The Futility Infielder

Barry Bonds: Leadoff Hitter?

Salon's King Kaufman has an interesting piece where he suggests that the San Francisco Giants would be better off if they batted Barry Bonds leadoff. When this article appeared the other day, my friend Nick asked me for my take on it. I gave him my best five-minute lunch-hour assessment (short answer: bat Bonds second to increase his PAs but give him somebody to clean up after), then packaged the quandary over to Giants fan John Perricone of the weblog Only Baseball Matters for an article to be named later. John ran my response and took a quick stab at the question himself (short answer: where he bats in the order will have only a marginal effect on his production; only batting him behind himself would make much difference). Since then, I've decided to go back and take a closer look at Kaufman's piece.

Kaufman is an entertaining and provocative writer whose work I generally enjoy, but he's not exactly known for his number-crunching. He presents a basic premise which makes sense: batting Barry leadoff would maximize the number of plate appearances the peerless slugger would get. But the writer makes some serious errors in his analysis, and it ultimately falls apart.

Kaufman starts with the assertion that the opposing strategy of pitching around Bonds has rendered him less valuable when it comes to driving in runners:

Because opponents flatly refuse to pitch to Bonds with runners on base, his value as an RBI man is severely limited. But: He's on base all the freakin' time! Nobody's ever been on base as often Nobody's been close. The more good hitters there are behind Bonds, the more likely the Giants will make the other team pay for walking him. With nothing but mediocre hitters behind Bonds -- Benito Santiago, Reggie Sanders, J.T. Snow and David Bell usually hit behind him--opponents walk him, and the strategy works.

First problem: the Giants hitters are not actually that mediocre. For one thing, their batting statistics are depressed by Pac Bell, which greatly favors pitchers, and so their raw numbers look worse than they are. Baseball Prospectus' Equivalent Average (EqA), a park- and context-neutral measure of offensive performance placed on a scale on par with batting average (with .260 defined as the major league average), shows the Giants with the best EqA in baseball, at .283. This is largely due to Bonds and Kent, of course, but Santiago, Bell, and Sanders--not to mention leadoff hitter Kenny Lofton, are all between .270 and .280. Shortstop Rich Aurilia and first baseman Snow are a few points on either side of .260, but by and large the oars are pulling in the right direction.

Kaufman then points to Dusty Baker's flip-flopping Bonds and Jeff Kent in the batting order and Barry's subsequent decrease in his rate of scoring runs when hitting behind Kent:

When Bonds was hitting third, ahead of the dangerous Jeff Kent, he scored 30.3 percent of the time he was a baserunner. (That is, 30.3 percent of the time that he reached base but didn't hit a home run.) After Giants manager Dusty Baker switched Bonds and Kent in the order, Bonds scored 16.4 percent of the time that he was on base, an astonishing, pathetic figure

...What's really amazing about Baker's misuse of Bonds is that he actually got some praise in late June when he switched him in the order with Kent, who had hit fourth for most of the previous five and a half years. The change helped Kent's production, for the obvious reason that he got better pitches while hitting in front of Bonds. But that improvement for Kent wasn't nearly enough to offset the neutralization of the game's best hitter.

Kaufman then gives us some figures for Bonds pertaining to the switch which I will more clearly present in a chart:

           G   R  BI   AVG   OBP

Pre (#3)  71  69  50  .354   .574

Post (#4) 72  48  60  .385   .588

If that's a downturn, I don't see it. Bonds' R + RBI (two team-dependent stats) went down by 11 in the second span, but his OBP was higher, so he was using fewer outs--something Kaufman never bothers to consider. More importantly, he never offers comparable breakdowns for Mr. Wheelie, despite his assertion that Kent's increase didn't offset Bonds' decline.

So I took a look at their ESPN splits batting in the two positions; the numbers don'texactly jibe with Kaufman's incompletely-presented figures, and taken together they tell a more revealing story:

             PA   R  BI   AVG   OBP   SLG

Bonds (#3)  340  71  64  .377  .591  .861

Kent (#4)   374  50  53  .297  .354  .484



Kent (#3)   304   52  55  .333  .387   667

Bonds(#4)   256   46  46  .365  .571  .730



Bonds-Kent  716  121  117  .329  .466  .633  1099 OPS

Kent-Bonds  573   98  101  .346  .473  .691  1164 OPS

Contrary to Kaufman's assertion, the 1-2 punch of these fine sluggers was actually more effective with Kent hitting before Bonds. Their OBP was seven points higher, their SLG was 58 points higher, and their rate of (R + RBI)/PA was higher as well (.522 to .472). Their counting totals were down in the second permutation because the two players missed about 30 games between them, with whoever played presumably taking the #3 slot while the other was absent from the lineup.

Kaufman also attempts to figure out how many runs Barry would have scored had he batted leadoff. To do this, he takes regular leadoff-hitter Lofton's rate of scoring and applies it to the number of times Bonds was on base: "If he scored at Lofton's 39.1 percent rate, he'd have tallied 167 runs this year, 50 more than his actual number."

Which is a horrible assumption. Lofton's scoring rate was dependent in no small part on having Bonds to drive him in. The ability to drive runners in is roughly represented by slugging percentage, and nobody hitting behind Bonds can touch his .799 this year. Suffice it to say that Bonds wouldn't match that 39.1 percent scoring rate without unprecedented work in the field of cloning. Furthermore, that's not 50 runs Bonds is adding to the Giants total, that's 50 runs he'd be scoring instead of some other player (leaving aside for the moment the fact that there's no way in hell it's 50 runs).

While Kaufman's idea is intriguing, his reasoning is faulty and his methods of calculating the effect are irredeemably flawed. By relying solely on counting stats, he misses the story being told by the rate stats--that Kent-Bonds was actually more productive than Bonds-Kent on a per-plate-appearance basis. And by compounding his calculations with further incorrect assumptions, his argument falls apart. It may make sense to bat Bonds leadoff, but Kaufman's not the one to prove it.