Pete Crow-Armstrong Doesn't Have to Lead Off to Maximize His Value on the Bases

By now, we're all well-trained students of the school of Sabermetrics 1.0, a movement that began in the 1970s and found its gear in earnest in the 1980s. One of the most famous of that first wave of data-driven insights into the game was the value of on-base percentage, as a better measurement of offensive efficacy than batting average. What matters most (not, by any means, the only thing that matters, but the thing that matters most) is how well a hitter avoids using up one of his team's 27 outs when he comes to the plate.

A crucial corollary to that observation, of course, was the fact that many of the game's leadoff hitters were miscast. Too many teams used high-average, low-power, low-OBP guys atop the order, partly because they were fast (and speed at the top of the lineup has always been highly valued), but partly, too, because those batting averages fooled teams into thinking those guys were better hitters than they were. Sabermetrics tells us—started telling us 40 years ago, and largely won the argument as early as 20 years ago—that leadoff hitters need to get on base at a high rate, and that no team should position a player who makes a lot of outs into the spot that gets the most plate appearances.

We've all internalized that, by now, and thus, when a young player like Pete Crow-Armstrong comes to the majors, no one really expects him to step right into the top spot in the batting order. By consensus, Crow-Armstrong (who had a .286 OBP last year) is not ready for that kind of job. Here's the thing, though: Somewhere, either right near the surface or deep down, pretty much all of us keep thinking that one day, maybe, he can progress far enough to merit that job. It's a shared goal for him, held by fans and analysts alike, because we all see things like what he did Thursday against the Royals, and imagine how much chaos he might create by batting leadoff every day.

Somewhere in our brains, we all still share an instinct that speed has added value at the top of the lineup. This, therefore, will sound radical: It doesn't. It just doesn't. In fact, speed matters far more in the lower half of the modern lineup than in the top half. Back in 2004, when Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin published The Book: Playing the Percentages in Baseball, one of their less-heralded findings was that speed is usually leveraged best by placing the good runner fifth or sixth in the order, all else being equal. The changes to the landscape of the game have only made that truer in the intervening years.

Crow-Armstrong has immense value on the bases, once he reaches safely. It's almost unimaginable, though, that he'll ever get on base enough to warrant hitting first. In a good enough developmental scenario to get him to the top third of a lineup, he'll probably profile more as a third hitter, where the power he might tap into more consistently and the high potential batting average could play up. In all the scenarios within a standard deviation of the top of the possibilities curve, though, this guy looks a lot like Kevin Kiermaier: a sensational glove, some slashing offensive contributions, and lots of speed, but nothing that should even tempt you to bat him shoulder-to-shoulder with the best hitters on a winning team.

That's ok. It's really good, even. Right now, baserunning is the strongest aspect of Crow-Armstrong's game. It's not just Thursday. He's created chaos in other instances already this spring, and we saw lots of steals and few times caught stealing in 2024. 

We've all broken free of the delusion that players with high averages can lead off, even if they have poor OBPs. Next, we need to shake the false idea that speed plays best from the top of the order. That was true 70 years ago, 50 years ago, and even 30 years ago, to some extent, when the league's overall power level was lower, so small-ball strategies and the ability to take an extra base on a single mattered more; strikeouts were much less common and singles much more so, especially among the game's best hitters, so getting into scoring position with the heart of the order coming up mattered more; and the bottom of each batting order tended to contain one or two true zeros, sometimes including the pitcher, such that offenses relied more on creating runs in the short sequence from Nos. 1-5 in the lineup.

That's not the game teams play in the majors anymore. Almost everyone who starts in the big leagues can hit double-digit home runs. Shortstops, catchers and center fielders (like Crow-Armstrong) are expected to make offensive contributions, which means that most functional lineups have the ability to score even when the lower third is coming up—especially if someone is on in front of them, gaining ground with great baserunning and disrupting the pitcher and the defense.

Speed doesn't matter as much at the top of the lineup as it once did, and it never mattered quite as much as we imagined. Crow-Armstrong doesn't fit the profile of a leadoff hitter, and he almost certainly never will. Letting him bat sixth (and perhaps, eventually, move up to third, if his bat takes off) is the best way to make use of his skills, and that's a good way to unlearn some of the incorrect things we all grew up believing about the nature of speed and its place in a baseball offense.

I was @Mitch Widmeier's guest on Episode 2 of the North Side Baseball podcast, where we had a good discussion about this topic that reminded me to write it up. That episode should drop soon. Be the first to find it, by subscribing to our YouTube channel and to the podcast feed on Apple Podcasts or Spotify.