Team Offense, Washington Nationals

The Harper. Photo: Steve Mitchell-USA TODAY Sports

The series on team offense continues with the Washington Nationals. The Nationals finished tenth in the majors and fifth in the National League in 2012 with 4.51 runs scored per game.

The CBSSports.com projected lineup that Davey Johnson may use is plugged into the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) using Musings Marcels as the batter projections. For pitchers, I use the 2012 numbers generated by the Nationals staff. That information produces the following results:

Best lineup: 4.59
Probable lineup: 4.46
Worst lineup: 4.13
Regressed lineup: 4.21

Johnson’s lineup is almost a match to the LAT shifted one slot. Davey bats Denard Span, Jayson Werth, and Bryce Harper 1-2-3. The LAT bats them 9-1-2. Ian Desmond and Kurt Suzuki bat seventh and eighth in the probable lineup, sixth and seventh in LAT lineup, with the pitchers eighth. The LAT puts Adam LaRoche ahead of Ryan Zimmerman, but without the second leadoff man in the ninth slot, batting Zimmerman fourth instead of LaRoche makes sense.

Davey’s lineup also has the advantage of batting players where they are comfortable. Davey will go unconventional at times, as he demonstrated last season with Jayson Werth leading off. If Span is healthy this season and gets his OBP back up over .360, this lineup will look a lot better.

I’l also note the Nationals pitchers hit very well in 2012. That’s a very nice advantage for the team in Nationals League parks.

By the way, you’ll notice that Bryce Harper projects to slightly higher averages than in 2012. At his young age, the Marcels formula gives him a huge boost, enough to wash out regression toward the mean based on only one season played in the majors.

You can follow the data for the series in this Google spreadsheet.

Previous posts in the series:

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March 21, 2013

Team Offense, Washington Nationals

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