Defining Balanced Lineups

We’re used to hearing about teams having balanced or deep lineups. Other teams are defined as “stars and scrubs”. While I think we all know what these term mean, it’s not something that’s ever been quantified (at least, not to my knowledge). Since the issue of depth is an interesting one to me, I thought it’d be fun to to tackle this using wOBA.

For each team, I calculated wOBA on a team level, then the weighted standard deviation for all players. This produces each teams’ distribution, but since the size of the standard deviation is dependent on the average, (meaning that it’s not standard when comparing teams) I used the coefficient of variation (aka CV, simply standard deviation/average) as the final measure of consistency. The lower the CV, the smaller the spread of wOBA performance.

My first run showed a definite bias against NL teams, since pitchers added a lot of variability. So I ran the numbers without pitchers as well — this isn’t as accurate since we’re looking at the entire offense, but it allows for a better comparison to AL teams. I grabbed runs/game from Baseball Reference so we can get an idea of run production as well. The results, sorted by position player CV:

Team	wOBA – ALL	CV – ALL	wOBA – NP	CV – NP	R/G
Mets	0.297	20.04%	0.308	8.74%	3.9
Royals	0.304	11.20%	0.304	10.38%	4.0
Rays	0.306	12.11%	0.307	11.19%	3.8
Phillies	0.294	18.74%	0.304	11.34%	3.9
Twins	0.316	12.42%	0.317	11.44%	4.4
Athletics	0.313	13.53%	0.315	11.65%	4.6
Nationals	0.315	18.94%	0.326	12.05%	4.3
Orioles	0.323	13.47%	0.324	12.23%	4.4
Cardinals	0.309	17.22%	0.316	12.71%	3.8
Yankees	0.305	13.86%	0.306	12.78%	3.9
Brewers	0.315	21.19%	0.327	12.86%	4.2
Padres	0.281	18.18%	0.289	12.99%	3.2
Mariners	0.300	14.56%	0.301	13.47%	4.0
Astros	0.309	14.49%	0.310	13.54%	3.9
Rangers	0.305	14.35%	0.305	13.81%	3.9
Pirates	0.324	21.83%	0.336	13.88%	4.3
Giants	0.310	20.42%	0.320	13.94%	4.2
Marlins	0.309	20.68%	0.319	14.14%	4.1
Tigers	0.333	14.97%	0.334	14.23%	4.7
Red Sox	0.304	15.34%	0.304	14.38%	3.8
Angels	0.324	15.54%	0.325	14.46%	4.9
Indians	0.315	15.45%	0.316	14.60%	4.2
Rockies	0.333	20.11%	0.343	14.61%	4.5
Reds	0.294	19.78%	0.302	14.70%	3.7
Dodgers	0.323	18.42%	0.331	14.93%	4.2
Diamondbacks	0.299	21.09%	0.309	15.47%	3.8
Braves	0.298	22.65%	0.310	15.59%	3.6
White Sox	0.314	17.27%	0.315	16.13%	4.1
Cubs	0.301	20.18%	0.308	16.45%	3.8
Blue Jays	0.326	18.32%	0.328	17.19%	4.5

On the opposite end of the spectrum, the Blue Jays have widest spectrum in wOBA, with a true stars and scrubs approach — of players with over 200 PA, Jose Bautista, Edwin Encarnacion, Adam Lind, and Melky Cabrera all have wOBAs over .350, Anthony Gose and Munenori Kawasaki each are under .290, and five (Jose Reyes, Brett Lawrie, Colby Rasmus, Dioner Navarro and Juan Francisco) all are sitting around 0.320. Throw in some part-time players with sub-.300 wOBAs, and you get a team with a .326 line. The Mets win the prize for most balanced lineup, unfortunately for them, this means they have a collection of pretty poor hitters, with only Lucas Duda (0.358 wOBA, 553 PA) and Daniel Murphy (0.330 wOBA, 598 PA) putting up strong numbers.

Of course, the ends can always be extreme, and in this case they just happen to be represented by one poor-hitting team and one good-hitting team. So what about the middle? The Astros, Rangers, and Pirates all hover around the CV median, with .310, .305, and .336 wOBAs respectively. No real trend there. The R values of CV against wOBA and R/G are:

	wOBA	R/G
All	(0.11)	(0.19)
Non-Pitchers	0.23	0.06

Very different results depending on whether or not we include pitchers, but either way the correlation is weak.

What does this tell us? Basically, there are a lot of ways to build a solid offense. I expected teams with more balance to perform better, but that doesn’t appear to hold water. While there are other aspects to consider when building a roster, such as defense, depth in case of injury, etc., team compositions can vary yet yield similar results.