THT’s Steve Treder has been writing an interesting series on the worst hitters of the last 50 years by batting-order split. Most recently (Monday), he posted his Worst Cleanup Hitters since 1957 . Since only one Cardinal made the list (we’re not complaining), our interest in the local angle was piqued: Who have been the worst cleanup hitters in recent Cardinal history, and, for that matter, who have been the best? With the mashing Ryan Ludwick recently taking hold of the #4 spot in the 2008 lineup — he is now tied with Rick Ankiel for the plurality of games played at the spot — where does he stand (despite his small sample size) among his thumping predecessors?

Since we had the luxury of focusing on a smaller set of players, we thought we’d enhance Treder’s methodology. First, we took the Cardinal player who had the plurality of games as cleanup batter each season. Then we looked at his splits only as a cleanup batter, and rather than use OPS+, we used GPA+ (which we calculate the same way people calculate OPS+, only with, well, GPA) compared to the NL split for cleanup hitters. And since 1956 data is available, at least for the Cardinals, we’ve cast our net one year further back.

First, the bad news, or, actually, the bad cleanup batters (number after player name is games at cleanup):

Fans might’ve guessed that Cub Jim Edmonds, with his dismal 2007 campaign, would appear on the list. And Pedro Guerrero and Todd Zeile never had better than 105 GPA+ seasons. But like Edmonds, guys like George Hendrick, Ted Simmons, Joe Torre and Ken Boyer also had some successful years as Cardinal cleanup hitters:

It’s hard to know the true place of McGwire’s 2000 campaign (not only because of his steroid use, but because of his relatively small number of games — 62 — at cleanup), as well as several of the other "top" seasons, which occurred during baseball’s PED era. As for Ludwick, even if he slacks off his pace a bit (and keeps hitting in the four hole), he has a good chance of finishing in the team’s top 15. Ankiel, on the other hand, may be producing this season, but not in the cleanup spot (he hit his eighth home run of the season last night but as a pinch hitter in the eighth spot). As we’ve seen especially in the last week, the key to Albert Pujols’s success, and of course, the team’s, is how the cleanup hitter goes.

This entry was posted by Pip on Thursday, May 22nd, 2008 at 12:57 pm and is filed under analysis. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.