In looking at how poorly Joe Valentine started the game yesterday, I failed to notice that Frank Robinson batted Tomo Ohka, the pitcher, 8th. It’s an unusual strategy, but one that was tried by Tony La Russa a few years ago. If you didn’t know, there is some mathematical basis for this lineup.
Bruce Bukiet at the New Jersey Institute of Technology has done simulations that have convinced him that the last spot is not the best spot for the pitcher.

My colleagues and I studied the 1989 National League to ascertain principles common to optimal lineups and reduce the number of lineups we needed to test. We ranked players by Scoring Index – the number of runs a team would score on average if it had 9 copies of the given player. Interestingly, we found that the slugger – the player with the highest Scoring Index – should bat second or third on 3/4 of the teams and bat fourth on only 1/4 of the teams considered. We also found that the pitcher should almost never bat last. (These two findings are, of course, not in keeping with the way most managers construct their lineups.)

(You can download a postscript version of the research paper here.) To sum up his conclusions, the worst hitter should be as far away in the lineup from the best hitter as possible. So if you bat your best hitter in the top 3, you don’t want a pitcher batting ninth, because that is going to reduce the rbi opportunities for your best hitter. He basically endorses the strategy that some AL teams use with the DH of putting a 2nd leadoff type hitter in the ninth spot.
When I first heard of this work, I was skeptical. I thought that giving extra plate appearances to poor hitters would do more harm than the extra rbi opps for the best hitters would help. But using the runs created formula and figuring how many runs would be gained and lost by switching the 8 and 9 hitters around, you don’t lose that much. Jamey Carroll did have a hit, a walk and a run scored from the ninth spot yesterday. I don’t think it makes all that much difference if you bat the pitcher 8th or 9th, but for a poor offensive team like Montreal, anything is worth a try.