I’ve been thinking a lot about platooning lately, I just finished up a book on Casey Stengel and I’m in the midst of the playoffs in my Strat league. If you know anything about Casey Stengel or if you’ve ever played Strat then you probably have pondered platoons before. Furthermore the recent Reds signing of Jeff Conine has seemed to strike fear in the hearts of some baseball fans. Some people (mostly Reds fans) are afraid that he’ll somehow find his way into the lineup in the outfield or even against right-handed batters. Conine has already been earmarked as the RH 1st base option of the moment, his .337/.400 line from last year makes him the perfect bookend to Hatteberg, another player in the long line of BA driven Reds first baseman. Don’t get me wrong, Conine has his perks, I should know he’s a starter 50% of the time on my Strat team. (I did mention the playoffs right?) Anyway, back to the platoons.
Platoons are a funny thing, especially if you grew up a fan of the Reds with the Big Red Machine; a team that knew no platoons. But that was standard for that era, because platoons are like the long ball and the bunt; it appears and then vanishes as simply as it had previously appeared. I can point you to a brief history of platooning in Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (page 117) he covers it better then I and if you are reading this site and have never read that particular work, do your self a favor and get it.
If you want to break down the platoon arrangement mathematically you can see how it was done by the Baseball Prospectus team in their book Baseball Between the Numbers, to cut to the chase they state: “Any general manager who signs a player based on his individual platoon splits is crediting him a skill no batter has definitively possessed.”