MLB: Would you rather have a player bat 1000 with all singles, 500 with all doubles, 333 all triples, or 250 all HR's??

I see you thumb your nose at lineup optimization. Get your best hitter as many opportunities to bat as possible. He'll get about 5% more ABs at leadoff than 4th.

Kennesaw Mountain Landis wrote:

I would bat the singles hitter clean up. If he hits in the 1st inning someone is on and a strong possibility of an RBI. If he doesn't come up until the 2nd he's the lead off guy other posters wanted. Yes, I know he may not have as many AB's hitting down in the order.

That's a very good point. I was thinking batting 1000 also means perfect on base percentage = leadoff. Batting 1000 also means any runners on base are advancing. A fielders choice would ruin the 1000 average.

Face it. The vast majority of the 600 singles would go to waste for the singles guy. The home run guy would score a minimum of one run per game, and a maximum of 4. The home run hitter would average 2.5 runs per game, the singles guy would not.

*RBIs not runs.

250 all HR's batting clean up position.

Les wrote:

Three runs can break a game open. Two, not really.

You're sure about this?

Btw I would choose the HR guy because he'd be the most fun. Everyone would hate my 100% singles guy, to the extent that he'd probably be murdered.

Interesting question, I either take the singles hitter or the home run hitter.

Anything a hitter can do to not create one of the 27 outs his team gets over the course of a game keeps his team in the game and gives them a chance to continue to score runs. From that perspective a singles hitter who never makes an out will continue to put his team in a position to continue to score runs. Doesn't matter if he's getting a single or walking. How productive his 1.000 batting average is in terms of runs produced is dependent on the other players on the team. For the purpose of this discussion I will make the presumption that this hitter is not keeping up his 1.000 BA via sacrifice hits, which although they can be called "productive outs" are still outs.

On the other hand, a .250 hitter with all HR's has the potential to produce a lot of runs over the course of a season. The rub is that at a certain point the league should start to walk him to avoid the chance of a HR. Let's say you have a player who hits 5 HR's in his first 20 plate appearances without any walks/sacrifices/etc. Not a big deal, he's still going to be pitched to. But let's say you have a player with 25 HR's in his first 100 plate appearances, again without any walks/sacrifices/etc to make the argument more straight-forward. That means he has produced at least 25 runs for his team in 100 plate appearances. Or let's go to 50 HR's in 200 plate appearances (i.e. 2 months of games) Extrapolate that out and you're talking a minimum of 175 runs produced over a typical season (estimating 700 plate appearances for an everyday player). That would be huge, so the obvious change is to walk him every at bat. He still ends up with a .250 batting average but the damage related to 4-5 walks per game might be less (no guaranteed runs) than the damage of 1 HR per game (at least 1 guaranteed run).

The doubles and triples hitters, I don't see where either of those options has the same impact. Neither gives you guaranteed runs like the HR hitter does, and both create outs unlike the singles hitter.

If I am pushed to choose, I'm going with the singles hitter, and I'm batting him 2nd or 3rd. Knowing that he's going to get a hit or walk every time up, I like the idea that if anyone gets on in front of him that he moves those players along or drives them in. My first instinct is to bat him leadoff to get him the maximum number of plate appearances, but since he does the same thing every time I like him in the 2 or 3 slot. Even if the league starts walking him every time that means he's pushing other players who are on base along and giving the 3-4-5 hitters more runners in scoring position.

Question:

Is it random 1/4 home runs or is it homerun, out, out, out, homerun, out, out, out,...

Regardless, I think all singles

Even if it's a reliable HR/out/out/out/HR/out/out/out then he's still not a great choice to me. It would be tempting to have him pinch hit when the bases are loaded and to burn the three outs in two-out-nobody-on situations but I still think the guy batting 1.000 is a more valuable player.

Bring the HR guy up to 1/3 and the doubles guy up to 2/3 and it might be balanced. As it is, the singles guy is ridiculously broken.

And yes, I realize he's really a 'BOB' guy not a 'singles' guy. I would teach him to wait for a two strike count every time to run down the pitcher and they'd respond by walking him.

My first thought is if he ALWAYS gets a single, I would put him 4th in the order, always giving a shot at having people on base when he comes to the plate. If he gets up in the first inning, then someone has either already scored or there's someone on base, and a single scores a dude from 2nd or 3rd.

