We usually toss around platitudes like “It doesn’t matter that much” when discussing lineup construction. On an almost daily basis during baseball season, many of us (myself firmly included) find nits to pick with the order in which nine names are written on a piece of paper.
Is our nit-picking justified? How many runs (and wins, perhaps) is Price giving up? I’ll venture to show that “not many” is the correct answer, and that the platitude is correct.
To be fair, most of this sort of work has been done in The Book, but I like to take principles like those and apply them in a more specific manner.