OFFICIAL TLR HEAD SCRATCHER THREAD

[33anda3rd]

The manager has to optimize the rest of the lineup to make the PH8 practice work. If the whole lineup is optimized, great, but if you're doing stuff like batting the P in the 8 and you're still going by old-timey baseball "knowledge" that the speedy non-base-clogger (who has a 310 OBP) is hitting first then you might as well not hit the pitcher 8th because the whole lineup has to be optimized to make it work. You can't judge hitting the pitcher 8th in a vacuum.

[Popeye_Card]

Pretty much everyone agrees that batting the pitcher 8th is a good idea and increases scoring, if not by a large amount.

Nope.

Yep. Everyone that's studied it, at least. The only problem with TLR batting the pitcher 8th is that he didn't do it more often.

Nope.

::shrugs::

You can google it if you like. Batting the pitcher 8th increases scoring, although the effect is quite small.

Google comes up with Lester strikeout in spot he shouldnt have been in, and 100+ years of baseball where it is simple logic, put your least effective hitter last and give them least amount of ABs. It is not complicated.

Counterpoint: Does the pitcher's spot still have the weakest hitter in it during the highest leverage innings in the game? No, it will be a pinch hitter. If your bench hitters are better than your 8th best starter, then starting the game with the pitcher's spot 8th makes plenty of sense.

[Freed Roger]

The manager has to optimize the rest of the lineup to make the PH8 practice work. If the whole lineup is optimized, great, but if you're doing stuff like batting the P in the 8 and you're still going by old-timey baseball "knowledge" that the speedy non-base-clogger (who has a 310 OBP) is hitting first then you might as well not hit the pitcher 8th because the whole lineup has to be optimized to make it work. You can't judge hitting the pitcher 8th in a vacuum.

Can't we just enjoy that stupidity of Lester coming up to bat in a key spot.

[JackofDiamonds]

Ben Lindbergh at Grantland

Despite that ambivalence and the lineup studies, the industry as a whole has embraced the eighth-place pitcher to an unprecedented degree this season. According to the Baseball-Reference Play Index, only 861 games since 1914 have featured a starting pitcher in the second-to-last lineup spot. Almost 20 percent of those games have come in 2015. The following graph shows the number of games in which teams batted the pitcher eighth, and the number of teams that tried it, by year:

[SHOW]

[Jmodene]

Well, by that standard, the pitcher shouldn't be batting at all. Cue the DH.

I notice Hurdle had *his* pitcher batting 8th this past weekend.