Quote Originally Posted by Johnson85 View Post
This randomly came up in tball. We were playing a league that treated an inning as 5 runs or 3 outs, which ever comes first. Basically as long as you don't hit it directly to the pitcher, 2nd baseman, or 1st baseman, you are safe. Getting out of even one inning without letting the other team score five wins gave you a good chance of winning. Getting out of two innings without letting the other team score five wins guaranteed a win except for against maybe two teams, in which case it's maybe 50/50 whether you'd win with that. The other coaches basically did the line-up 1-9, best to worst hitters (really 1-11 or 1-12 depending on how many showed up because everybody just batted through, regardless of who was in the field), with some adjustment in the first 5 to match traditional roles. When I explained to them that it was stupid to put our three most likely outs together and virtually guarantee that we wouldn't max out one inning, it was deer in the headlights. Could not comprehend that when all twelve people were there, we had enough people guaranteed to get on base that we could space out our 3 bad hitters enough to guarantee three of them didn't come up in the same inning before we reached five runs.

And the opposite applies if you are not a good team. If you have too many outs in the lineup to space them out, you need to bunch your hits together to get people around the bases, and put them at the front of the lineup to maximize their number of at bats.
I like this overall philosophy.