The DH Is Universal, but Good DHs Are Rare
Two years into the universal DH era, and more than 50 years after the role was first introduced, DH production has dried up. Why is designated hitting so hard?The DH Is Universal, but Good DHs Are Rare
Two years into the universal DH era, and more than 50 years after the role was first introduced, DH production has dried up. Why is designated hitting so hard?
Dave Dombrowski’s first full season with the Boston Red Sox was also David Ortiz’s last. Hired in the middle of the 2015 campaign as president of baseball operations, Dombrowski couldn’t know the next spring that Ortiz was set for one of the greatest goodbye tours in baseball history, an MVP-caliber performance in his age-40 season. So you can understand why the executive was a little concerned in spring training 2016 to see Big Papi barely play at all and struggle mightily at the plate when he did.
“You’re wondering: This guy, is he done?” Dombrowski, who’s now with the Philadelphia Phillies, recalled recently.
“So I said, ‘Guys, I’m getting worried. I never see Big Papi play, and when he plays he doesn’t look very good.’ They said, ‘Dave, don’t worry, he does this. He’ll be ready Opening Day.’”
The Red Sox opened in Cleveland, where Ortiz had two hits—the first of his 38 home runs and MLB-leading 48 doubles that season.
“He just knew what he was doing,” Dombrowski said. “He had that gift of knowing what to do.”
Over 20 seasons and more than 2,000 games at the position, Ortiz dominated as a designated hitter. We don’t think of him as excelling at his position because we don’t really think of it as a position at all. Big Papi was incredible at the plate, a productive blend of power and on-base ability—skills that would have served him whether he’d spent every other half-inning out on the field or ensconced in the dugout awaiting his next at-bat. Certainly, playing a defensive position would have required its own set of skills, and had Ortiz mastered those as well, he probably could have finished his career with an MVP trophy to go along with his many other accolades. But it’s worth considering whether the timely readiness Dombrowski came to appreciate—the ability to go from slumbering to slugging as soon as it mattered—is a skill. Did Ortiz have a particular gift for DHing? And if so, is that something teams—all 30 of which now have a DH in their lineup every day—should be evaluating, valuing, and seeking out?
Long seen as the sole material difference between the American and National leagues—and thus a reliable source of debate—the designated hitter has faded as a flashpoint in baseball discourse since it became permanently universal in 2022. The expansion of the rule has largely been accepted as a sanding down of the sport’s historical quirks. Pitchers hitting poorly—and potentially risking injury in the box—was an unnecessary vestige in an era of optimization and, critically, declining offense. Say what you will about the strategic intrigue of pinch hitting for the starter—and the potential for collective delight at the most unexpected of dingers—but pitchers were a black hole of offense. In their final decade of hitting in the NL, there was never a season in which pitchers collectively struck out less than a third of the time or managed a batting average better than .141. Their wRC+, an all-encompassing measure of offense for which 100 is the league average and anything above or below that represents deviation from the average, was never above zero. In other words: Pitchers as a whole were virtually always at least 100 percent worse at the plate than the career numbers of middling catcher Carlos Ruiz.
This long-standing truism became less tolerable in the middle of the 2010s, as declining offense across baseball became an existential crisis threatening the future of the sport. Fortuitously, and somewhat suspiciously, a livelier ball propped up run totals, but strikeout rates continued to soar and batting averages plummeted, leaving lineups heavily reliant on homers and yielding a more stagnant version of the sport. Pitchers had become incredible at inducing outs, while neglecting to get good at hitting.
After the universal DH was included as part of the COVID protocols for the shortened 2020 season, it became clear that such an obvious attempt to aid offense and streamline the two leagues was a foregone conclusion for the next collective bargaining agreement. In 2021, pitchers tied for their second-worst season at the plate, and then they laid down their bats for good. Swapping out hitters who treated offense as an afterthought for those who made their living by hitting helped arrest MLB’s rising strikeout rate, at least temporarily.
“I think it’s great,” Ron Blomberg, the AL’s first DH back in 1973, told The New York Times about the position going universal. “They should have done this a long time ago.”
Since then, though, the DH has been the subject of very little scrutiny. While the position has gone universal, the practitioners are increasingly diminished. Despite twice as many opportunities, and rosters expanding to (at least) 26 players in 2020, the era of the universal DH has seen a drop in full-time DHs. In 2023, there were four players with at least 450 plate appearances as a DH; in 2022, there were three. From 2011-21—excluding 2020—an average of 4.6 players per season reached that threshold.
And while they’ve certainly hit a whole heck of a lot better than pitchers used to, the overall offensive numbers for DHs have been somewhat disappointing.
In 2022, leaguewide wRC+ out of the DH spot was just 101, or 1 percent better than league average. First basemen (111 wRC+), third basemen (105 wRC+), right fielders (102 wRC+), and left fielders (106 wRC+) all performed better at the plate. Last year, DHs improved to a 106 wRC+ but still lagged behind first basemen in terms of offensive output. Over the past two seasons combined, 14 teams have received below-league-average offense out of the DH spot. And it’s not just that NL teams have especially struggled to take down the “hitting help wanted” signs they hung in 2022; AL DHs haven’t really raked either. Last year marked the 50th season of the designated hitter, and the five-year rolling average of MLB-wide OPS+ for DHs has never been lower.
Even if we concede that demand for DHs has outstripped supply—that doubling the number of DH spots dilutes the talent pool by default—there is something wrong with this picture. The adjusted metrics—wRC+ and OPS+—help us compare a class of hitters whose sole purpose is to provide offensive value to non-DHs, who pull double duty at the plate and in the field. Those comparisons haven’t been kind to the former. Why are teams accepting such paltry production from players who have one job: to hit?
