Leadoff Hitters Are Everywhere, And Dusty Baker Keeps Missing Them

During the Yankees' dynasty years under manager Casey Stengel, between 1949 and 1960, the team's most frequently used leadoff hitter was not, as is often written, the light-hitting shortstop Phil "Scooter" Rizzuto. He was second. Stengel's first choice was outfielder Hank Bauer, who wasn't particularly fast and didn't walk all that much—he just hit. Stengel liked that Bauer might lead off the game with a home run, and while he wasn't a basestealer, he could make it around the bases on a double or score from second on a single. That was good enough for him.

If you add up all the stolen bases by the top six players to lead off for the Stengel Yankees, you get 79 in 1,409 games, which is 34 fewer than Billy Hamilton stole in 2014-2015 alone. They also scored a lot more runs than he did. The lesson I take from that is this: if life offers you a choice between leading off a light hitter who is spectacularly fast or a grumpy ex-Marine who ran through the Japanese bullets at Okinawa at a moderate rate of speed, you go with the latter. Or, additionally: stolen bases are good, but maybe the speed that exists at the intersection of desperation (don't let them shoot me) and determination (I will not let them shoot me) has value as well. We sabermetric types are not supposed to believe in soft dreamy stuff like that, but until we learn how to quantify being shot in the ass, it's probably smarter to remain agnostic.

This is a question of imagination—to be able to see a leadoff hitter when the received image of one isn't present on the roster—and it's one that Washington Nationals manager Dusty Baker has struggled with throughout his long managerial career. Which is a shame, because it's not a complicated problem, even on a hypothetical team of waddling porcine sluggers. Once you accept that your solution at the top of the order is literally anyone good enough to hit at the top of the order—yes, it's a tautology, but yes, it's that simple—the problem of who bats first explodes in a puff of possibility.

At 9-3, the Nats have gotten off to the start that last year's roster would seem to have demanded, their current two-game losing streak notwithstanding. But the Nationals have a problem at leadoff, and if they're not careful it's going to be a detriment all season long. Michael Taylor is presently substituting for the injured Ben Revere. After his 2-for-4 with a walk on Monday, Nats leadoff hitters have a .189/.228/.264 line on the season. That's better than the Phillies have done, which is admittedly a low bar; their leadoff hitters are at .140/.138/.193 on the season, and have scored just two runs. That on-base percentage in the middle isn't a typo—Phillies leadoff hitters have yet to take a walk. Rickey Henderson weeps. It is only due to this performance that a Baker squad is not once again last in the league in performance out of the top slot.

Over the course of his 21-season managerial career, Baker has struggled with the kind of abstract thinking that puts a Bauer or Wade Boggs at the top of the order. This is of a piece with his managerial reputation; Baker has long been lauded for his leadership skills and relentlessly criticized for his dozy approach to fundamentals and general resistance to baseball modernity. Cubs fans seem unlikely to forgive him for overseeing what still looks like the destruction of a generation of pitchers.

Less dramatically, his batting orders have rarely been optimized. Now, this may seem like a small thing, and studies have shown that the difference between a team's best lineup and its worst plausible lineup—no manager not having a public nervous breakdown is going to lead off with the pitcher and bat Adeiny Hechavarria cleanup—is not that great. Still, in an era in which managers do not design the rosters, have inflexibly structured bullpens staffed by seeming hundreds of pitchers, and often have the designated hitter to take the stress of pinch-hitting off their weary minds, a solid batting order seems like very little to ask. Have at least that much on-field impact for gosh sakes.

If handed a player like Kenny Lofton who all but wore a neon sign saying, LEAD ME OFF, COACH! Baker knew what to do with him. Left to his own devices, though, the results were often dire. Baker had managed 20 full seasons coming into 2016. The blunt tool that is OPS tells us that his leadoff hitters have ranked last in the NL in that category three times and in the bottom half of the league 12 times. Conversely, he's finished first once; in 2013, while managing the Cincinnati Reds, Baker parked Shin-Soo Choo atop the order and got the best offensive season of the outfielder's career. Otherwise, all too often it's been players like Darren Lewis (.255/.317/.330 batting first for the Giants) or Corey Patterson (.249/.301/.448 for the Cubs, .192/.217/.322 for the Reds). The other leadoff hitters Baker used in Cincinnati were players like Drew Stubbs (more than any other player), Brandon Phillips, Zack Cozart, and Wily Taveras. Some of those guys are decent base-stealers; none of them are leadoff hitters;

There was often no obvious leadoff candidate on the Reds, but that's exactly why Baker's blinders are so vexing—if the solutions were always obvious, literally anyone could manage. To invoke Bauer's example once more, a leadoff hitter is anyone who can hit. Speed is a nice bonus. Walks are important, but their absence is not necessarily a disqualifier if the player does enough other things at the plate; Ichiro Suzuki's 162-game average for walks drawn is just 41, but when you hit .320 and steal bases efficiently, no one is going to complain.

The batting order is, after all, not a Rube Goldberg device for generating offense through the arcane interactions of its parts; it's more a machine for distributing playing time. A team's every-day leadoff hitter is going to get more plate appearances than any other player on the team. If that player happens to be the weakest hitter among the starting nine, the manager has demonstrated a perverse sense of resource allocation. Dusty Baker, who gave Willy Taveras 368 plate appearances in which to put up a .236/.275/.289 line as his leadoff hitter, is that manager.

At this early stage of the season, when not even a tenth of the games have been played, it's easy to overreact to what at midseason would just be a minor slump at the top of the batting order. The question is whether (and when) the inference can be made that the Nationals' No. 1 guys have more than the April blahs, and that a change needs to be made.

Revere was Baker's initial primary leadoff candidate, but he is in the mold of Taveras or Juan Pierre (another Baker leadoff man)—a sub-Ichiro deadball-style hitter who might be able to slap .300 but doesn't actually generate many runs due to his lack of power and patience. Revere's not without value, but he's also not someone who demands a spotlight offensive role. He's also been on the disabled list since the first game, and while he will no doubt improve things when he returns—he has to, given how bad things have been—unless his batting average hews closer to the .319 he hit after his trade to the Blue Jays last year, he is another subpar choice for a team which could otherwise be striving for historic-level goodness.

Taylor posted a .282 OBP last season, and while he has more ability than that, patience isn't among his skills. Baker's best choice now could be Anthony Rendon who, while no Camera Eye at the plate, proved his Baueresque bona fides by leading the NL in runs scored in 2014 while batting second. Jayson Werth, assuming he gets his bat going, is typically patient and will walk more in a bad year than Revere will in a good one. Or perhaps the answer will be provided by 23-year-old shortstop Trea Turner, presently killing both the ball and his service-time clock at Triple-A while Danny Espinosa makes outs in the big leagues. Through Monday, Turner has hit .324 in 195 career games down there.

The Nationals' predecessors in D.C., the Washington Senators, had some traditional leadoff men, like George Case, another Juan Pierre-style player from the 1940s, and Clyde Milan, who was kind of Juan Pierre-plus. But they also had some unorthodox choices, such as first baseman Joe Judge, who hit a bit like a speedier Mark Grace. Best of all was third baseman Eddie "The Walking Man" Yost, who hit only about .250 and stole perhaps six bases a year—in 1957 his stolen base-caught stealing record reads 1-for-12—but took 120 walks a year. Leadoff men are everywhere if you're willing to see them.

Baker made his reputation on leadership. After the divisive reign of Matt Williams, a positive presence was exactly what the Nationals needed. With a roster this good, and reinforcements like Turner and Lucas Giolito coming on fast, this team should win. It would be a shame if it missed again because the detail work was neglected.