A second look at lineup construction

Translated by Pepe Latorre

I’m old enough to remember the times when batting order construction was fairly routine. The leadoff hitter was the best base stealer, a guy who could reach first (At least once in a while. Billy Hamilton led the majors with 208 stolen bases from 2015 to 2018 with a .299 OBP) and scoring. The second was someone with good control of the bat, someone who could bunt or hit and run, in short, someone who helped move the leadoff runner. The team’s most complete hitter was in third place and fourth was reserved for the guy with the most power. The fifth and sixth were less glossy versions of the third and fourth. The seventh and eighth were… The shortstop and catcher? Let’s say they were not the first offensive options. And, of course, the pitcher batted last, unless Tony La Russa was feeling particularly windy that day.

Over time we realized the weakness of this formation. Last year, on the average team, the leadoff hitter hit 745 times, the second hitter 728 times, the third hitter 712 times, and the fourth hitter 695 times. If the third and fourth are the two best, why give them 2 or 3 fewer plate appearances per week than the first two hitters?

To be clear, building order does not determine your fate in the season. The Royals’ leadoff hitters had the worst OBP in the Majors, .270, and qualified for the postseason. The Yankees reached the World Series and their leadoff hitter’s OBP was .306, the seventh lowest. But as with many baseball strategies, a series of seemingly small changes can add up to a handful of victories. And in a 162-game season that can take you to October.

I have analyzed the production that teams have obtained in the first eight positions of the lineup (I have ignored ninth because the National League insisted on having a non-designated hitter who almost always batted ninth between 1973 and 2021) during the games era divisional (starting in 1969 and not counting 2020). To measure offensive performance I used the tOPS+ of Baseball-Referencewhich measures OPS scaled to a League average of 100, that is, values ​​​​over 100 are better than the average. This This is what I got:

Yes, I know the graph is illegible. I’m going to break it down. There are two things to highlight. First: The hitters in the 3rd (gray line) and 4th (yellow line) spots in the lineup dominated for almost the entire period. Second, only in recent years have hitters ranked 2nd (orange line) and 1st (dark blue line) broken the dominance of hitters 3rd and 4th.

Like I said, we have to look at that. Here are the first two players in the order.

I know there is a lot of empty space at the top of the graph (I keep the same scale as the previous graph). We see that the top two hitters in the order were pretty average until about a decade ago. When you have players like Shohei Ohtani, Gunnar Henderson y Francisco Lindor as first hitters, already Juan SotoBobby Witt Jr. y Corey Seager as second hitters, you’re going to push that trend up.

Here are the 6th, 7th and 8th hitters.

Players batting sixth have gone from being slightly above average to being slightly below. The eighth spot in the lineup has improved a bit. The No. 7 hitters have more or less stayed in place. There really hasn’t been much movement.

And here the heart of the order, the 3rd, 4th and 5th hitters.

There is no doubt here, all lines are declining. In case anyone is wondering, that rebound for the 3rd hitters occurred in 2001, when they hit .296/.386/.533. Basically every number 3 hitter was the Bryce Harper of 2024 (.285/.373/.525), but a little better.

The important thing here, however, is that tOPS+ is a relative number. Maybe the 3rd-4th-5th hitters are getting worse, or maybe it’s just that other positions in the batting order (specifically the first two spots in the lineup) are catching up, aided by the former 3rd and 4th hitters who are now 1st and 2nd.

As I have mentioned, it is a very recent phenomenon. Here’s a tOPS+ graph for the top five spots in the batting order over the last ten full seasons.

Surely you had perceived this intuitively, but here is the same graph with trend lines.

You should not draw too many conclusions from a single season. The success of hitters at No. 3 relative to No. 2 in 2024 was motivated by the repositioning of Aaron Judge to make room for Soto. The better performance of the leadoff hitters this year is due, in large part, to the fact that the two first finalists in the voting for the Most Valuable Player of the National League hit there: Ohtani hit there for the first time in his MLB career and Lindor for the first time since 2019. Maybe they are permanent changes. Or maybe they are anomalies. A sample size of 30 teams each season isn’t huge.

But the trends are quite clear. Relative to other positions in the batting order, teams are getting more production from the 1st and 2nd hitters and less from the 3rd-4th-5th hitters. This is not the case for all teams or all seasons. But the general trend is to move the best hitters to the top of the lineup. The hegemony of the 3rd and 4th and the honor of the cleanup hitter are quickly becoming a thing of the past.