[MicroBob]

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Baseball's run fairly optimally, it's not like by perfectly running a team you'll pick up 30 wins a season or that wall street guys would just rape the current sabermetricly inclined front offices when it comes to trades/the draft.

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For all of you that have any doubt please read Baseball between the numbers by Baseball prospectus. It is run highly sub-optimal in terms of base stealing, bunting, batting order, pitching rotation,pinch hitting, closer usage and pretty much every other aspect of the game. If you want to discuss this more pm me, I don't feel like unleashing all my pent up feelings on sports management debacles here. Perhaps I will start a blog.

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i believe most of this but haven't saber guys determined that batting order doesn't matter much at all?

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tell that to the pitchers trying to grind their way through the 3-4-5 batters of a tough line-up.
Tell that to a batter who gets all these great pitches to look at because of the guys hitting behind him....or to the guy who never gets anything good to swing at because the guy behind him is lousy or slumping.

As I mentioned, there's a lot of stuff going on then just the numbers. "Player A hits .320 and Player B hits .210...but if you reversed their order in the lineup and assume they continue hitting at those clips then the team's run-production will stay the same!!"

Ummmm, who says they will continue hitting at those clips if you switched them in the line-up? Pitchers will be approaching them differently now and they will be seeing different looks and situations. So making the assumption that their average, etc will remain the same is just plain wrong I believe.