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Agree with the one exception. Fat Panda has already used up all the rope I was willing to give him. The way he showed up for ST and his comments upon arrival were the end for me. He has sealed his fate on performance as well. He crossed the age/weight line last year and then shows up this year maybe... MAYBE ten lbs lighter than his worst from last year when he obviously gains most of his weight IN SEASON....Done and Done. I think Hanley has the physical skills to play 1st. I don't see that as a barrier. But he appears unwilling to work at the game from the 1st base perspective. Can't just go out there and make it up as you go. Yet that has always seemed to be Hanley's plan. Also, he is not going to hit the ground for any batted ball....and I do mean ANY IMO. Once a player crosses that line...."the I am not going to" line then how far is that from "well I guess I won't stretch for them either". So as I said at the top I am not at all worried about the physical aspects of 1st base and Hanley. I will be shocked if he adapts to the mental and psychological change. Given the amount a 1st baseman ends up handling the ball, that part is flat frightening. We are lucky Miley is out of here else we would be treated to pick off attempts buzzing past Hanley's ear.

Panda's listed height is 5'11". I have stood close enough to him to at least gauge his height. I think he is shorter than 5'11". I said he looked like 5'10" when I saw him. He is not 5'8". He is without doubt taller than 5'8".

Panda's comments were basically f*** you Boston. That combined with that shape is gonna' draw a lotta' fire in Fenway. Too much time standing around out at 3rd with a hostile crowd and this could get ugly quickly. I have seen guys just not let up on a player for an entire game....as long as the player is on the field. Hanely has the SD role out ahead of him and I think that is enough to keep him interested. I really do think Panda is going to push this to the point where the Sox really try to get him outta' here at some point this year. As for the consequences of the added weight itself on Panda's game. we all saw it last year...those of us that watched a lotta' Sox baseball. Panda has finally found a weight that won't support even decent play and that is where he ended last season. He actually looks bigger!!!!

I am guessing that if Panda actually lost any weight, that stopped as Farrell's plane left Florida when he went down there to visit. Panda probably celebrated with about a 5,000 calorie meal. He says he was not even trying to take off weight this off season and that the Sox did not ask him to take off any weight. Just my opinion but I really don't think Panda wants to be here. He has his money. He knows we are passionate about this team. This is a place a player should want to play....but Panda's best days are behind him IMO. Hanley is probably holding out for the DH spot soon to be vacant. If not for that I doubt Hanley would want to be here either. Welcome to MLB in the 21st century.

Runs allowed late in games do not leave your team much of a chance to come back. As such runs given up late in games are in fact more of an issue than runs given up early in games. You have more innings to come back early in a game. Your opponent has more innings within which to score as well. But if you end up giving up the lead late who cares. You are now the team behind and you have little time to come back. As for more flexibility in how relief pitchers are used, this is pretty much a new era for relief pitching. The relationship between starters and relievers was never like this before and teams that stick to the old way of building bullpens will likely find themselves behind the eight ball. One of those behind the eight ball decisions is where do I use my relief pitchers based on their individual talents and the caliber of pitchers in the pen. Once we have teams fielding more guys that are quality relievers we can see how Managers handle that asset. We have some teams like that now but not that many. As for post season...nothing is the same between post season and regular season...starters are often trimmed back to the best guys a team has with guys that regularly started during the year dropped into relief rolls or just plain dropped off the end of the roster. Situational baseball is played almost from 1st inning to last. That is what creates anomalies between regular season and post season play. The rosters are not the same in the post season either as they are designed to give managers more assets to use in situational opportunities.

You know I never speak in absolute terms and if you knew how to read you would know that. How do you like that answer?

Nobody can follow it systemically to the max although I am not sure Larusso was as much governed by any stats based system as much as he relied upon his own instincts. Managers are the guys that get stuck dealing with all the anomalies and random variables that make up a team and have to try to turn all those guys into a reliable offense. For all the talk of FO's now being fully bought in, they don't much provide their managers with player options that can roll up into one of these "optimized" lineups.

