Lucas Duda is Such a DH

Just for fun and because I have an exam tomorrow so I need to find ways to procrastinate (it's okay, it's okay, I'm on top of things), I spent about five minutes just now implementing an idea I've had before. Using the framework of wins above replacement, it is somewhere between possible and easy to determine how valuable a given hitter would have been had they been employed solely as a designated hitter. The idea is that hitter WAR is composed of five elements: runs above average from batting, from baserunning, and from fielding; a positional adjustment; and a boost to provide the gap between league average and replacement level. Batting and baserunning together are called, by FanGraphs anyway, "Offense;" fielding runs and the positional adjustment together are called "Defense." Making everyone a DH wouldn't affect their Offense score, or their Replacement runs. What it would do is affect their Defense score, a lot. Now, taking anyone and pretending they had played a different position would change their Defense score, and usually in a way that would be utterly impossible to calculate. We do not know how good a shortstop Keith Hernandez would have been, or how good a catcher David Wright would be. But, see, every DH has exactly the same number of fielding runs above average: zero. DH's don't field, that's the beauty of it. So making everyone a DH simply replaces their combined Defense score with the positional adjustment for a DH, which is something like -17.5 runs per 600 plate appearances. Easy. Then we can see which players lost the most, which great players hold up the best as full-time DHs, and who might actually have been better served as a DH.

Let's start with that last one: the player whose career WAR would have been the most higher had he done nothing by DH is Danny Tartabull. His career Defense score was -202.8 runs, per FanGraphs; as a DH he would only have given up 170.4 runs in that category. So, while he was actually worth 22.6 career wins above replacement, as a DH he would've been worth 26 WAR. Tartabull is one of only two players with a minimum of 1000 career plate appearances who both would've been better off as a DH and would've been above average as a DH; the other is Ken Phelps, with 9.5 actual WAR and 9.6 DH-WAR. Several players, interestingly, were or are below replacement level on their actual careers but would have been above replacement as full-time DHs. Chief among these is the man with the second highest difference between his DH-WAR and his real WAR: Lucas Duda. He's produced 0.8 runs below replacement for the Mets, as a corner outfielder and first baseman. As a DH he'd've been worth 1.8 wins above replacement. Trade him to the AL already, guys.



Another interesting experiment is to see which great players would have lost the least from being nothing but DHs. I'll define "great" here as 20 or more career WAR, which is a low bar but anyone who's cleared it was pretty great at baseball in the grand scheme of things. Here's the top ten such players who would've lost very little as DHs: Tartabull, Adam Dunn, Manny Ramirez, Frank Howard, Gary Sheffield, Travis Hafner, Greg Luzinski, Prince Fielder, Oscar Gamble, and Frank Thomas. Jason Bay is 12th, with Jason Giambi 14th, Ryan Howard 15th, Ryan Braun 16th, David Ortiz 17th, and Carlos Delgado 19th. You get the point: these guys are first baseman or occasionally corner outfielders who sucked at defense. Many of them actually were mostly DHs. Interestingly, Matt Kemp, a center fielder, only drops from his career 20.6 WAR to 15.5 DH-WAR, placing him 26th on this ranking.

At the other end of the list we have the guys who would've taken the biggest hits had they not been able to play the field. Topping the charts is Brooks Robinson, who plummets from 80.2 WAR to just 5.5 DH-WAR. Ozzie Smith, however, falls from 67.6 WAR to -3.5 DH-WAR, a smaller drop in absolute terms but, well, he's lost more than 100% of his value. Not surprisingly. Rounding out the top 10 players losing the most as DH are Cal Ripken, Luis Aparicio, Rabbit Maranville, Ivan Rodriguez, Omar Vizquel, Willie Mays, Honus Wagner, and Bobby Wallace, with Mark Belanger 11th. Andruw Jones, interestingly, is 15th, one behind Pee Wee Reese. You'll recognize these names as glove-first shortstops, mostly. The exceptions are Pudge Rodriguez, the best defensive catcher of all time; Andruw Jones, a decent enough hitter who really made his living as a phenomenal center fielder; and two of the best players of all time, Mays and Wagner. Mays still would've been plenty good as a DH, putting up 93 wins, but that's a far cry from his actual 150 WAR. Wagner is the best shortstop of all time and Mays is the best good defensive center fielder of all time (Ty Cobb being nearly as good as he was overall but not nearly as good in the field), so it's not too surprising to see them on this list.

What that does suggest, though, is that we should perhaps also try to evaluate the importance of defense to a player's game proportionally. Mays, after all, loses a little over one-thirty of his total career value, while Ozzie Smith lost more than all of it. The problem here is that we're bringing denominators into the picture, and when denominators get small, things can get weird. But using our same 20+ WAR sample, it's easy enough to sort by the percentage of career WAR lost as a DH. Twelve of these players got less than 10% of their value from their ability to play the field: Tartabull, Dunn, Ramirez, Frank Howard, Sheffield, Frank Thomas, Luzinski, Giambi, Fielder, Ortiz, Hafner, and Delgado. A lot of other names with less than 20% of career value from defense are ones you'd recognize. Ryan Braun. Dick Allen. Albert Belle. Willie McCovey. Ted Williams. (In fairness he's got a big denominator.) Mark McGwire. Willie Stargell. Jim Thome. Miguel Cabrera. Lou Gehrig. Ralph Kiner. Babe Ruth. Jose Canseco. Ryan Howard, whose figure strikes me as surprisingly high at 17.6%. Canseco. Edgar Martinez. Fred McGriff. And, the last man under the 20% figure, Mickey Mantle, a center fielder who appears to have been terrible at that job.

It looks like 81 of these players got more than 100% of their value from defense. Of these, Ozzie Smith is easily the best, beating second-place Luis Aparicio by almost 20 WAR. Mark Belanger loses 159% of his value in this scenario, the most of any player with at least 30 career WAR. Rabbit Maranville's -150% and Omar Vizquel's -142% are the biggest losses for the 40+ WAR crowd. (No one other than the Wizard of Oz had at least 50 WAR and lost all his career value above replacement in this scenario.)

There's no single great conclusion from all of this; it's just an interesting way to look at how different MLB players have generated their value. Some have been less than zero percent defense; some have been less than zero percent offense. If I had to offer a conclusion, though, it did appear that a lot more good MLB players have been all-glove than all-bat. Of the 802 above-average players with at least 20 WAR, exactly one gained from becoming a DH, Tartabull, while 75 would have been below replacement level as one. Being actually more valuable as a DH is not a very successful path to being a good Major Leaguer.

Oh, and the Mets really have got to trade Lucas Duda.