Using The Book to Create a Major League Line-up

There are so many ways to develop a starting line-up. Some are more traditional than others, but The Book by Tom Tango, Michael Lichtman, and Andrew Dolphin discuss an approach based on research and developing models based on run values for various in-game events.

There is a chapter of The Book that discusses batting orders, so I thought it would be interesting to re-arrange a major league line-up based on the research conducted for the book. Because the Yankees line-up remains pretty consistent day to day, I chose use their team as an example. In the video, I breakdown the line-up spot by spot, explain the criteria for each spot as identified in The Book, and then developed my own line-up in comparison to the Yankees’ from their game on August 28th. This game was selected because most of their starters were playing.

Not mentioned in the video above, if I were to create an ideal line-up for when the Yankees are all back from injury, it would look like this:

What do you think of the line-up based on The Book’s guidance?