How to build a fair batting order

Fair does not mean random

The first thing worth saying is that a shuffled order is not a fair order. It feels fair on any given Friday and it is not fair across a season, because randomness clusters. Shuffle twelve names ten times and somebody bats ninth or lower in six of them. The parent who notices is not being difficult. They are right.

Fairness is a season-long property. It cannot be measured in one game, and it cannot be achieved by not thinking.

Start from last week, not from scratch

The single change that improved my orders most was keeping the previous game's card and writing the new one against it. Not reusing it — writing against it. Who hit at the top last week goes lower this week. Who hit last goes up.

This sounds obvious. Almost nobody does it, because the card from last week is in the bag in the garage and it is nine o'clock at night. That is the entire reason it does not happen, and it is why a season-long record beats a good intention.

The top of the order is a reward you are handing out

Coaches talk about the leadoff spot as a baseball decision. For older teams, a good leadoff batter can definitely tip the offensive scales. At young ages, however, it is mostly a social designation. Kids know where they bat. They count. The nine-year-old batting tenth every week has worked that out by the third game, and so has their family.

I am not saying ignore ability — I am saying be honest that you are distributing something valuable, and distribute it deliberately rather than by habit.

Two mistakes I made for years

Batting the weakest hitter last, every week. It seems kind. It protects them from the pressure of the top. What it actually does is tell a child, once a week, in public, where you have ranked them. There is no version of that they do not understand.

Setting the order around one or two players. I used to build from my best two hitters outward. The order that produces is technically defensible and it means the other ten kids are furniture. Build the whole card, then check the top two happen to be somewhere sensible.

What I tend to do for younger teams, in order

1. Pull up last game's card.
2. Move the top third of last week down, and the bottom third up.
3. Check nobody has been in the bottom third twice running.
4. Then, and only then, adjust for who is hot and who is hurt.
5. Look at the whole card once and ask: if I were this kid's parent, reading this, would I think it was fair?

That last step takes ten seconds and catches more than the other four combined.

The record is the point

Whatever you use — an app, a notebook, the back of an envelope — the thing that makes an order fair is that you can see the last several. A coach who can look back across six games makes better decisions than a coach starting fresh each Friday, and it has nothing to do with being a better coach. It is just the difference between having the information and not having it.

I built Even Innings because I was doing this on a legal pad and it took an hour. But the method above works on paper. The tool is convenience; the method is the part that matters.

Written by Jeffrey Schwartz, youth baseball coach. This is how I approach it, not a rule — your league's bylaws and your own judgment come first.