A few weeks ago, the Twins TV broadcast commented on how manager Derek Shelton trotted the same lineup out to the umpires for five consecutive contests. In today\u2019s matchup\/platoon-heavy baseball environment, similar batting orders day after day is exceedingly rare (and\u2014let\u2019s be honest\u2014Shelty\u2019s stubbornness was likely generated at very least by a run of right-handed starters).<\/p>\n
This got me thinking of how many unique lineups the Twins have used over the years. Though too much work at this point in a long season to go year-by-year, I looked at 10-year increments going back to the 1960s to see how many different batting orders were utilized (as well as some data on how many players were used out of the first four lineup slots).<\/p>\n
Honestly, I thought I would find a more linear upward progression of unique lineups as the years went on\u2014but that wasn\u2019t necessarily true. Starting in about the 1980s, it seems, lineup modulation has been as much about player talent as matchups. In 1996 and 2006 (especially), the Twins had a solid starting nine\u2014so not much reason to hit puree on the daily lineup blender. Whereas in rougher years like \u201886 & \u201816, it makes sense that more combinations were attempted to unlock production.<\/p>\n
Hey\u2014we may have found an area of baseball that hasn\u2019t been completely taken over by analytics (shhh\u2026don\u2019t tell Jeremy Zoll!). Let\u2019s hope whatever nine visitors take the field at the Big A this late-afternoon are the right ones to nab a victory.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"A few weeks ago, the Twins TV broadcast commented on how manager Derek Shelton trotted the same lineup…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":810052,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2388],"tags":[5,822,60,80253,3190,4,148],"class_list":["post-810051","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-minnesota-twins","tag-baseball","tag-minnesota","tag-minnesota-twins","tag-minnesota-twins-discussion","tag-minnesotatwins","tag-mlb","tag-twins"],"share_on_mastodon":{"url":"https:\/\/channels.im\/@mlb\/117305373060794848","error":""},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810051","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=810051"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/810051\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/810052"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=810051"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=810051"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.rawchili.com\/mlb\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=810051"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}