This post is not really directed at anybody. But to be honest having read the piece that discusses the entire issue of the batting order and sabermetrics a few times since it was written, I am impressed more by the writing skills of the author than with the contents. It is a skillful mix of ambiguity, expressed confidence in an opinion and overstates some things to the point of misstatement. It talks about the traditional method of choosing a lineup from 1-9 with definitions that either went out at least a decade or more ago or simply imply more meaning than exists in fact. A traditional 1 hitter is defined as a "speed guy that can hopefully get on base". What I see is high OBP guys that can hopefully get down the first base line without the aid of a wheelchair. It describes the traditional 2 hitter as "a good bat handler". While there are many good hitters that are not good bat handlers I do not know of a good bat handler that is not a good hitter. The traditional 3 hitter is described as the team's best hitter and this one still does seem to exist and has existed now for quite some time. However when you get down to 3, 4 and 5 in the order, you are starting to get to high OPS guys who can often end up really very close to each other unless a team only has one truly good all around hitter and only one true power hitter with a big disparity between the two. As I pointed out earlier, there is movement on this issue and I would say it is likely half and half now across the 30 teams of MLB depending on the year and the availability of power. What the piece completely misses is that while it lauds the work of FO's that have adopted systems dependent on Sabermetrics, it does not in any way deal with the issue of teams simply not having perfect or in its terms "optimized" candidates to put even in the 1-5 slots in the lineup. It does not deal at all with the transitions that players go through from young player groping with trying to establish an MO for themselves in a ML lineup to mature players that have landed somewhere. They often mature from early careers as "good bat handling" all around hitters to added muscle and maturity as a hitter turning them more and more toward power and pulling the ball. It is still rare for hitters to come to the majors fully developed into what they are going to be through an entire career. The article makes a big deal out of crediting a manager for putting a slow high OBP guy in the 1 hole. That is just stupid, at least as stupid as choosing a 1 hole hitter for speed. In fact the piece completely misconstrues speed and dead slow. There are teams that one might consider speed teams or teams that use speed more than others. However IMO, the use of speed as a team wide offensive weapon is not nearly as prominent nor as critical as what happens to teams that are dead slow. Teams that are dead slow simply can't get out of their own way and struggle to generate enough offense before they run out of outs in an inning. The team of dead slow hitters becomes over dependent on power because it just can't play AT ALL station to station. Power hitting is not for the most part simply good hitting that results in the ball going a long way. Power hitters more often have or develop the physical attributes needed and then fashion themselves to be power hitters. Pitchers have an easier time identifying where they need to pitch to reduce the chances of the power hitter hurting them and that is even more the case with pretenders that are power hitting wannabe's. If an entire team of hitters tried to hit the ball over the wall every AB, that team would be easy meat for ML pitchers. It devotes a whole section on trading outs for bases when it rarely happens and has rarely happened for a long time now. It either happens late in games playing for one run or late in counts when some hitters feel their options have been cut by being down in the count and they begin looking at the possibility of making a productive out as opposed to just making an out. The article's big punch line on lineups is the possibility of an optimized line up scoring 5-15 more runs than a traditional lineup. Well show me one lineup that you can contend is entirely put together "traditionally" even if you buy the author's use of that term in the precise way he means to use it? There are so many issues that drive the lineup that you don't end up with a lineup that is all one way or all the other. As for relief pitchers and closers.....the closer is for the most part being handed a clean but high leverage inning. A fireman is being handed a high leverage situation as well but it is a situation with runners on....not at all the same thing. So a manager in this day and age that is making the his decision about closers and firemen thinking they are the same thing needs to have his head examined. Frankly I think the Sabermetrics proponents are starting to become a bit strident because they really do not have good, reliable data points on defense and MLB is going back to where it was in the 60's and 70's. This trend has been on now for a few years. The existence of more power in lineups and less capable pitching created a hay day for the Sabermetrics crowd. The resurgence in pitching plus the dynamic way the shift is being used has really put a kink in their armor and I think they are starting to panic a bit. In closing, I have always thought it a very professional piece of authorship and not a whole lot more.

