BASEBALL teams would play better if they did away with the traditional batting line-up beloved of coaches and aficionados. Putting the best batter second, rather than the customary fourth, can substantially improve team performance, a mathematical analysis suggests. Surprisingly, the weakest hitter shouldn鈥檛 bat last.
Baseball managers have known for years that not all batting orders are created equal. If there are already players on base, a strong hitter has a better chance of getting them back to home base to score several runs 鈥� 鈥渁 clean-up鈥� in baseball parlance. For that reason, managers tend to put the strongest players together in the line-up.
But it鈥檚 a subtler decision whether the two best hitters should bat second and third, or third and fourth, for instance. In all there are more than 360,000 possible ways to line up the nine players. To find the best line-up, mathematician Bruce Bukiet of the New Jersey Institute of Technology in Newark took data from the 1989 US baseball season and used it to calculate the likely number of runs each potential line-up would earn. The difference between a team鈥檚 best and worst batting order could change the outcome of as many as 10 games in a season, he found.
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For the majority of National League teams that season, the optimal line-up would have been to use the best batter in the second spot. 鈥淢anagers traditionally put the team slugger in the fourth spot, on the rationale that several players might get on base before he comes to bat, and he can clean up.鈥�
But it鈥檚 more important to get the top hitter batting earlier, so he may get more chances to bat over the course of a game, Bukiet reported last week at the annual meeting of the Society for Industrial and Applied Mathematics, in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania.
The study also found that the worst batter, usually the pitcher, should bat seventh or eighth, not last, where he is almost always placed. 鈥淭he pitcher should be far away from the slugger in the line-up,鈥� says Bukiet. That lessens the chance that he鈥檒l be the clean-up hitter responsible for getting the strongest batter back to home base.