Let's Play Lineup Sudoku with the 2025 Chicago Cubs

[Matthew Trueblood]

What if we decided to just trust projections—and demand that every hitter possible be fully qualified for their place in the batting order?

Image courtesy of © Allan Henry-Imagn Images

Building a batting order is a complicated business. There's emotion tied up in it, for players and for fans. There are interaction factors that make each decision about where to bat a given individual dependent (to one extent or another) on the decision about where to bat someone else. At the core of it, though, there's a pretty interesting truth: talent plays, and if you have players who mostly meet or exceed the league-wide standard for production at their spot on the lineup card, you're likely to score plenty of runs to win games.

For today, then—just as a thought exercise—let's assume all the Cubs' key hitters are healthy, and also that the opposing pitcher for the day is split-neutral. Let's further assume (a bigger leap, this one) that projections are an accurate barometer of what we can expect from each Cubs batter. We'll use PECOTA, from Baseball Prospectus, and BP's holistic batting value metric, DRC+. It's indexed to 100, so that number represents a league-average hitter, and higher is better.

Here, from best to worst, are all the relevant Cubs hitters, ranked by their projected DRC+ for 2025:

• Kyle Tucker: 142
• Seiya Suzuki: 115
• Ian Happ: 112
• Gage Workman: 111
• Justin Turner: 109
• Nico Hoerner: 108
• Michael Busch: 103
• Miguel Amaya: 99
• Dansby Swanson: 98
• Matt Shaw: 95
• Pete Crow-Armstrong: 93
• Jon Berti: 89
• Carson Kelly: 88
• Kevin Alcántara: 87
• Vidal Brujá: 84

First, let's acknowledge that this is a pretty good, deep set of hitters. Sure, PECOTA's chugging Gage Workman Kool-Aid in a way not even Marquee Sports Network is likely to match, but you can take 20 points off his projection and still feel decent about this group. To line them up right, for our little game, though, we need the league context for each place in the order. Here those are, for 2024:

1. .255/.327/.412 - OPS+: 108
2. .254/.326/.429 - OPS+: 112
3. .257/.335/.442 - OPS+: 118
4. .245/.314/.423 - OPS+: 107
5. .244/.313/.402 - OPS+: 101
6. .240/.305/.386 - OPS+: 95
7. .240/.307/.384 - OPS+: 95
8. .227/.293/.362 - OPS+: 85
9. .222/.280/.337 - OPS+: 74

Noteworthy trends here, for those with sharp eyes: The league's No. 3 hitters were better than the No. 2 guys last year, although that has not always been the case in recent years. The cleanup hitter is no longer one of the best hitters in the lineup, at least to the extent that they used to be. The sixth and seventh guys are almost identical, making those spots easy to fill and a bit interchangeable.

So, here's the game, which I call Lineup Sudoku. The rules are:

1. If it can be avoided, no slotting a player into any place where their projected performance is worse than the league's average production.
2. Where there are multiple candidates for a given spot and choosing any of them would still allow you to follow Rule 1, use the best player for that spot, and shove the other qualifiers further down the hierarchy of lineup positions.

The way in which it's like Sudoku is that we can take each hitter and code them as an array of possibilities—valid places they can be put, versus those where they can't be. It's like the process of elimination that leads you gradually to the correct answer for each box of the game grids.

Tucker can hit everywhere in the lineup, of course. Suzuki, perhaps problematically (if this were more than a bit of fun with an idea), is eligible to bat anywhere except third; so is Happ. Workman, Turner, and (surprise!) Hoerner all rate well enough to bat anywhere but second or third, which will become important here shortly. Michael Busch qualifies to bat fifth, but everyone else needs to bat sixth or lower—and starting with Crow-Armstrong, the bottom handful of guys can only bat eighth or lower. Bruján only qualifies to bat ninth, by our formula.

For fun (and nothing more), let's start by building a Sudoku where we let Workman play ahead of Shaw and Turner get the nod over Busch. After all, that's what the projections are telling us!

1. Ian Happ - LF
2. Seiya Suzuki - DH
3. Kyle Tucker - RF
4. Gage Workman - 3B
5. Justin Turner - 1B
6. Nico Hoerner - 2B
7. Miguel Amaya - C
8. Dansby Swanson - SS
9. Pete Crow-Armstrong - CF

If we see this lineup at any point this season, something has surely gone haywire—although not, perhaps, in an altogether bad way. Presumably, under the constraints of reality, Workman would have to get very hot for quite a while to prompt Craig Counsell to bat him cleanup.

Ok, let's inject some reality, but still hew to the rules of Lineup Sudoku. Shaw and Busch get their places back, but that creates some complications, because of the more limited number of spots for which they each qualify. It ends up looking like this:

1. Ian Happ - LF
2. Seiya Suzuki - DH
3. Kyle Tucker - RF
4. Nico Hoerner - 2B
5. Michael Busch - 1B
6. Miguel Amaya - C
7. Dansby Swanson - SS
8. Matt Shaw - 3B
9. Pete Crow-Armstrong - CF

This one is, somehow, less plausible, right? But we're very close to something imaginable. If Hoerner gets healthy and has the kind of strong season he's capable of, wherein he runs an OBP around .370, he could hit in the top segment of the order. It would just be first, rather than fourth, which better accords with both our traditional inclinations and the shape of the league's production at leadoff and cleanup, as shown above. Flip Hoerner and Happ, and you have a lineup that the team could actually lean into for a month or so at a time—assuming Amaya hits the way the model expects, anyway.

As silly as it is, this exercise has a tiny amount of real value, in that it helps us grasp how much quality depth the Cubs have. Even if a player or two gets hurt, they should be able field hitters at least qualified for their place in the lineup on an everyday basis. Most of the guys in the lower half of the order, while confined to those spots based on their expected performance, easily clear the bar even of the lineup spot ahead of them.

If you believe in Hoerner the way the projections do, getting and keeping him healthy is pivotal. With him, the Cubs have five regulars with above-average bats, plus Turner and Workman off the bench. However Counsell elects to line them up, this team has the sheer talent to be good offensively.

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