I think where this discussion gets fuzzy is that there does appear to be some support here for using sabermetrics as a driving influence in building an entire lineup or a batting order as opposed to using it as guidance. I actually don't know if there might be some guys using sabermetrics unilaterally and to the exclusion of anything else to build an entire lineup. If there are I don't think that would a very smart way to do things. I think that is the dividing line for the discussion. I am trying to parse that with a very thin, sharp blade. As I stated earlier, I would likely use OBP to choose my lead off hitter unless he needed a wheelchair to get down to 1st. So for my money that is a stat that could be useful for choosing that guy. But since I am not excluding the ability to get down the line completely even there I would not be using either a stat or an advanced stat to the exclusion of everything else. I also might not do that if I had two guys with very similar OBP's but one with much more broadly based hitting skills than the other. My recent example was Holt/Mookie. I would not have batted Mookie from the 1 hole with Holt playing as much as he was last year. I would have batted Holt lead off leaving pitchers to have to deal with Mookie with Holt on base if at all possible instead of giving Holt that opportunity with Mookie on base. Had we better than chopped liver at the bottom of the order last year, maybe I would have not been so definitive about that. But it would not take a rocket scientist to see how many other issues I am allowing to influence that decision besides a stat or an advanced stat, not to mention who is pitching.

I agree....Farrell's comments really don't amount to much in practice....which brings me back to where I was earlier. Maybe Farrell just does not want Vaz pushing himself to get there....happy to have him I think if he lands there on opening day but would probably be pretty unhappy if Vaz set himself back by pushing too hard for that goal. Shifts have been around for a very long time. However it is the degree to which they are being implemented and changed now that is the dif. They are shifting based on the hitter, the pitcher and even the count now and shifting up and down the batting order. Throw in men on or bases clear and it is the multiplicity of different shifts that has changed and the caliber of player facing a shift.....It is no longer just the best hitters...not by a long shot. I don't have the numbers for 2015 and I don't think they are out there as yet...but up through 2014 total shifts were going up by as much as 1,000 per year across baseball. I think I remember the number for 2014 was something north of 4,000 total changes during the course of all the games played with the number still growing. Also it is a fluid environment. Last year as Ortiz slowed, teams kept pushing their shifts deeper and deeper into the OF as there simply were more places from which a throw could beat David to 1st. I hate the shift as we see it today because at this rate of increase ultimately we are going to rob baseball of great defensive plays. I really have little interest in seeing a guy positioned so that he just moves a couple of feet and takes away a potential hit as opposed to seeing a guy get a great jump, and track the ball down...maybe either taking such a direct route (JBJ) that he can catch up to the batted ball or is just so fast (Ells) that he outruns the baseball to make a play on it.

Now I got it. I figured you were talking about Swihart v Vaz. I think the only real chance Hannigan would have outside of injury is if Price (have to figure him for opening day starter) said he wanted Hannigan. Hannigan has to have caught Price. I suppose it is possible that Price just up and says..."Hey this is my first start here, I would like to be as comfortable as I can be.....give me Hannigan please,"

But who else would it be? Farrell might be trying to cool Vaz's jets a little. Vaz impresses me as just the kind of guy that would push it too hard to get back. As much as it would be nice to have him there for opening day, I doubt it is likely unless he pushes himself past what makes much sense. I have to admit I am interested to see what Vaz looks like 25 lbs lighter. Maybe Farrell wants to take opening day out of the equation for Vaz. Does not mean he won't be there but it likely won't be a goal Vaz tries to hit at all costs.

