With Tucker in, what's the Dodgers' optimal lineup?

Kyle Tucker is going to hit “second or third” in the top-heavy Dodgers lineup, manager Dave Roberts said after Tucker signed. While a statement like that generally shouldn’t make any waves – only very, very good hitters get the kind of contract that Tucker just did, so of course he should hit near the top of the lineup – he’s also joining a team that famously had a few good hitters already.

Last year, the trio of Shohei Ohtani, Mookie Betts and Freddie Freeman occupied the top three spots together nearly 80% of the time, with Freeman occasionally dropping to cleanup when facing a lefty starter so that righties Will Smith or Teoscar Hernández could move up to third. In 2024, Ohtani’s first year as a Dodger, the Big Three took up 85% of those top-three starts, a figure which would have been even higher had Betts not missed time with a broken hand.

If Tucker really is going to hit in the top three, then that means one of the three nearly-guaranteed-future-Hall-of-Famers won’t be. Which one? In what order? Also, don’t forget that the catcher Smith outhit Freeman, Tucker, and Betts last season, and found himself hitting second in three different World Series games, as well as moving up when Betts was injured in 2024. He’s a factor here, too.

Come with us on a fun thought experiment through the numbers, as January threatens to turn into February.

There are, to be sure, a pair of very powerful caveats to keep in mind about all of this:

• Player comfort, often, matters most. It’s why Ronald Acuña Jr. has hit leadoff for Atlanta, despite this guaranteeing him fewer runners on base. If the famously-regimented Ohtani finds that knowing he’s the first batter up helps him with his preparation, particularly on days he’s pitching, then no amount of data analysis is going to make Roberts change that lineup. It’s not worth annoying your stars to try to game out fractions of a projected run, is the point.

• Lineup construction never really matters quite as much as people would like it to. It does matter, a little, but really only on the extremes. The general rule of thumb is that the difference between the best order you can make and the worst is about 15 runs, or 1.5 wins, which would be a lot, except that no one is realistically making the weakest order you can, like having Tucker and Ohtani hitting eighth and ninth while Tommy Edman hits cleanup. That means the gap between “best” and “good enough” is even smaller than that. It’s hard to make it matter too much.

Generally speaking: As long as your three weakest hitters are hitting seventh, eighth, and ninth, the rest is gravy. That didn’t always happen, in the years when the very fast runner who couldn’t actually hit was leading off. Teams are much better at this in recent times; in 2023, the second spot in the order was the most productive for the first time ever. If each lineup spot gets around 18 plate appearances more per season than the one behind it, well, have your best hitters taking those extra chances.

Still, it’s a never-ending topic of interest, and if you’re interested in making an informed argument about it, it’s worth thinking through what Roberts is working with here. As he sits down to pen his lineup, he’s staring at a likely top five – Ohtani, Betts, Tucker, Freeman and Smith, in some order – that consists of the following facts to consider.

• Three lefties, two righties. Betts and Smith are right-handed bats. Ohtani, Tucker and Freeman hit lefty. There’s probably a good argument here for Roberts to not run with three lefties ahead of the two righties, for ‘facing relievers’ purposes in late innings, particularly with the three-batter minimum mandating that a lefty specialist would have to face at least one righty hitter. Except …

• No one here has major platoon splits. … right, these aren’t typical lefties. Over the last two seasons, all three lefty bats were at least 20% above average against lefty pitchers. That undersells it; Ohtani, Freeman and Tucker were three of the best 15 lefty-mashers in 2025. No one here really needs a platoon partner. This makes the “don’t stack lefties” matter a little, but less than you’d think.

• It’s 2026, not 2019. Understanding that Betts’s difficult 2025 may have been due in part to an early-season illness, it’s also true that he’s 33, having hit as many homers the last two seasons as he did just in 2023, and with some concerning downward bat speed indicators that stretch even earlier than the illness. He was better in the second half, and can be expected to be productive in 2026 as well, but it’s about the players these guys are now, not all they’ve accomplished in their careers.

Because of that last point, we’ll take four of the best projection systems hosted at FanGraphs, average out their 2026 expectations, and this is what we’re looking at for 2026 projected OPS for what now looks like our Big Five.

• Ohtani: .989
• –big gap
• Tucker: .865
• – big gap
• Freeman: .828
• Smith: .812
• Betts: .803

So, working backwards, let's assume that the final four spots in the lineup will be Hernández (.787 projected OPS), Max Muncy (.780), Andy Pages (.763) and Edman (.692), in some order (or those spotting in for them as matchups and health demand). Then let's start to fill in the gaps, as math demands.

Strict math, using these players and their 2026 projections, would demand the following order:

1. Tucker
2. Ohtani
3. Betts
4. Freeman
5. Smith

Don't forget, Tucker did steal 25 bases a year ago. But the reason for his order is simply because Ohtani is so much better a hitter than anyone here that ideally you wouldn’t want to have him hitting with the bases empty ever, really. That’s less of a concern in the modern National League, where the leadoff man isn’t following the pitcher’s spot for the rest of the game. But, either way, Tucker hitting first doesn’t seem likely on this team.

Which leaves us with this: the version of the lineup with the best combination of optimization and realistic likelihood.

1. Ohtani. This in part because he did it for all of 2025, and seems to be happy there, but also because of this: He’s projected to be a top-five on-base hitter, a year after he was a top-five on-base hitter. There is compelling evidence that if your best hitter is also your best on-base hitter, then having him bat leadoff does mean something.

2. Tucker. If the No. 2 spot is now where your best hitter lives – and it is – and Ohtani is already spoken for, then there’s a big gap between the newest Dodger and the other three. “I don’t want you guys to hold me to it right now,” said Roberts, “but [Tucker hitting] second or third seems to make sense.” It sure does.

3. Betts. Surprised? Us too, a little. The 36-year-old Freeman isn’t immune to aging, but he’s a better hitter than Betts nonetheless. Yet as Tom Tango’s “The Book” wrote years ago, your three best hitters should hit first, second, and fourth, largely because the No. 3 hitter ends up coming up with two outs and none on so often. Besides, this breaks up what would be three lefties in a row if Freeman were here, and we're assuming that after a career of hitting in the top two, the Dodgers would prefer not to bump Betts any further down than this.

4. Freeman. The third-best hitter on the team, but also the best one remaining, hitting in the spot he spent much of last October manning anyway? Sometimes the lineups write themselves.

5. Smith. Now: Could you make a case for Betts and Smith to swap spots here? Probably, because Smith was better than Betts last year, and is projected to be slightly so again in 2026. But we’re trying to stick in the real world also, and after how good Betts was in the second half (.819 OPS over his final 55 games), plus the years he’s spent hitting first or second, means it feels unlikely they’d drop him this far. This setup also has the secondary effect of less disruption when Smith needs a day off, as catchers regularly do.

6-7-8-9. TBD. To be honest, the exact order here doesn’t matter that much. Presumably it's Hernández and Muncy ahead of Pages and Edman, but again, once you get to this part of the lineup, it won’t make much difference.

Is that actually what we’ll see? We’re betting it’s close, because it’s hard to see Ohtani not leading off, and it’s hard to see any of the other hitters being placed above Tucker.

We’d say this is a “good problem to have” for Roberts, except it’s not even that. Really, it's not a problem at all. Having too many good hitters is never really a problem, is it?