The day after the Winter Meetings ended in December, general manager Billy Eppler was asked if he thought the Angels’ projected lineup leaned too right-handed. It was a fair question, as at that point in the offseason: 1) the big additions to the roster were Andrelton Simmons, Yunel Escobar, Geovany Soto, Craig Gentry, and Cliff Pennington, of whom all but Pennington hit exclusively right-handed; and 2) with Erick Aybar shipped off to Atlanta, the only returning starter who hit from the left side was Kole Calhoun. Eppler’s response was concise and noncommittal: “I think it’ll balance.”
So did it?
A quick glance at the standard lineups for the Angels’ first week of 2016 reveals an offense that appears anything but balanced:
Daniel Nava, a switch hitter, was signed a week after Eppler made his statement about balance, but that proved to be the team’s last dive into MLB free agency for the winter. Beyond Nava, who is really more of a SHINO (Switch Hitter In Name Only) than a true dual threat, the only other non-RHH in the starting lineup is Calhoun.
This imbalance is unfortunately a big part of the legacy that Jerry Dipoto left behind when he resigned last summer. In the heyday of the Angels’ 2000s dynasty, the team boasted a flexibility in the lineup that allowed Mike Scioscia to send his hitters to the plate with the platoon advantage far more often than not. From 2006–2011 the Angels held the platoon advantage in 60.9 percent of all their plate appearances, never once dipping below 57 percent:
This immediately changed when Dipoto took over in 2012. The team’s platoon-advantage rate dipped to 52 percent in his first year1 at the helm and never once climbed to even 54 percent. Their average rate in the four Dipoto years was just 52.1 percent, well below the league average (~55%) and several standard deviations away from their pre-Dipoto norm.
The failure of LHH acquisitions like Raul Ibanez, Josh Hamilton, and Matt Joyce explain some of the platoon-advantage decline, as does strong right-handed hitters like Mike Trout and Albert Pujols playing every day. But perhaps biggest cause of the Great Platoon-Advantage Decline was Jerry Dipoto’s dramatic shift away from rostering switch hitters:
The 2006–2012 Angels had four of the 25 most switch-hitter-heavy rosters in baseball history. This doesn’t necessarily mean they gave the most plate appearances to switch hitters—I have no idea how to search for that on Baseball-Reference—but they’re undoubtedly up there. Every Angels team from that period had at least three regulars (200 PA or more) who were platoon-immune, and most years they had four or five. In 2009, a full 44.7 percent of the team’s overall plate appearances (2,807 of 6,281) were carried out by switch hitters. Nearly half!
Dipoto held fast with the core of the switch-hitting group in his first year, but after 2012 the dominoes started to fall. First, Maicer Izturis left in free agency and Kendrys Morales was traded. The next year Alberto Callaspo left in free agency and Andrew Romine was traded. Then after 2014 Shawn O’Malley was released and Hank Conger was traded. Dipoto did next to nothing to replenish those losses, selecting just five switch hitters in four years heading the Angels’ draft, or 6.2 percent of the 81 position players he drafted overall. O’Malley was the only switch hitter added via free agency, and he stayed all of one season.
The consequence of this is pretty straightforward: By the beginning of 2015 Erick Aybar wasn’t just the lone switch hitter in Anaheim. He was also one of just two switch hitters in the entire organization above Double-A. The only reason the Halos didn’t end the regular season with just one switch hitter on the roster, which would have been an American League low, was because Kaleb Cowart miraculously brought his career back from the dead. This shortage of switch hitters alone might not be a problem for a team, but when it’s combined with a dearth of left-handed hitters anywhere near the 40-man roster—after Calhoun and Kyle Kubitza, there was…Sherman Johnson?—it absolutely is.
Long story short: Eppler inherited not only a roster that was already heavily skewed right-handed, but also a farm system that was almost completely bereft of the potential to help balance the big-league club in the near future. So it’s hard to fault him for failing to realign the starting lineup on a severely limited budget.
