Every year about this time I employ the Lineup Analysis Tool (LAT) to get an idea of how a team’s offense is shaping up for the regular season. The LAT takes as input the OBP and slugging percentage of the default lineup, and outputs the top 20 potential lineups, the worst 20 potential lineups, and the predicted runs scored for the lineup entered. Using this tool gives us a handle on the potential of the lineup, and how well the team optimized the batting order.

With nine seasons evaluated this way, the predictions look like this:

Predicted Runs for the default lineup versus actual runs scored.

It’s not a great predictor, but it tends to get the direction right. Looking at the graph, the most volatile lineups are those with a prediction between 5.0 and 5.3 runs per game. They can either be great or terrible. The very high predictions tend to do well, you see few of those below the regression line. I suppose those teams are so deep, it’s tough for them to have a bad offensive season.

The regression line I’ll be using his year is 0.6522x + 1.3087. For each team, I’ll report the value for the best lineup, default lineup, worst lineup, and the regressed default lineup. The results will be available for viewing in this spreadsheet.

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