Even my earlier post regarding some teams switching out their 3 hitter to a 4 and discussion of the kind of hitter often found in the 2 is an example of the differences between teams and Managers, not suggesting the existence of some sort of lock step structured approach to lineups. I seriously doubt that will ever happen because Managers are often groping for a batting order that can or will coalesce into an offense. Now more than ever that also means dealing with single minded players that decide for themselves how they are going to approach their plate appearances based on what they believe to be best for them as individual players. Look how single minded Hanley got about swinging for the fences in 2015. By the end it was pathetic. Pitchers adapt. If they know what you are going to do each time you come to the plate, you are just meat and they will chew you up. Didn't stop Hanley. So noticeable that his Pres of Baseball Ops has felt compelled to comment publicly which still may not have an effect on Hanley as he has his money now for at least three more years. If there is some similarity between the way different Managers set their batting orders it is that they are looking for the best way to get the most runs across before they run out of outs in an inning...which is sort of a different way of saying groping for an order that can coalesce into an offense. That requires guys willing to try to fit into an offensive approach. That is what KC has....they have an approach that is particularly well suited to the place where they play 81 games a year and they have had players that both have the physical attributes and the belief in that approach to cooperate. Took them 30 years to get there but that is where they got. The reason the stats guru's keep sticking them in 4th place in their division is because compilations on individual player stats misses too much of what makes a team a team. That is not ever going to be the same thing for 30 different teams and we are not even talking here about teams that need better defensive players because they see their wins coming from a higher percentage content of pitching and defense (run prevention) which creates anomalies in their batting order when their turn in the inning comes. When you really consider all of the variables that might invade a manager's thinking with regard to a batting order, the idea of a proposed best order building process is nonsense. Another opinion based on the belief that stats and worse these various compilations of stats should drive your thinking as opposed to guiding your thinking. A player's individual numbers IMO should guide an organization's decisions about that player and that is about where it ends. Beyond that....you are kidding yourself.

Yup....it's one of the things that makes baseball such a great game. People who are all over and all into the stats claim it to be a game of individuals...playing down the team aspects of the game because it suits their purposes to do so. It is in fact a game of individuals....hitter confronting pitcher with bit players on either side supporting. But the simple fact is that your individual players and their offensive stats must roll up into enough meaningful offense. In order to do that there must be a meaningful, concerted effort at establishing a relevant offensive intent that runs 1-9. It must roll up into a real baseball team. If you don't have that...you have a Fantasy Baseball Team, at best. If you don't have players willing to cooperate or simply ignore the need for it, forget it.....play your 162 and prepare for next year.....try to do better.

That is far too absolute a position to take. Your best hitter might also be your best power source. In fact that is probably more and more likely and an issue given the sparsity of real power in baseball right now. 1 run HR's win nothing. So really you want your best OBP guy hitting 1st. That may not be and in fact is not likely to be your best hitter....certainly not your most dangerous hitter. I would have preferred Holt to Mookie because Holt's OBP was something like 348 and Mookie was I think up into the high 350's....better but not enough better for a team that at least in its division was having trouble scoring enough to keep up with its division mates. Mookie recorded an incredible number of RBI's for a guy that had just mush hitting in front of him for most of the year. When JBJ had his little mini-run he and Mookie were just about in the middle of every run scoring opportunity they had in that 3 week period. Moving Mookie to 2 in the order is not miles better. But Holt will get on more than the guys we had at the bottom of the order and I expect Mookie to be even more of a hitting beast this year than last. Panda will get his shot at 3rd. But if he stumbles....unfortunately likely, then I would not hesitate to throw Holt in there and put him at the top of the order as well. No matter how you slice it, this team plays better with Panda sitting. Not expecting that to change by much if at all.

Probably not here because I did not post here much last year, but I argued all last year that if they were going to play Holt as much as they did, Holt should have been bating lead off with Mookie behind him in the 2 hole. As I expected Holt's OBP was just a tick under Mookies...hardly a dif worth discussing yet Mookie was exactly that beast I referred to earlier that should have been in the 2 hole. To make matters worse, while being the fastest guy on the team, Mookie was not as yet a smart base runner and ran into useless outs. Holt bats from the left giving him an extra step and a half down the line and is at this point a more seasoned, smarter base runner. Though I expect Mookie to have learned something about base running, I expect Mookie to be even more of a hitting beast this year. Mookie is wasted batting lead off. Typical Farrell lunacy. One of the reasons our batting order was such a mess last year is because it was a mess right from the 1 hole. If you screw up there, it is hard to recover. I have an ulterior motive here. IMO, fat Panda is likely to fail again. Holt while not being a great 3rd baseman goes to 3rd and Panda starts riding pine until he gets the message. If it takes the whole year ....FINE. We are stuck with this misery for another five years and I am already sick of this pandering horse s***. Holt might be worth considering as lead off with Mookie in the 2 this year as the effect would ripple through the entire order and might change this lumbering hippo of an offense into the juggernaut people thought they were getting, especially if it sends the Panda bear to the woods...I mean the pine.

