Maybe I’m way too Baseball Managering this, but I’d much rather have Maddon (and Theo) looking at these decisions in a weighted coin flip type of way than ‘emotion and the like’. We have probably five better hitters against righties than him in the lineup today, and they’re all going to get less at bats than he is. The whole thing that makes Theo Theo is that for inconsequential decisions like this he looks at the human element. If the projections say we'll score like .09 fewer runs with Almora leading off but they know that he's jazzed to do it and they think it's helping his development they're gonna let him do it. I would bet pitchers tend to throw fastballs more to the first batter, which would benefit Almora too.