Ok, folks....we're a french bread crust piece past the halfway point in the season, and the boys are underachieving. 84 games in, we are all-square at 42-42. Predictably, the natives are restless, and most of the jeers and taunts are directed towards one Dusty Baker. I agree wholeheartedly that the Reds are underachieving. However, I will not (and never will) tolerate spears and arrows being aimed in the direction of the architect of the most successful and thought-provoking strategery of winning baseball ever developed - Bakermetrics.
Over the next few days, possibly spilling past the all-star break, Yours Truly and the venerable Texasdave are going to give you folks a wake up call - a hands-on seminar of how to manage and play winning baseball. Depending on the performance of the students, this class may take a couple of days or a couple of weeks. Assessments will be given and decisions as to the scope and depth of the course will be made on the fly, so to speak.
The class is called "Bakermetrics 101" because we are starting at the bare-bones beginning. How far will we go with it? We'll see, dude.
First question. A fundamental concept of BM (henceforth, for the sake of expediency, "Bakermetrics" may simply be referred to as "BM"): We're talking lineup construction.
You manage a baseball team. You need to construct a lineup for today's game against the Montgomery Manhandlers. Who bats first and why?
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