Since time immemorial, a favorite offseason pastime for the passionate baseball fan has been to scratch out possible batting orders for their favorite team for the coming season. You might do it on a text file you bring up surreptitiously on your office computer. You might do it on the back of a napkin in a coffee shop. You might punch it up on your favorite social media platform and put it out there for all your friends to see. However you do it, musing about lineups is a wonderful way to bridge the gap between the holidays and the languorous days until teams finally report to spring training.
The trade rumors are still floating about but with this week’s acquisitions of Starling Marte by the Arizona Diamondbacks and Nicholas Castellanos by the Cincinnati Reds, the pool of names likely to fill out any of those lineups is more or less fixed. A few weeks ago, we took a snapshot of the starting rotations across baseball. Today, we do the same with the projected lineups for every team.
Teams are ranked based on projected 2020 production and playing time for each club’s anticipated base lineup. Teams move players around the field and in and out of the lineup more than ever these days, so the number of days through the season in which you’ll actually see these precise lineups is likely to be limited. But we’ve got to scratch out something on those napkins, right?