KluberSociety
NBA Starter
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- Apr 10, 2018
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Just to be clear this is not my logic per se, it's me attempting to guess Tito's logic and I think we can agree to agree that the lineup SHOULD be changed and would be were it not for some "stubbornness" somewhere. I just don't see pinning it on the specific player (Rosario) being fair.We can go around in circles because with your logic, it was working last year without Bell in the line-up so why is he going to bat #4/#5 ... Because he is a good hitter, has power, you put him in #4/#5 slot and thus move Oscar down (but Oscar worked just fine last year and not broken, so why change???).
They didn't change it last year (agree with you - midseason as Gimenez had to prove himself) but was it good enough to get past NY, last year? No!!! Thus, why not tinker with it to make it better (good enough for a stronger playoff run). As you said, lineup isn't good enough outside of Ramirez. FG Steamer is projecting Gimenez at over a double OWar than Rosario (12+ vs 5+). To me that means seeing (at least in ST and maybe first week or two), if the guy with the better Avg, OBP, SLG and OPS and WAR and ..... list goes on, would preform even bettter with Ramirez behind him (as protection) than Zunino or Hedges (last year). With all the analytics and 100 years of baseball knowledge, is there one statistic that Rosario leads Gimenez in that would mean Ramirez would have more RBIs (better for team) with Rosario's lower OBP ahead of him than Gimenez who has over 50 points better OBP and just as many SB to get to 2nd base for Ramirez to score him on a single?
Okay, Rosario may score 2 or 4 times from 1st to home on a double that everyone points too, but Gimenez will be on based 600 AB x .05 = 30 more times than Rosario and has more power to offset any speed advantage that Rosario has to get to 2nd even more to set Ramirez up (SLG which is .06 higher for Gimenez would reflect Amed speed in pushing a double vs a single or triple vs double). What is more valuable???
Again, Gimenez is a better hitter in almost every metric ... even with being pitched around with Hedges behind him. Logic would say, Gimenez would do better with Ramirez behind him (and Rosario only did so well with Ramirez behind him) - so gap between Gimenez and Rosario grows with a change. And, with new rules, Gimenez being on base more, than no walk Rosario, distracting the pitcher with limited step offs, will only make Ramirez better as pitcher cannot focus as well on 2 things without a step off to reset.
I'm partial to the Kwan/JRam/Gimenez lineup personally. I also think it's time we just went ahead and did it now but alas we aren't getting it or maybe the plans are to run out the other lineup for a bit and then if it struggles then there will be more of a data-driven defense for shuffling it around. If going by last year's process maybe we will get that new lineup sooner than later. We can only hope...
Re: stubbornness, an interesting thing was when Bimbo brought up that as part of Jose's contract he was essentially promised that he would only have to play 3B. I wonder if he has a personal preference to hitting 3rd as well. Now this isn't exactly typical "stubbornness" in the typical sense because he took a large pay cut versus what he would've gotten on the open market. But he does seem like someone who likes his comfort... and also might like the comfort of his buddy Amed hitting in front of him. Who knows... There's many explanations to what goes on and I'm no insider.