Now on Almora: he should be starting. Nothing can be argued against it right now. And to be honest I think he has been around 80% sense his emergence.
Think people are missing the point. Almora doesn't sit because Maddon doesn't think he's good enough. He sits so that he will be fresh in October. I mean I don't hear the same sort of drum banging for La Stella who has a 132 wRC+ to Almora's 126. You can make a case for everyone on the positional roster to start games save for Gimenez who's clearly just a back up catcher. But like I said La Stella could start for a number of teams and be a pretty decent 2B.
The reason Maddon does this is because historically the thinking was that you win as much as you can and then coast. However, what we've seen in the playoffs is it tends to be a bit of a crap shoot. One possible explanation for this is that the best teams coast for the last month of the season while the teams fighting for the wild card have to play their best baseball night in and night out or they are home in October. Maddon has just changed the dynamic a bit. Rather than resting guys a bunch in September he more periodically does it throughout the season and then puts the pedal to the floor late in the season.
There's idealogical points to be made on that debate so I'll leave it to another time. But that's the reason he does this. It's also the reason unlike other managers that he runs an 8 man bullpen. These 2 aspects are glove in hand. Fewer positional players means that its easier to give 12 guys 400-500 PAs and more BP arms reduces wear on the BP as a whole. Now there's obviously the risk of them not playing well by doing this but look at the results broken down by half. The past 3 years they are 143-120(.543) in the first half and 149-73(.671) in the second. Generally speaking if you're better than .500 in the first half and can consistently win 65% of your second half games you're going to the playoffs. And the thing is you can always adjust if you start very poorly.
But frankly, I prefer this approach to riding guys every day. Baseball players are stubborn and will try to play through nagging stuff and will often hurt themselves more later on just because they want to be tough guys. If you think about the cubs since Maddon took over you'll notice they've been a fairly healthy team.
