Should Reds' new skipper bat Phillips cleanup?

Brandon Phillips had 30 HRs in 2007 but just a .485 slugging percentage. AP

SARASOTA, Fla. -- Dusty Baker can't win. I mean, his record as a manager -- which is, after all, what all of these guys are ultimately judged on -- isn't bad at all. He's guided his teams to the playoffs a handful of times. He took the Giants to the World Series in 2002. He was a few outs away from getting the Cubs there in 2003.

He has a lifetime winning percentage of .527. That's behind Bobby Cox, Tony La Russa, Mike Scioscia and Joe Torre. But it's ahead of Lou Piniella, Terry Francona, Jim Leyland and every other manager in the game. You have to admit, Baker must be doing something right.

But every time the man talks strategy, every time he starts in on his disdain for slow-footed sluggers who "clog the bases" with walks, every time he goes to the bullpen early -- heck, every time he fills out a lineup card -- he becomes an easy target for stats-crunching critics everywhere. The decidedly old-school skipper simply can't win, even when it looks like he's doing something new-school.

A current example: Baker, who is taking over the Reds this season, is planning on sticking second baseman Brandon Phillips into the cleanup spot. Phillips took the majority of his at-bats there last season, though he never put in any real time in the middle of the lineup before that. In fact, before former Reds manager Jerry Narron wrote him in at cleanup last season, Phillips had all of two plate appearances there.

This is, seemingly, something different for Baker. Phillips -- 6-feet tall, and certainly no more than 195 pounds or so, and a man with plenty of speed -- may be the most unlikely looking cleanup hitter in the game. He's not the player that you'd typically think that Baker would want swinging the big lumber.

Yet, in many ways, this is exactly what Baker would do, and it's easy to see why he's doing it. Despite his lack of size, Phillips cranked 30 home runs last season. He drove in 94 runs. And -- this is important -- Phillips provides a nice right-handed compliment to stick between the two big lefty swingers in the lineup, Ken Griffey Jr. and Adam Dunn.

"The best place for him, eventually, would be third," Baker admits, finishing up his breakfast in his office one recent morning here. "But Brandon can bat leadoff, second. He could bat all over that lineup. Fifth. Just for our team, right now, the best spot is where he is."

The problem with Phillips as a cleanup hitter -- and this is, statistically speaking, hard to argue -- is that he's miserably miscast. Yeah, he had a lot of home runs and a lot of RBIs last year. You'd kind of expect that from that position in the lineup.

But, overall, Phillips didn't get as much out of that spot as even an average cleanup hitter would have. Among cleanup hitters with at least 350 plate appearances, Phillips (who had 364 as a No. 4 hitter) put up one of the lowest slugging percentages (.493) and one of the worst on-base percentages (.352) in baseball last season.

Knocking in runners? Phillips drove in somewhere between 13-14 percent of the runs he had a chance to knock in (not counting himself, with home runs), which ranks deep in the bottom half of all hitters in the league. (The best player in the league least year at converting on his RBI opportunities was Detroit's Magglio Ordonez, who drove in nearly 22 percent of the runners that were on base for him.)

So far this spring, Phillips has one walk so far and a .267 on-base percentage. He does have a couple of homers, and he's driven in a team-high 11 runs.

Still, Baker's standing by his man.

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