Chapter 4 of 11
Lineup construction
Each step down the order costs about sixteen plate appearances a season. Where those go, and with whom on base, is the whole art.
The short version
Give the most plate appearances to the best hitters, and bat the very best second, where volume and runners on base meet.
KBO 2026 season data through Oct 13, 2026
01
The idea
The batting order does two things. It decides how many plate appearances each hitter gets — the leadoff man bats more than the ninth, every single game — and it decides who is on base when each hitter comes up. Everything else written about lineups is a footnote to those two facts.
The traditional lineup — a fast leadoff man, a bat-control hitter second, the best hitter third, the slugger cleanup — was built around the second fact and mostly ignores the first. Modern analysis, most clearly in Tango, Lichtman and Dolphin's The Book, flips the emphasis: get your best hitters to the plate as often as possible, and fit them to the slots where their skills meet the most runners.
02
The math
Each spot down the order loses about 0.11 plate appearances a game — 16 over a 144-game season. The leadoff hitter gets roughly 128 more trips to the plate than the ninth. That alone is why your best hitters belong near the top.
#1 empty 60% · RISP 23% · leadoff 37% / #2 empty 53% · RISP 24% · leadoff 16% / #3 empty 49% · RISP 27% · leadoff 17% / #4 empty 47% · RISP 29% · leadoff 23% / #5 empty 50% · RISP 29% · leadoff 23%
Who comes up with runners on. The leadoff man leads off an inning far more than anyone, so he bats with the bases empty most; the cleanup hitter sees the most runners in scoring position.
Put the two facts together and the second slot stands out. The #2 hitter gets 0.11 more plate appearances a game than #3, and comes up with the bases empty 53% of the time against the leadoff man's 60%. He has nearly the volume of the leadoff slot and more of the runners. That is why The Book bats the best hitter second, puts the best on-base hitter first, the best remaining power fourth, and treats third — fewer plate appearances, often with two out and nobody on — as a lesser slot than its reputation.
03
Try it
Each club's nine most-used hitters this season, in four orders. Every order plays the same simulated games.
- 1Choi Hyoung-woo.386.387
- 2Koo Ja-wook.464.458
- 3Kang Min-ho.366.352
- 4Lewin Diaz.401.384
- 5Park Seung-kyu.385.381
- 6Kim Sung-yoon.359.375
- 7Kim Ji-chan.356.397
- 8Jeon Byeong-woo.355.355
- 9Ryu Ji-hyuk.348.366
Right-hand columns: wOBA, then OBP
Runs per nine innings
Between the best and worst of these orders lies about 15 runs over 144 games — 1.4 wins. Between any two sensible orders the gap is usually much smaller.
30,000 games per order on the same random numbers. Treat gaps under about 0.02 runs a game as noise.
04
This season in the KBO
PA lost per slot, season
16
Best vs worst order
14
runs a season, club average
In wins
1.3
The Book vs traditional
+0.7
runs a season
Across the ten clubs, the best of the four orders beats the worst by about 14 runs a season — 1.3 wins at this season's 10.6 runs per win. Most of that gap is the difference between batting your best hitters at the top and batting them at the bottom. Between The Book's order and the traditional one, the average difference is 0.7 runs, in The Book's favour — small enough to sit inside the simulation's noise for any single club.
That is the honest headline. Lineup order matters, but only at the margins: a win or so between a sensible order and a perverse one, much less between two sensible ones. The order a manager writes matters far less than the nine names on the card.
05
When the conventional wisdom is wrong
01
The speedy leadoff man
The leadoff hitter leads off an inning in only 37% of his plate appearances. What makes him valuable is getting on base, not stealing once he is there. A high-OBP slugger is a fine leadoff hitter.
02
The bunting #2 hitter
The second slot is one of the three most important in the order. Spending it on a hitter whose job is to give away outs wastes the plate appearances the lineup can least afford to waste.
03
“Protection” for the cleanup hitter
Studies of large MLB samples have struggled to find a measurable protection effect: hitters do not hit noticeably better with a strong bat behind them. Order by quality, not by who scares whom.
04
Agonising over the order
Daily lineup tinkering within sensible bounds is worth runs you cannot see. Rest, platoon matchups and who plays at all matter more.
The season files hold each hitter's totals but not the order he batted in, so the platform cannot say how KBO managers actually arranged their lineups. Each club's nine are its nine hitters with the most plate appearances, whatever their position; their outcome rates are regressed toward the league by 200 plate appearances, and the simulation plays nine full innings against a league-average opponent.