Tony LaRussa received quite a bit of attention this season by batting his pitchers in the 8th slot in the order, a move sabermetric studies suggest may have added a tiny bit of offensive value for the team (this study suggests LaRussa may not have gone far enough and should have been putting his pitchers in the 7th slot to achieve another tiny bit more offensive value: http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/is-larussa-right-to-bat-his-pitcher-in-the-eight-slot/).
For the record, Cardinals pitchers in 2007 batted in spots other than the 9th spot in the order in 124 of 325 plate appearances (38% of the time).
On the diametrically opposite side, the Mets in 2007, for the first time in their history, went a complete season without a single plate appearance by a pitcher in a batting order slot other than the 9th spot. The only other year that happened in Mets history was 1981, but 1981 was a labor dispute year in which the Mets played only 103 games. Every other Mets season has had at least one, and often at least a handful and sometimes more, of PAs in which a double switch puts the pitcher in a batting order slot other than 9th and the pitcher ends up coming up to bat. The most times that happened was in the Mets winningest season of all, 1986, when Mets pitchers came up to bat 14 times in batting order slots other than the 9th spot, and Roger McDowell alone had 8 PAs in slots other than the 9th spot.
Hat tip to baseball-reference.com's Play Index Event Finder, which enables cross-searches of PAs by both fielding position and batting order spot, by team and season.
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