But, I'll admit I don't really feel like putting too much consideration into this.

you'd be silly not to have the 1.000 guy. A guy who is a guarantee on base is a slam dunk. You can work around him in a line up, reliable... get him to steal into 2nd and he's always in scoring position.

i kinda like running wrote:

This would be interesting question for the guy who does the What If blog at xkcd.

It would be a good question for FanGraphs. There has to be a sabermetric answer to this.

Someone else made the point that the 1.000 batting average guy would get walked every time (assuming the other team knew he batted 1.000), and the .250 guy is going to get walked A LOT. It becomes a completely different question when you take that into account.

I assume a guy with 400 singles and nothing else will have a higher WAR than someone with 100 home runs and 300 strikeouts. But if you assume they always get intentionally walked in situations where it's smart to do so then the answer could change.

I would imagine the opposing teams would know he is currently batting 1000, but only us as outsiders in the hypothetical know he will continue batting 1000. This leaves some options. Do you still pitch to a guy who is batting 1000 with a runner on 1st in hopes to break his streak? I sure wouldn't pitch to him with runners in scoring position.

This isn't even a close question from a SABRmetric standpoint. Now, granted, any of these four options would easily produce the greatest hitter in the history of baseball, but between the four, the guy with a 1.000 OBP and 1.000 slugging percentage would be far and away the most effective player.

And the "guy getting walked" argument doesn't change the equation. In real life, none of these guys would see a good pitch, which probably works to the benefit of the 100% singles hitter (he ALWAYS gets a hit, and a walk doesn't really change his outcomes), though we could certainly debate some of the assumptions here (e.g., does seeing bad pitches make it more likely that the power hitters make an out).

They would all get walked 100% of the time. So its a push.

A lot of people here do not understand baseball. Now that the simpler results of SABRmetrics have hit the mainstream, it should be obvious to all. While OPS is not that good alone, it is not so bad that results of 2.00, 1.50, 1.333, and 1.25 are not significant.

In Moneyball, it is suggested OBP is three times more significant than SP. Using that, we can produce a modified OPS: mOPS = (3*OBP+SP)/2, which has the same scale as OPS. Computing mOPS yields 2.00, 1.25, 1.00, and 0.875. This has the same general result, but the difference for the singles guy is more dramatic.

What the baseball neophytes often forget is that, barring walks, the HR guy leaves his team worse off most of the time, and when he cashes in, the team is starting over. The singles guy always leaves his team with a better chance to score more.

This is one pretty simple...Home Run guy.

Singles guy would hit into double plays, and him being on base is not a guaranteed run, how many times are runners left on base? all the time.

Home run guy is a Guaranteed RUN every 1/4 at bats...thats at least 1 run a game, if we assume there is one or two guys on base when it happens that 2-3 runs a game...not to mention the other plays at bat...how many games are decided by 2/3 runs...tons.

I'd take the home runs. The stats might say take the singles, but I'm going with the eye test on this one based on the closest we've seen to the pure singles and huge power hitter. Ichiro had 262 hits in a single year (mostly singles), just about 4x as many hits as Bonds had HR in his best year. I don't watch much baseball anymore, but the most dominant hitter I've ever seen-by a very, very large margin-was roided up Barry Bonds when he was hitting a home run every other game.

Quote all the stats you want, but are you singles guys are going to tell me that Ichiro was even remotely as dominant or valuable a batter when he was hitting 200 singles per year? He wasn't, and it's not even close. There's no doubt that 1000 singles would account for more runs. However, would anyone here who watched those 2 players would even consider hypothetically trading Ichiro for Bonds straight up in their best seasons? Saying yes its taking stats too far. It's about the equivalent of arguing Karl Malone deserved the MVP over Michael Jordan in 1997 because he averaged more combined points, assists and rebounds than MJ.

Bonds completely affected the planning of late innings when he was due up soon. The opposing teams had to take risks to try and keep the bases empty ahead of him so they could pitch around him and avoid the HR. He was walked 232 times in one year, with 120 outright intentional walks. That was almost 40% of his at bats that season when he hit a HR on 12% of his at bats. I'd say that it's safe to extrapolate that hitting a HR on 25% of his at bats would've resulted in an astronomical walk rate, possibly approaching that of a guaranteed single. Bonds was walked intentionally several times in late innings with the bases empty in the 2003 playoffs. I'd bet that no one ever did that with Ichiro. Bonds was once intentionally walked with the bases loaded. That's how terrifying Bonds was. Teams would rather freely give him the equivalent of a single with the game on the line than let him bat, and his HR rate was only half the theoretical in the question.