Not sure what anybody is talking about here. Bunters go to the bottom of the lineup or the bench. Bat-control is one characteristic of a good hitter but not a power hitter. Everybody can't be a power hitter. In fact there are few of them anymore. Scrappy is not actually something one would often ascribe to a hitter. Most teams have a beast in the 2 hole if they have one. Look at the guys the Cards have had in the 2. We have had Mueller, Pedrois, Vic....not exactly chop liver. Free swinging, power hitting pull hitters are feast or famine......Not exactly what you want there. We have had Holt there on occasion but Farrell does not appear to know a batting order from a Mack Truck and we have not had the strongest lineups of late in the first place. If XB had been using his new inside out swing from 2014 on, he might have been a perfect 2. The 3 is what worries me because Pedroia has had a hard time staying on the field of late and I have a suspicion that Farrell is going to try to stick Hanley there especially if he has some misgivings about Pedroia. Hanley in the 3 which would be just plain bad IMO. The "noise" coming out of Fenway about Hanley worries me and I don't trust either Hanley to be effective nor Farrell who might reach and throw his confidence behind him.

I agree with that 700. I am really not convinced that outside of looking at a specific player stats they really do much for you. They are great for looking at a specific player and surely when making decisions about a specific player. But IMO all of these compilations are for the most part nonsense. Maybe they are useful for a Fantasy League player. I would not know. But they are pretty close to meaningless otherwise. Its a house of cards IMO. Made for a decent movie but what has Oakland won? Actually it does not matter the environment, baseball or bricklaying, the more you compile from the core data, the farther you get from an answer that is reliable or relevant and in some cases you get to a point where there is no relevance at all. I fully expect one day to see an analysis on statistics released with a margin for error +/- 50% on the number and people swearing by it!

Your right MVP, its 20 MORE, not 20%. I meant to go back and correct that and did not get to it...thanks!

There is a study out there that claims there is a subtle shift going on away from hitting a team's best hitter 3rd mainly toward 4th but partially toward 2nd. The 2 hitter gets somewhere between 15-20 more AB's than the 3 but the 4 gets far more RBI ops than either and the 4 hole is where the biggest money players hit even now because of their RBI ops and success. It points out that in 2013 9 of baseballs top 15 teams put their best hitter in the 4. Looking back, I am not sure that we will be able to detect much of an effect unless teams truly only get down to one real power hitter in their order. In that instance your best hitter might also be your only real power hitter. The other thing that probably needs to be considered is DH vs no DH ball. NL teams have to build their offensive effort away from the 9 hole as there is no hitter at all waiting down there and NL pitchers work the opposing order toward that free out they are going to get at the 9. That pushes the best a team has farther up the order and away from that free out at 9. AL teams can smooth their offensive assets more. As to protecting a hitter in the order and partly to concur with 700's post, as I stated earlier I think you see much less of it now because pitchers more often than not go after everybody in the batting order. They seldom pitch around anybody except an 8 hole hitter in the NL at times. What with the advances made in pen construction, if your pitcher empties his tank on the opponent's most dangerous hitter, so be it. Take your out, pull the pitcher and start the line of 95 mph arms moving. But a decision to pitch around a hot hitter is situational baseball. It happens within the context of a specific game. That is anathema to how statistics are constructed as they are most often constructed around what happens most of the time. Well what happens most of the time is small consolation when you are watching your best RBI chance trotting down to 1st having just been walked, the guy can't run for beans and there is a huge drop off to the guy hitting behind him. Point being that the stat is not very meaningful in this context. I would have to guess that last year I saw a middle of the order bat pitched around not more than once every 150-200 total PA's. Figuring 40 hitters a game, that is only once every 4-5 games or so. Even with that it happens more at the end of a season than early in a season, so even coming up with any number would require some smoothing. But it is still small consolation when you lose the opportunity to have your best RBI chance swing the bat and you know it. As for whether managers should ignore OBP for speed at the top, I simply don't think smart managers do that anyway. Good teams regularly feature a 350+ OBP hitter at the top. What are you people looking for......a 400 OBP? Good luck with that one! You won't find many. As for speed, some teams can really use speed in their lineup but it is more the impact of dead slow that hurts a lineup. That is not the same thing. I can remember when Detroit had all these great hitters but their offense completely bogged down when Jackson was sitting because he was the only guy that could move at all and no matter how good those hitters were they often singled.....and then what? Your team runs out of outs before it can move enough runs across the plate too many times. The 2015 Sox had a similar problem in that once you got past Mookie the few guys with average speed like XB were overwhelmed by the guys that are below average or dead slow. Pedroia is now a tick below average. Hanley is now only average. Ortiz and Panda are dead slow and batting Panda high in the order right in the middle of everything killed this already slow lineup even if he got a hit. JBJ is below average. Swihart is above average for a catcher which means he has average speed. Castillo is speedy but can't get on. XB has according to his own words been working on his speed and base running this off season. A good thing. He is I suspect expecting to make more appearances higher in the order, right in the middle of everything pushing fat Panda down farther.....where he belongs. If XB can even make a small improvement what it really does is moves one more guy positive and better offsets what is a slow lineup especially when you consider where he is likely to be in the order. Now that I think about it, maybe one reason Vaz has lost 25 lbs is an effort to move from slow to average in speed again as a means to get more guys to the good side of the ledger.

