Best Lineup - Cincinnati Reds

Moving on a little bit from my series on where to bat your best and worst hitters, I am taking a look at the best lineup for an actual team. In this post I will be looking at the best lineup for the Cincinnati Reds, when they are facing both a right handed (RHP) and left handed (LHP) pitcher.   I am using my baseball simulator that I wrote in C language, which takes pretty much everything that you can model in to consideration.  Keep in mind I did not run every single permutation of lineups but it is very easy to narrow things down to the best lineup with some experience of doing this.

I used the lineups at MLBDepthCharts as my baseline as far as the lineup "to beat" and who the actual starters would be against both RH and LH pitchers.  For input projections I used the Bill James projections for each player available at Fangraphs.  I played the Reds as the visiting team, against an imaginary team of players that I kept constant and an imaginary set of starting and relief pitchers for both teams.  This gives a WOWY (with or without you) sense to this exercise.  All I did was run simulations (1 million of them) with different sets of lineups, keeping everything else constant.  Below are the best lineups that I could find for the Reds against both a left handed and right handed pitcher.


First, here is the lineup that MLBDepthCharts list as the most likely lineup that the Reds will use.  They do not differentiate between a vs RHP/LHP lineup - so it is a rough draft starting point to use.

MLBDepthCharts Lineup:
CF - Shin-Soo Choo
2B - Brandon Phillips
1B - Joey Votto
LF - Ryan Ludwick
RF - Jay Bruce
3B - Todd Frazier
C - Ryan Hanigan
SS - Zack Cozart
SP - Pitchers Spot

Now on to the good stuff...

Best Lineup vs RHP
CF - Shin-Soo Choo
C - Ryan Hanigan
1B - Joey Votto
2B - Brandon Phillips
RF - Jay Bruce
3B - Todd Frazier
LF - Ryan Ludwick
SP - Pitchers Spot
SS - Zack Cozart


Best Lineup vs LHP
2B - Brandon Phillips
C - Ryan Hanigan
1B - Joey Votto
3B - Todd Frazier
RF - Jay Bruce
LF - Ryan Ludwick
CF - Shin-Soo Choo
SP - Pitchers Spot
SS - Zack Cozart

Analysis:  The first thing that sticks out is that like in my previous exercises with other lineups the pitcher should bat 8th not 9th.  Choo is correctly in the leadoff spot against RHP but against a LHP he should be dropped to 7th and replaced with Phillips at the top of the order.  Ryan Hanigan who has an amazingly odd OBP/SLG spread (high OBP, low SLG) should be leveraged by batting him 2nd in front of the slugger Joey Votto, if indeed his walk rate is a function of patience not pitchers avoiding him to get to the pitchers spot.  Todd Frazier should be batting ahead of Ryan Ludwick in all lineups.  Votto should bat third, Bruce 5th and Cozart 9th in all lineups.