"We've done studies on this," Yost said. "It's not just that we come up one day and say, 'You know, Jason Kendall's gonna hit ninth.'
I used David Pinto's Lineup Analysis tool and plugged in the Brewers' starters' PECOTA projections. I ran it twice, first with Yovani Gallardo as the pitcher, using his stats from last year (.268/.475)--basically the high end for a pitcher's hitting performance. For the other, I plugged in Ben Sheets' average numbers from the last three years (.056/.041!!!), which pretty much represents the worst possible hitting performance by a Major League player.
"You've had a lot of smart people looking at it and crunching numbers and seeing if, numbers-wise, it made sense."
The results: in both scenarios, all of the top 30 run-producing lineups have Kendall batting ninth.
Contrast Milwaukee's (you don't really think Yost volunteered for this, do you?) flexibility and openness with that of the new Cincinnati regime:
The best baseball managing is done by the seat of your pants, using good, old-fashioned, pre-sabermetric logic. That's another reason to like Dusty Baker.
Like, whoa. The sheer venom in that article is astounding; it reminds me of why books like this get written.
Anyone with a laptop can locate the Web site baseball- reference.com and sound like an expert. Anyone with a library card can pick up one of James' mind-numbing baseball "abstracts," in which the author makes the game sound like a first cousin to biomechanical engineering.
It ain't that scientific.
Here's a stat: Wins as manager: Dusty Baker, 1,162; Bill James, 0.