Before steroids zoomed to no. 1 on the Baseball Argument Chart, the batting order was always the most surefire way to get a rise out of players, managers, and fans. Like steroids, the effect of batting orders is not easily grasped, which is why both make for great disputes. Just as no one has ever seen a hormone hit a home run, it has never been proved that batting second has any real impact on a hitter’s production over batting fourth or seventh. It has always been thought that the only real way a batting order can negate a hitter’s ability to hit is if he’s not listed in it at all.

During spring training, Mets manager Willie Randolph toyed with the idea of batting third baseman David Wright eighth; he batted seventh on Opening Day and has been locked in the sixth slot for most of the young season. In the Bronx, Joe Torre is still trying to figure out if slap-hitting second baseman Tony Womack should bat at the top of the order or the bottom; Womack batted leadoff last night after hitting out of the ninth slot for the first week of the season.

In both cases, the managers are looking for an alchemical batting order in which the hitters will interact in a way that creates runs. According to traditional baseball thought, the best-constructed lineup includes a teams’ speediest player first, its best bat-handler second, its best overall hitter third, and its burliest power hitter fourth. However, the traditional batting order retards offense just as often, if not more often, than it helps.

There are 362,880 possible batting orders. A study conducted by Bill James nearly a decade ago showed that the difference between the optimal batting order and the fourth- or fifth-best batting order is quite small. Still, every run counts, and even a 1% improvement in runs scored over the course of the season can mean more wins. Those runs are available at no cost to a manager who recognizes that the main function of the batting order is not to stack hitters in some faux-scientific order, but instead to distribute playing time in the form of plate appearances.

The higher in the batting order a player bats, the more chances he gets. Over the course of the season, the leadoff hitter will come to bat 3% more often than the no. 2 hitter and nearly 20% more often than the no. 9 hitter. In 2004, the Mets’ leadoff slot saw 742 plate appearances, while the no. 9 slot saw just 620.

By moving a player up in the order, a manager increases the number of times that player will bat by about 20 appearances per slot. By suggesting that Wright bat sixth, Randolph is arguing (knowingly or otherwise) that Wright deserves 40 fewer plate appearances than the cleanup hitter and 100 fewer appearances than leadoff man Jose Reyes.

According to Baseball Prospectus’s weighted mean projection, which takes into account trends in a player’s career and how similar players have fared as they aged, Wright will hit somewhere around .276 AVG/.358 OBA/.476 SLG in 2005. That’s a lot of production to forego voluntarily just because Carlos Beltran, Mike Piazza, and Cliff Floyd occupy the traditional power slots, and Wright doesn’t fit the image of a no. 1 or no. 2 hitter. With Wright batting sixth rather than second, that’s approximately 70 fewer plate appearances devoted to the third baseman. This is fine if Kaz Matsui deserves the extra plate appearances; wasteful if he does not.

Ironically, Randolph seems to have missed a strategic development that took place right under his nose. In 2004, Torre reaped the benefits of a non-traditional batting order when he moved Alex Rodriguez up to the second slot. He did so to diminish the pressure on Rodriguez – and perhaps he succeeded – but the primary benefit was to give one of baseball’s best sluggers a few extra chances to whack the ball over the fence.

Over the course of his career, Rodriguez has hit a home run every 16.8 plate appearances. Should his 2005 season be consistent with his career, batting Rodriguez second will yield the Yankees approximately 45 home runs, one more than if he batted third, two more than if he batted fourth, three more than if he batted fifth. Those home runs come at the cost of a simple stroke of Torre’s pen.

While power hitters might not fit the traditional image of the leadoff man or even the no. 2 hitter, it is certainly true that those at the top of the order have just one job: to get on base. Elite sluggers like Rodriguez, Albert Pujols, and Barry Bonds would, therefore, fill these roles ideally because of their ability to get on base. The only reason, in fact, not to insert these players into the leadoff slot is that many of their home runs will be solo shots rather than grand slams.

After Rodriguez’s success in the second spot last year, it is no coincidence that this year more managers are batting power hitters in the second spot in the batting order. Ken Griffey of the Reds, Trot Nixon of the Red Sox, Larry Walker of the Cardinals, and Hank Blalock of the Rangers are all batting in the spot usually devoted to a second baseman who can hit and run.

Still, the traditional wisdom is very difficult to shake. Last Monday, 22 teams were in action, and 10 of them had their second basemen batting second. Yet it is impossible to argue that all these players – Kaz Matsui, Craig Biggio, Luis Castillo, Placido Polanco, Pete Orr, Junior Spivey, Chone Figgins, Orlando Hudson, Tadahito Iguchi, and Ruben Gotay – were the second-best hitters on their respective teams.

Torre showed managers – some managers, at least – that there was another way. Randolph was there, but as a new manager he may lack the confidence to try something so “radical” as to bat a slugger such as Wright in the second spot.

After only eight games it is too soon to say definitively that Randolph’s current batting order is harming the Mets, except to say that in placing Kaz Matsui in the lineup’s second slot he has elected to put roughly 80 of the team’s plate appearances in the hands of one of his weaker hitters. Matsui drew just 40 walks last year and wasn’t much more selective in Japan. Neither is he, at this moment, a power hitter. Over the course of the season these weaknesses will be exposed as more qualified hitters, such as Wright, watch helplessly from the dugout.

Mr. Goldman writes for Baseball Prospectus. His biography of Casey Stengel, entitled “Forging Genius,” will be published next month.