Musings on Ohtani, Designated Hitters, and the Value of Margins

On December 9, 2023, the baseball world was rocked to its core by the news that reigning American League MVP Shohei Ohtani would sign a 10-year, $700 million contract with his former crosstown rivals, the Los Angeles Dodgers. This contract is the largest in the history of North American sports, and by a long shot. Ohtani is something of a unicorn in Major League Baseball, as he is elite at both pitching and hitting, making him insanely valuable and worth every penny of his massive contract. However, today I want to talk about something a little bit different. Ohtani has an often forgotten aspect to his game that could theoretically make him even more valuable: his defensive ability. The big question is how to value this aspect, or if it should be valued at all.

Due to his pitching prowess, Ohtani is deployed primarily as a designated hitter on the days that he is not pitching. This is done in order to minimize injury risk, as this allows him to only hit and not play the field, which in turn reduces stress on his ever valuable body. However, for his career, Ohtani has played 8.1 innings in the outfield, and graded out as about average at both right field and left field (of course, normal small sample size caveats apply). If allowed to play the outfield daily instead of being stuck at designated hitter, Ohtani could add roughly 9 runs of value, or a tick under a full WAR (roughly 10 runs of value) per season, by playing average defense at a corner outfield spot instead of playing designated hitter when looking at FanGraphs positional adjustments. These positional adjustments give a designated hitter a set flat rate of -16.2 runs of defensive value (Def on FanGraphs) per full season (roughly 600 plate appearances) and an average left or right fielder -6.9 Def per full season.  Over the course of a full career, that could really add up and potentially impact the Hall of Fame chances of a player right on the edge of electability.

This designated hitter positional adjustment can also skew value numbers in the opposite direction. Take for example the current incarnation of the Philadelphia Phillies. Kyle Schwarber and Nick Castellanos are both very poor defensive corner outfielders, yet only one at a time can play the designated hitter position. If Schwarber gets all of the designated hitter plate appearances in a season and Castellanos plays right field the whole season, since when playing the field Schwarber has put up worse defensive value numbers than Castellanos for the recent parts of their respective careers, Schwarber would get a straight -16.2 Def. However, Castellanos could potentially have as low as -28.1 Def, like he did back in the 2018 season. If Schwarber is continually deployed at designated hitter over Castellanos, would it not stand to reason that it is Schwarber who should be valued lower defensively, or at least the same, due to being worse at defense than Castellanos? Then how can it make sense that Castellanos is penalized and valued lower for being a better defender since he is forced to play the field?

Luckily, I have a proposal that may fix this problem. In my perfect world, designated hitters would not be given a set flat rate negative defensive value that is agnostic of any other factors. Poor fielders forced to play the field would not be as comparatively penalized by being slightly better than an even worse fielder that was pushed to designated hitter, and good fielders pushed to designated hitter by their team having even better fielders at their position would not be penalized nearly as much as they were by the set flat rate designated hitter positional adjustment. The world is not a fair place, but the current setup is too harsh. The way that I would accomplish this feat of leveling the playing field is by tying the designated hitter positional adjustment to the defensive value of the worst fielder actually playing the field for the team of the designated hitter at each plate appearance that the designated hitter makes.

In my proposal, reusing the Phillies example from above, if Schwarber has 600 plate appearances at designated hitter with Castellanos serving as the right fielder for the Phillies during all 600 plate appearances, Schwarber will receive the same defensive value as Castellanos. Instead of Schwarber getting -16.2 Def and Castellanos getting -28.1 Def, they will both get -28.1 Def. Another example of this can be seen in my hometown Tampa Bay Rays. Yandy Diaz has been a passable defender for his career, averaging -8.0 Def per 600 plate appearances. However, due to the rise of young slugger Isaac Paredes, who is a better defender than Diaz, he looks to be in line to get moved off first base and into the designated hitter role for the 2024 season. If Paredes produces the defensive value at first base that Steamer currently projects him to produce in 2024, he will receive -3.3 Def in 600 plate appearances. It is quite possible that this will be the lowest Def of any regular starter for the Rays, given their propensity to employ gold glove level defenders. Instead of dropping from his average of -8.0 all the way down to -16.2, Diaz will only get -3.3 Def in this scenario, given that both earn all 600 plate appearances in the same positions in 2024 (first base for Paredes and designated hitter for Diaz). This saves Diaz over a full WAR of value, and gives him a value closer to his true talent than he would have gotten in the old positional adjustment system.

While the examples above are extremes and not perfect in any way shape or form, I wanted to illustrate that this proposal can make meaningful differences at the margins, which matter, especially when looking at contract negotiations and arbitration salaries. Ben Clemens at FanGraphs showed that for the 2022 free agent class, one extra WAR per year was worth approximately $8.5 million per year of the free agent’s newly signed contract. That is not a small difference. The set flat rate of -16.2 Def per 600 plate appearances for designated hitters is outdated and needs to change to reflect the evolving nature of the position. No longer is designated hitter a monolith. It is not just a role for aging sluggers that are poor defenders, but now for a myriad of different archetypes that are each unique in their own way, and should be valued as such.

I recognize that the way WAR is calculated for the league as a whole may need to change if this proposal is put into effect, as the league wide caps still apply and would skew the distributions, but that will only make a small impact when looking at a few runs compared to the value of every single field player in MLB. Although this method would take a ton of math behind the scenes to prorate values for a designated hitter positional adjustment for each player that appeared at the position in a season, given that lineups change and players switch teams and get injured, it is not like we are short on the computing power needed to do this in the current day and age. The game has come a long way, and positional adjustments need to do just that: adjust.

All statistics pulled from FanGraphs.com