The changing figure of the designated hitter position

Translated by José M. Hernández Lagunes

Salvador Pérez was one of the great little stories of the MLB this season. The veteran catcher already looked like a player on the decline in 2022 and 2023. He posted identical .292 OBP numbers each year, his receiving got closer and closer to unsustainable, and his DRC+ fell as low as 92 in the last of those seasons. Then this year, he came into spring training hungry for plate appearances and, once ready, started the regular season differently. He doubled his walk rate, reduced his strikeout rate, lost none of his power, and if that wasn’t enough, his DRC+ rose to 130. Even more surprising, the man who has cost his team 116 runs with a miserable framing with the glove throughout his career he posted an average framing this year. Not only was he back, he was better than ever.

In all of 2022, there were 17 tweets that included the words “Salvador Pérez Hall of Fame.” In 2023, there were 34. A week before Opening Day, I put out a poll on that very topic, and three-quarters of those who responded said he was not a candidate for Cooperstown. A legacy recovery season capped by a turn in the spotlight October later, that same search term has produced 114 tweets since Opening Day. This is the Google Trends map of searches for the same words in the last five years.

Understood. Perez turned a corner this year, proving not only that he can still be a great hitter, but also an excellent defender behind the plate, even if only part-time. If Pérez had been a little less solid defensively, given the year Freddy Fermín just had, we’d probably be hearing debates about whether the old man should put the bib on again, or if he’d be better off as a designated hitter costing $22 million in his last guaranteed year with the Royals in 2025.

Believe it or not, this article is not really about Pérez. It’s about maybe we wouldn’t be hearing that question even if he hadn’t taken those crucial steps. Perhaps his viability as a catcher and DH is due to the League increasingly leaning toward the mixed-use DH.

We are several years into a much-discussed and documented shift away from any type of full-time DH as a staple of MLB roster building. Generally, however, that question has been addressed by treating the situation as binary: Are teams employing a full-time DH, or are they using the position as a revolving door to keep people fresh, give the mythical half-day off , and make room in the lineup for an extra bat? However, when we reverse the lens and look at things from the perspective of individual players, we can see that there is a middle path being plotted more and more consistently.

Here are the last 10 full MLB seasons, along with the number of player seasons in which a guy:

1. He had at least 500 total plate appearances; and
2. Between 150 and 350 of them as a designated hitter.

In other words, these are not players who move to the designated hitter position occasionally, when the team plays its 13th game in 15 days, but neither is the designated hitter position its main and almost exclusive place. It’s something in between; They divide their time between one or more positions and the DH.

Obviously, the number of potential player seasons like this doubled in 2022, when the DH became a permanent feature in the National League. But just as obvious is that this is not enough to explain these data. The semi-regular DH is a rising trend in the MLB. Teams have realized: you can’t get a true half-day off by using one player as a DH, but since you’re also unnecessarily ossifying the roster by having a permanent DH, you might as well split the job between a couple of people who spend significant but not total time there. Each player, as a whole, will likely pay a penalty for being a DH in their days in that role, but perhaps it will be somewhat mitigated if it is a role they play often, but not exclusively.

In each of the last two seasons, there have been four players who met the above criteria and were actually better in their days as a DH. The frequency with which players lose 10% or more of their skill when used in this way is decreasing, although it may be too early to speak with certainty about the permanence of this trend, given the sample sizes. Receivers especially seem to benefit from this plan, which makes sense. While Russell Carleton’s work demonstrating the folly of the half-day off concept is solid, it’s easy to describe a logical exception (perhaps even one that doesn’t have to be statistically demonstrable to be worth believing in) for catchers. Still, they have to take days off from the hard work of their defensive position. They also have more mental rest by not playing defense than, for example, a center fielder, because catching is a cerebral job of perpetual dedication.

Adley Rutschman He has been the semi-regular DH who has outperformed his defense the most in the last two years. In fact, Pérez was not even part of the team in any of those years, since injuries to Vinnie Pasquantino They forced him to play a lot of first base and a little less DH than he would have done under other circumstances. But beyond Rutschman, Tyler Stephenson was the one who bested himself when he was DH in 2023. This year, when the practice became more entrenched, Rhys Hoskins, Bryan De La Cruz y Seiya Suzuki they joined Rutschman as guys who made it.

There is great value to a team in a player who can take half of the appearances assigned to the DH and perform at least as well as they do when asked to play defense on a given day. That ability has historically been very rare, but as teams modulate how they implement the plan, who they ask to do it, and how they help them prepare for it, that could be changing. We know that being able to catch will, after all, prolong Perez’s career as a starter and bolster his Hall of Fame chances. We don’t yet know if Suzuki, De La Cruz or Hoskins can help themselves and their teams by showing that they are able to slide in and out of the DH spot frequently, because we don’t know if their apparent ability to adapt in that way will have power. permanence. For the Cubs, Pirates and Brewers, however, the advantage of trying is obvious. Chicago is trying to create an avenue to add a top-notch slugger. Milwaukee needs to reserve some of its DH time for Christian Yelichwho will arrive at spring training fresh from back surgery, and to William Contrerasa catcher who is also their second best hitter. However, if Hoskins and Suzuki can absorb time as BBDD without paying a heavy penalty in terms of performance, each of them will give their clubs an important extra flexibility, so that no one has to be pressured with too much defensive work, or too much bit.