Second Guessing Scioscia – No, you’re out of order!

Welcome to Second Guessing Scioscia, our look back at some of the questionable decisions that Mike Scioscia made in the last week. And, boy, there are some questionable decisions to be reviewed. In the history of this column, we have never once struggled for content. However, we aren’t anti-Scioscia. The official MWAH stance on Scioscia is pro-Scioscia overall. But his in-game tactics need some help and we are here to provide that help by nitpicking incessantly and grading them with our patented SciosciaFace grading system.

This is a very special edition of Second Guessing Scioscia in which we second guess those doing the second guessing of the batting order. It doesn’t get much more meta than that, people.

No, you’re out of order!
Lineups. People love to gripe about lineups. People do not love Mike Scioscia‘s lineups. Specifically, they don’t like Mike Scioscia lineups that involve Matt Joyce, he of the 9 wRC+, batting clean-up. When Scioscia returned to this lineup permutations this week, the reaction from most Angels fans was roughly akin to this:

There is a great deal of anger over something that is worth maybe a win or two over the course of the season. While every little win counts, batting orders just aren’t that big of a deal in the big picture. They just happen to be one of the most tangible things that fans can point to and blame the manager for. For a lineup to have a severely negative effect on a team, it needs to be egregiously bad. Like picking names at random while blindfolded and suffering from severe damage to your frontal lobe bad. Like Buddy Bell is your manager bad. As bad as it might seem to have Joyce batting fourth, it isn’t that bad.

Yes, Joyce is off to an absolutely horrific start, but there is much more talent there. At some point it will breakthrough. Good managers are wise to resist managing to streaks. If a guy actually has some mechanical or physical issue, yeah, bury him in the lineup. If he is making good contact and just not seeing the results, which appears to be the case of late for Joyce, then you are just punishing a guy for having lousy luck.

The other factor here, and honestly the more important factor, is who the frak else is going to bat cleanup? The rules of baseball mandate someone bat fourth, right? Right?

/checks the rulebook

Confirmed. It checks out. Cleanup batters are, in fact, mandatory. With that in mind, let’s open the floor to suggestions.

David Freese? OK, sure. He’s batted there the most this year and hasn’t been entirely terrible this season. He’s actually been phenomenal against lefties, posting a .449 wOBA. The flip side of that is he has only a .260 wOBA against righties. Gross.

C.J. Cron? Um, ok, I’ll humor you. I guess he makes sense because, in theory, he has great power. In practice, he has a .082 ISO and 42 wRC+. I’ll take a pass.

Carlos Perez? Sure, he’s off to a hot start. If beggars can’t be choosers, he’s as good as any other option. At the same time, you probably don’t want to put too much pressure on a guy who has played just six MLB games. Besides, if we are being good l’il managers and managing to true talent, Perez is not really a big upside hitter.

Erick Aybar? He has no power, but at least he can put the ball in play. That gives him a big edge over all these other options. He is still is a terrible fit for the role, but so is everyone else.

And that’s the point of all this. There is no best option here, only the best worst option. The Angels clearly need a better cleanup hitter and they are only going to get one right now (as they await the trade market to open up) if Joyce starts hitting like he used to, so why not give him an opportunity to do that? And why not stop complaining about it until then?

At a minimum, keep your complaints to yourselves. Leave the poor beat writers alone. They don’t make the lineups, they just reprint them.

Vitriol — intense, unrelenting vitriol — dominating my timeline right now. Over a starting lineup. #Angels

— Alden González (@Alden_Gonzalez) May 7, 2015

Don’t shoot the messenger. Don’t make them sad either. Nobody likes a sad beat writer. So how about we all just calm the eff down when we see a suboptimal lineup, OK?

VERDICT: