Looking at the lineup again

The Brewers play their second exhibition game today against A's again and JS is already displaying the lineup which reads:

2B Rickie Weeks
CF Mike Cameron
1B Prince Fielder
LF Ryan Braun
RF Corey Hart
3B Bill Hall
SS J.J. Hardy
DH Joe Dillon
C Jason Kendall

RHP Dave Bush

And I can see people screaming right now about Mike Cameron in the two hole, but this is the second day in a row for this, and I think it may be a trend. While Mike is a high strikeout guy, I mentioned in a post a long time ago that he sees more than four pitches an AB at 4.04. This is compared to the league average which is around 3.75. Prince Fielder sees 3.70 pitches per plate appearance, which is weird because he walks so much, Ryan Braun sees 3.70, Corey Hart 3.62, JJ Hardy 3.78 and Rickie Weeks 4.07.

So let's think about this. On average, if a player plays the whole season he will get about 630 plate appearances. No matter what happens, Rickie Weeks is your leadoff guy, and his OBP will be about .380 this year. That means that of your 630 PAs, Rickie will be on for about 240 of them. With a difference of about 0.35 pitches/PA between all of these guys, Mike Cameron will see about 84 more pitches during the year than everyone else on the team with Rickie on base if he worked the two hole. That gives Rickie 84 more chances to steal a base, to force a throw away on a pick off or take the pitcher off of his game. Weeks has stolen 59 bases in his major league career and only been thrown out 9. Hell, he was 25/27 last year. That's pretty darn good. Career he has an 86% success rate on the paths. And if you think about it, that hole lefty neutralize thing doesn't work so well since Cameron is a pretty solid hitter against lefties going .265/.363/.480 which is a 20/30/46 point increase across the board over lefties.

Just something for you guys to mull over.