Crawford Cespedes D. Navarro Hosmer Cano Bautista Beltre (Texas) J.D Martinez Pitcher

I would go with this. This splits up your lefties with a switch hitter and righty, while also giving you 2 set of lefties in a row with only 1 good all around righty hitter separating them. This gives you a lot of lefty at bats against their righty starter, and brings up your big power righty bats after you have a feel for how your opponent pitches.

Before you have a good feel for how your opponent pitches, it helps a lot if you have a lefty batter. This gives you a lot of lefty at bats vor the first half of the game. At some point in the 5th or 6th, he probably brings in his lefty. Now you have a few options.

If you have a lead of 2 or more runs, I would just stick with the lineup as is. You have very good defense. If it's a 1 run game, then you play according to the situation, for example.

If I'm up only 1 run or losing and there's a runner in scoring position in the 6th inning or later and Hosmer is up with a lefty on the mound, I pinch hit with a righty power hitter. The beauty of using Hosmer in this spot is that since he's a 1B, you can pretty much use any right handed bat here, because bad defense at 1B won't hurt you that much. If you have a good power hitting righty !b, great, bring him in. If you used him as a pinch hitter already, then you can use an OF and just let him play 1B. Most of the time, your defense will be fine. Another reason this is good, is your opponent will probably stick with the lefty because he's worried about Cano batting next, so 99% of the time, you will get to have that bat righty vs lefty, instead of him switching to a righty after you pinch hit.

The other great thing about this is if he brings in his lefty to face Crawford, you can pinch hit there, and most of the time he will keep his lefty in to face Cespedes and Navarro, because he wants to use the lefty against Hosmer and Cano. He doesn't know that you will pinch hit Hosmer if that's an important at bat.

So now, for the entire first half of the game, you made his righty starting pitcher face your lefty heavy top of the order. Then he brings in his lefty, and before he even gets to face 1 lefty hitter, he has to get through 3 or 4 righty hitters.

Sometimes, you may choose to let Crawford face the lefty, because at some point he will probably switch to righty because the second half of your line up is murderer's row against a lefty. You can leave him in, and then only pinch hit Hosmer if there's a good opportunity to score runs.

It will take some time to get a feel for how you want to use your bench. Over the long run though, I think you would get comfortable using this line up. Once you build up your custom player, you can stick him at catcher and the 3 slot and the whole strategy works even better.

With a line up like this, you're not looking to use Navarro as a power hitting #3 hitter. He's not a good enough hitter for that. You're just trying to have good at bats. A good at bat means just trying to find a good pitch to hit, and not swinging at balls. You're not trying to hit HRs there. Let the rest of the line up do that. You're just trying to get on base with Navarro, drive up the pitch count, and if a runner is on base, just trying to make contact to drive in the run. Navarro is good for this role because he has good contact and a tiny strike zone.