In part JBJ missed a good deal because he still had that horrible swing until finally rediscovering his college swing. The other reason he missed a good deal is because he was constantly swinging for the fences with that horrible swing to boot. He is not a natural power hitter leaving many flies balls at the warning track even when he did hit it hard last year. Swinging as hard as you can all the time means you are going to miss a good deal ahd Feneay RF is pretty big. I would rather see JBJ stay focused on becoming a good all around hitter at the ML level and if he can accomplish that then maybe try to bring some power back into his game. All by way of saying that if a real opportunity presents itself then fine...swing for the fences JBJ. But based on his result last year....I would prefer to see much less of that as he tries to pick up his swing recovery from where it was at the end of the year. He did in my estimation accomplish quite a bit last year. Hopefully it is a springboard to enough output at the plate to support his defense. It won't take much.

I can see moving Betts back as the permanent 2nd baseman at some point. I would not move him back to spell Pedroia. I think Mookie would have to spend time at 2nd to turn into a top flight ML 2nd baseman. He is now a darned good CFer. I am not sure moving Betts to RF in Fenway makes much sense. But I guess we are going to see more of Mookie there this year.

Unfortunately or fortunately, depending on your perspective, Pedroia at some diminished capability has been a better option than anybody else we could put out there. Now they could I guess put Mookie out there...but I would not. Holt can play there for a bit. But unless Pedroia really can't go, until one of the younger guys comes up from the system Pedroia toughing it out is probably still the best option. I don't think DD is going to trade any of the top prospects unless somebody makes him an offer he just can't refuse. So some relief for Pedroia can't be that far off. His numbers do suffer especially in these years when he is playing with one hand.

That is about as weird a reading of my last post as i could possibly have imagined. As for the importance of lineups, it really depends on the players you have. If you have a good HR power bat for example and you set him up to come up too often with nobody on, you are just asking for it. Nobody wins games on 1 run HR's. 1 run HR's are just a means to lose. Nobody fears them...nobody cares about them. A pitcher will happily give 1 or even more than 1 up during the course of a game especially in the AL where it is particularly meaningless.

Would be nice if Pedroia learned how to preserve himself a little. While you could make the case that he would then not be Pedroia, there has to be a happier medium for a guy that important, especially to the middle of the infield. It would be especially useful in this year filled with not more than hopes in some cases and really big ?'s in others.