Batting lineup philosophy

I do not know if you are watching some of their practices but they probably set the lineup from what they saw in practice. DD’s MS didn’t play enough games to get a good picture of how the players batted. They were also a little stubborn changing the lineup after the first game of the year.

doublenickel said:

I am trying to understand why our MS coach is making the lineup the way they are is the reason I ask. They are putting a batter with the most K's in the two hole, the batter with the highest batting average/on base percentage in the 6 or 7 hole and te hitter with the third best average and probably the best power hitter on the team in the 8 spot. The difference between the highest average and the next highest is 200 pts. The player with the highest average has yet to strike out this year with over sixty at bats. I am just trying to make sense of it all, I keep the stats for the team and the way they have went about making a lineup just confuses me. I am not the coach so I will not discuss lineup with them, I just wondered if there was a concept
out there I wasn't aware of.

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If your MS is like ours where the math teacher is the coach then the lineup might actually be set alphabetically or even shortest to tallest.

fballchgup said:

If your MS is like ours where the math teacher is the coach then the lineup might actually be set alphabetically or even shortest to tallest.

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Lol-now I got to clean up the coffee I spit onto my screen.

there's also the philosophy of batting the best hitter period as the #1 hitter so the best hitter gets the most at bats.

Funny thing is, they claim to know softball and say they play to win.

doublenickel said:

Funny thing is, they claim to know softball and say they play Wi

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Fixed it so that it makes complete sense now

Last year we had a rec team consisting of a lot of varsity and JV girls. Towards the end of the season we started batting our best, most powerful hitter 1st. Our logic was to get her on base to get the rest fired up. She led off a few games with homers and just set the tone for the rest of the team. She got more at bats and most teams didn't know what she was capable of until she was trotting around the bases. It could also have the opposite affect. If she got out, the rest of the team seamed a little timid to start with. It carried us through to the dixie World Series where we finished 6th. Might not seem like much to brag about for most places, but we're a small place and don't have a large pool to pull talent from. Several of the other coaches at the WS were talking about the number of teams from which they chose their all stars. 6-10 teams of players. We had 13. Girls, not teams. We cut 1 player.

fballchgup said:

If your MS is like ours where the math teacher is the coach then the lineup might actually be set alphabetically or even shortest to tallest.

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If it's the Math teacher, it may be a Fibonacci sequence.

I believe there is an ideal lineup philosophy but unless you have an A level team with quality players from top to bottom you probably wont be able to use it. As a coach on a B level team we try to maximize the number of times our better hitters are at bat. I believe this is even more important in tournaments due to the time limits. We want our top hitters to bat as much as possible.

doublenickel said:

Just curious, I know the baseball philosophy of having the best contact hitter batting third and cleanup is usually the power hitter but I am curious as to how softball coaches typically like to set up the lineup.

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I've posted this before but it's a very interesting read on baseball lineup construction that is a bit different from "conventional wisdom"

Optimizing Your Lineup By The Book - Beyond the Box Score

Here's how the lineup spots rank in the importance of avoiding outs:

#1, #4, #2, #5, #3, #6, #7, #8, #9

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Not sure if this full translates from BB to SB but is fairly close.