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Originally Posted by Bronco_buster2
So far I have enjoyed all the interviews with Quatraro and I really want to see him succeed in KC. There seems to be a lot of positive changes in culture and I really hope this leads to competitive baseball. Games that are fun to watch.
I am struggling, however, with the analytics and the lineups we are seeing on a daily basis. Maybe someone can convince me to be more supportive, but I'm very put off by the line up we saw last night. The 5th and 6th hitters were Duffy and Lopez? Duffy was 'hot' I guess, but he's a career .374 slugger, not a 5th hole hitter. And we know Lopez is not a 6th in the line up type of hitter. I know. There's probably some plausible explanation as to why they were plugged where they were, but I'm just struggling to get excited to see a lineup that looks like that.
Sitting MJ Melendez against left handed pitchers? Granted it's a small sample size, but he has better splits against lefties than he does righties.
I guess I want to see MJ, Witt, Vinnie, and Salvy in the lineup every day (occasional rest for Salvy/MJ). Could probably lump Olivares in that top 5. His splits are better against righties than lefties!
Am I wrong to be frustrated with this? Do I need to give it more time?
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https://www.royalsreview.com/2023/4/...ey-jr-going-on
Former Royals managers Ned Yost and Mike Matheny were not exactly paragons of analytical thinking, and by the time you go back to the pre-Yost days of Trey Hillman, Buddy Bell, and beyond, the modern analytical movement was limited to a few cutting edge teams.
Matt Quatraro, then, brings a bit of a culture shock, coming from the Tampa Bay Rays and Cleveland Guardians school of analytics. That’s a big deal for a lot of reasons, and one of the most clearly obvious is in regards to lineups. Yost and Matheny tinkered, for sure, but Quatraro’s commitment to the analytics has resulted in some, shall we say, unusual looking lineups in this early season, a theme that continued when bench coach Paul Hoover took over when Quatraro tested positive for COVID-19.
Take, for example, this one, the fifth game of the year against Yusei Kikuchi: no MJ Melendez, no Vinnie Pasquantino, no Kyle Isbel, Matt Duffy hitting fifth. Seems weird!
Or this lineup, game eight in the young season. No Witt. Isbel hitting fifth. Michael Massey hitting...second?
Though these seem like the kind of lineups that you’d see in, like, September, there is logic behind them. In both cases, the opposing pitcher had extreme splits; Yusei Kikuchi’s career wOBA allowed against lefties is .283, while Alex Cobb’s wOBA allowed against righties since coming back from injury in 2020 is also under .300. Loading up with opposite-handed hitters gives you the best chance to win while paving the way for late-game substitutions, which the Royals have done in nearly every game.
Also contributing to these odd lineups is that the Royals are no longer committed to playing a player every single day forever and ever amen. Witt sitting out seems weird. Salvador Perez has already sat out, which seems even weirder. Look—baseball is hard enough to do when you’re not playing 162 games. Playing 140-150 lets players stay fresh and recover quicker from nagging injuries, and there’s no prize for getting to a games played streak of a few hundred.
Quatraro, Hoover, and company aren’t coming up with this on their own. Before each series, the front office sends the big league coaching squad suggested lineups based on expected run production against the projected opponent starting pitchers. These lineups are then tweaked by Quatraro from factors that the equations know nothing about (you know, quirky “human element” things).
But in any case, both of those weird-but-not-weird lineups above had something frustrating in them: Jackie Bradley Jr., who is, generously, not a big league caliber player. You know how everyone was tired of Ryan O’Hearn’s offensive ineptitude? Bradley makes O’Hearn look like Joey Votto. Which seems like a joke, except Bradley’s wRC+ since 2021 is 45, which is...bad, aka “second worst in baseball among everybody with 500 plate appearances bad.”