re: Traditional cleanup hitters batting leadoff

The Sabremetrics guys think Babe Ruth should have batted leadoff.

LINK

First they analyzed the GOAT leadoff hitter and see if it compares to GOAT sluggers.

They looked at the greatest leadoff hitter of all-time...and found that it didn't really matter where he hit in the line-up.

So after almost 2000 games (more than 12 full seasons), it didn’t significantly matter where Rickey batted in the lineup. Each team’s win total was no different than what you might expect from flipping a coin 2000 times.


We did the same for Babe Ruth. With Ruth, we found different results.

Hitting Ruth leadoff resulted in a significantly greater number of wins than expected by chance, due to the number of additional plate appearances by the leadoff hitter (4.66 PA/game as a leadoff hitter compared to 4.46 in the #2 spot, decreasing steadily down to 3.81 in the #9 hole).

Most importantly hitting him in the leadoff spot might have meant even more wins for the Yankees.