READY Lineups

Free baseball lineup template for Excel

A working spreadsheet, not a blank grid. Pick names from a dropdown, and it counts the bench for you, flags a kid who ended up in two places at once, and tallies innings played, innings sat and innings at each position across the whole season.

Most coaches who decide to get organized start in Excel, and then spend an evening building something that only counts what they type twice. This is that spreadsheet, already built. It handles ten games, up to twenty players and up to seven innings, and it works in Excel, Google Sheets, Numbers or LibreOffice.

Download the lineup template (.xlsx)

Free, no signup, no email. To use it in Google Sheets: File → Import → Upload, and choose "Replace spreadsheet".

What's in it

Roster tab

Type your players' names once. Every dropdown in the workbook reads from here, so a name is never misspelled twice.

Game tabs (ten of them)

Who's here — mark anyone missing as No, and they drop out of the fairness math for that game instead of being recorded as having sat.
The grid — positions down the side, innings across the top, each cell a dropdown of your roster.
Three checks under the grid — how many players are on the bench that inning, how many positions are still empty, and a warning if the same kid is in two positions in the same inning. That last one is the mistake everybody makes at 10 PM.
This game's tally — innings played and innings sat per player, live as you fill the grid.

Season totals tab

Adds up every game tab by itself: games attended, innings played, innings sat, innings per game attended, total infield and outfield innings, and how many times each kid has played each of the nine positions. The column worth watching is innings per game attended, because it is the one number an absence can't distort. Anyone more than an inning a game behind the team average turns red.

Watch the IF and OF columns too. Two kids can finish the season with identical innings and wildly different seasons — one at shortstop, one in right field. The spreadsheet will show you that gap; closing it is still your job, week by week.

How to use it without making it a second job

Fill the grid one position at a time, not one player at a time. Work across the pitcher row for all six innings, then the catcher row. It's faster and you leave fewer holes.
Start each week from the bottom of the season column. The kids who are behind get the first innings. That single habit is most of what fairness actually is.
Don't fight the sheet mid-game. Print it, write changes on paper, and fix the file afterwards.

Spreadsheet, paper, or app

Honestly, all three work. They cost you different things.

	Paper	This template	READY app
Builds the rotation for you	No	No	Yes, one tap
Counts innings across the season	By hand	Yes	Yes
Obeys "this kid never pitches"	Your memory	Your memory	Yes, always
Balances infield vs outfield innings	No	Counts them	Yes, all season
Handles two no-shows at game time	Rewrite it	Rewrite it	Rebuilds in a tap
Works at the field, one bar of signal	Yes	Awkward on a phone	Yes
Printable dugout sheet	It is one	Prints wide	One-tap PDF
Cost	Free	Free	3 lineups free, $9.99/yr

The honest summary: a spreadsheet can count, but it can't decide. It will tell you Nolan has sat four times, Jack twice, and that Wyatt has 30 outfield innings against 9 in the infield. You still have to build next week's rotation around all of that — plus the kid who can't catch, the pitcher who can't return to the mound under your league's rules, and the two who didn't show up. That is the part that takes the hour.

That part is what READY does. One tap builds the fielding rotation and the batting order, obeys every position lockout you set, and keeps the season-long tally by itself — including infield versus outfield, which it weighs above everything but bench time, so the kid who had three weeks in right field gets pulled in without you having to notice. It prints the dugout sheet too. Baseball and softball, any roster size, no team cap.

Download the READY youth baseball lineup generator on the App Store

Free for your first three lineups, then $9.99 a year. Why I built it · How the rotation math works

Prefer paper?

There are free printable versions of the same thing: a blank fielding rotation sheet and a tee-ball version, landscape letter, made to be photocopied.