Allen Craig would make a great clean-up hitter for the Cardinals. Photo: Scott Rovak-USA TODAY Sports
The series on team offense continues with the St. Louis Cardinals. The Cardinals finished fifth in the majors and second in the National League in 2012 with 4.72 runs scored per game.
The CBSSports.com projected lineup that Mike Matheny may use is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. For the pitchers slot, the 2012 Cardinals pitcher results were used. That information produces the following results:
- Best lineup: 5.06
- Probable lineup: 4.83
- Worst lineup: 4.53
- Regressed lineup: 4.48
The Cardinals are a Lake Woebegon team. The NL OBP in 2012 stood at .319. All eight position players for the St. Louis project to post a number well above that average. In a way, that make the manager’s job easy. Since everyone does a good job of getting on base, he just needs to line them up and let them keep clogging the bases until runners start scoring. That’s how they beat the Nationals in the NLDS in 2012. In fact, when you look at the top lineups, hitters are all over the place. The LAT really like Jon Jay batting ninth and Allen Craig fourth, but everyone else is fairly interchangeable. The fact that the tool like Carlos Beltran hitting at the end of the order gives you an idea of the quality of this order.
This really looks like a team assembled by a sabermetrician. I’m not surprised. If the pitching is just decent, this team should win a lot of games.
You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.
Previous posts in the series:
If you enjoy this series, please consider donating the the Baseball Musings Pledge Drive.