What we can do instead is laud him for building some incredibly well-balanced depth just beyond that starting nine. For every right-handed-hitting position player Eppler added to the 40-man roster this winter, he made a point of also adding either a switch hitter or a lefty bat. To wit, in chronological order of acquisition:
Eleven players added to the 40-man roster, six of whom are switch hitters or lefties. Cunningham got bumped off the roster before Opening Day and Choi is now exclusively a left-handed hitter, but with Cowart also in there suddenly the roster is back at pre-Dipoto levels of switchcraft. Nava and Pennington are the only switch-hitting guys guaranteed any plate appearances in Anaheim, but simply having the other options around makes the team exponentially more flexible. Should one or more starters go down, Scioscia now has the ability to mix and match to his heart’s content, which you know he adores.
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We’ve established that Billy Eppler is at least attempting to bring balance back to the Angels roster. What we still don’t know is if that’s actually something worthwhile to offensive production or if it’s merely an arbitrary preference.
To answer this question, the first thing to do is establish what we mean by a balanced lineup. For this exercise, lineup balance will be determined by the number of “LHBs” who received “regular” playing time for a team in an individual season, where “regular” is defined as 250 PA or more2 and “LHBs” is defined as both lefty hitters and switch hitters. A more balanced lineup, then, becomes one that has more “Regular LHBs” on the roster in a season, and not one that has merely the most plate appearances by non-RHBs. This way we avoid one or two LHBs who play every day skewing the results by making a lineup look more balanced than it really is.
Now that we have that figured out, let’s get a bearing of what a normal lineup balance might look like under this definition by plotting our results in a histogram. This will show us the full distribution of Regular LHBs per team season for our timeframe, which is from 1988 to the present:
What we find is a fairly normal distribution, surprisingly. Just over 70 percent of all teams since 1988 carried either four, five, or six Regular LHBs on their roster, while more than 91 percent carried between three and seven.
All but one of the Angels’ lineups in the sample falls within the latter range—the 1990 club had eight Regular LHBs3. The 1991, 1994, 2010, and 2015 Angels share the prize for “Most Imbalanced”, at three Regular LHBs apiece, though the 2015 team is the only one that truly merits the moniker. While the other three all had multiple players within shouting distance (i.e. ~20 PA) of the required benchmark, last year’s team had no one else within even 85 plate appearances of 250. This jibes well with our conclusions above about the inflexibility with which Dipoto left the club.
But enough about the Angels. Now that we know how lineup balance has been distributed across the league, we can get to the key question: Does having more lineup balance over the course of a season actually lead to better offensive performance?
Pretty tough to tell. With the exception of the outlier on the far end, which consists of four team seasons total and should be mostly ignored, all the averages come within three points of each other (95-98 wRC+). While the minimum and maximum values perhaps point to more lineup balance being an indicator of better offense, it’s impossible to tell what the odds are of going one way or the other.
So let’s fix that:
Looks like a pretty clear trend to me. Of the 576 team seasons with between 1–5 Regular LHBs on the roster, only 31.4 percent (181) resulted in an average or better season by wRC+. Of the 234 team seasons with between 6–9 Regular LHBs on the roster, 42.7 percent (100) resulted in an average or better season by wRC+. A more balanced lineup doesn’t guarantee an offense will be productive, but it does appear to increase the chances of an average or better offensive season significantly.
Personally, I’m not sure what the ramifications of this finding are, but they sure feel important. It’s entirely possible I buried a huge lede under 800 words of pontificating about Jerry Dipoto’s roster-building habits. It’s also entirely possible there’s some critical variable I left out and all this is meaningless—I am not a statistician, after all—but I can’t for the life of me think of what that could be4.
So, then, my admittedly small conclusion is this: If the Angels want to rebound offensively this year, they should work hard to utilize the balanced depth with which Billy Eppler has provided them. The odds are in their favor if they do.
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1 In 2012, Angels LHBs had only 12 plate appearances versus LHPs all season. TWELVE. That is not only 280 fewer LHB-vs-LHP plate appearances than any other team that year, but also easily the fewest of any team on record.
2 This is a mostly arbitrary cutoff point. It had to come somewhere and 250 PA seems as good a place as any to separate out bit players from real part-time guys.
3 Chili Davis, Donnie Hill, Jack Howell, Wally Joyner, Luis Polonia, Johnny Ray, Lee Stevens, and Devon White.
4 Weighted Runs Created Plus does a great job of neutralizing numbers, allowing for direct comparisons across different run environments, so there was really nothing left for me to control for without muddying the waters.
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