Before Dombrowski took over the Red Sox, Ben Cherington was the team’s general manager, his last title for the franchise he’d worked for in some capacity since 1999. In other words, while Dombrowski caught just the tail end of Ortiz’s storied career, Cherington was involved in baseball operations for almost all of Big Papi’s Boston tenure.
As he remembers it, Ortiz’s hitting really exploded once the club committed to having him DH almost exclusively.
“I think there was probably an argument at some point that taking the defensive load off of him, the burden for lack of a better term, in his particular case, just freed him up to be a great offensive player, which obviously he had that in him,” Cherington recalls. “It was pretty darn immediate, once he stopped playing first base most of the time, his offense just took off.”
The numbers don’t necessarily reflect quite so stark a binary—Ortiz was an offensive force even before he abandoned first base—but he did level up after largely mothballing his mitt. In 2004, the 28-year-old Ortiz played more than 10 games at first base for the last time in his career. That season, he won his first of seven Silver Slugger awards at DH and earned his first of 10 career All-Star nods. By the end of his career, Ortiz had compiled a 148 wRC+ as a DH with the Red Sox, and a 129 wRC+ when playing first (albeit over a much smaller sample size). Cherington says that in hindsight, it’s clear Ortiz possessed or developed a unique talent for DHing.
“I remember David expressing that he sort of figured out these routines between at-bats that kept his mind in a good spot,” Cherington says. “Obviously, he figured that out really quickly and really well.”
Now the GM of the Pittsburgh Pirates, Cherington is overseeing a different manifestation of the dedicated DH. Last year, he brought back erstwhile All-Star center fielder and local legend Andrew McCutchen, whose age and injuries had limited his outfield abilities, to serve primarily as the DH. A few years into what was initially an awkward transition, McCutchen turned in his best full season at the plate since 2018 and is once again prepared to be the rare full-time DH.
Yet even Cherington balks at the idea that teams are better off committing to a truly designated designated hitter. Sure, he concedes: If you have a guy who obviously, and exclusively, profiles as a fit for the position, that makes sense.
“But if you don’t, then you can very easily make an argument that the best way to handle it is to use it as a partial recovery day for whatever position player you think needs it,” he says. “And it becomes part of the volume management strategy as opposed to maximizing offense from this one position.”
This has become the predominant way front offices view the position.
Ten years ago, Russell A. Carleton wrote for Baseball Prospectus about the rise of what he termed the “timeshare DH.” He noticed a trend of teams opting against signing an aging slugger to fill the spot, in favor of rotating through, say, four capable outfielders or a semi-injured star to keep the roster optimally flexible. His analysis of whether this is a smart strategy concluded that there is little on-field benefit—except that it allows teams to avoid signing a pricey veteran with a limited skill set. A decade after Moneyball—the book, not the movie—was released, teams were still ostensibly overpaying for DHs, a pitfall that could be sidestepped by avoiding that market altogether.
A decade later, that trend has certainly died down, if not all-out reversed. When we talk about money and the value of DHs, we have to exclude Shohei Ohtani for the analysis to be applicable to anyone else. (Ohtani also pitches, elbow permitting, and even though he does DH—and has been one of the few players of late to clear the aforementioned full-time plate appearance benchmark—it wouldn’t make sense to consider him in the class of defensively limited DHs.) The New York Mets just signed J.D. Martinez to be their full-time DH on a one-year, $12 million contract that took him until late March to secure, despite being “worth” more than $17 million last season when he was making just $10 million. (Other primary DHs who signed this winter did, admittedly, do better. Jorge Soler signed a three-year, $42 million contract with the San Francisco Giants and Justin Turner went to the Toronto Blue Jays on a one-year, $13 million deal—much closer to, although still slightly below, the early offseason MLB Trade Rumors predictions.)
Yet even at a discount, teams are largely eschewing the tradition of dedicating a roster spot to a DH. The “timeshare” is now the norm. And there’s reason to believe that handling the DH role that way is actually hurting the on-field product.
The prevailing “it takes a village” approach to the DH slot is so entrenched that the second-best DH last year after Ohtani (minimum 200 plate appearances), the Houston Astros’ Yordan Alvarez, still split his time between DHing and playing the outfield. Alvarez, a bad defender who at 26 has already had surgery on both of his knees, made 40 of his 113 starts last season in left field. (Non-Alvarez Astros DHs posted a wRC+ below 100 in that role.) Alvarez has historically hit better in the games in which he’s had to use a glove, which isn’t uncommon: Research by Carleton conducted just ahead of the 2022 season (before the full-season introduction of the universal DH) confirmed a well-documented “DH penalty,” whereby position players tend to hit worse when they DH than they do when playing the field. However, Carleton found that whether this penalty applies depends on how habituated players are to DHing.
“When I looked at the group that had more than 75 percent of their plate appearances as DHs,” Carleton wrote, “there was no DH penalty.”
With two years of universal DH data to consider, that still holds true. Carleton recently confirmed to The Ringer that after rerunning the numbers, “Everything I said in the original article holds with the inclusion of the new data. There is a ‘DH penalty.’ It is not uniform. Players who are ‘most of the time’ DHs don’t seem to have one. Players who are guest-starring in the role struggle a bit.”
So while DHing may seem like it merely halves the demand on players who are normally tasked with hitting while also manning a position, perhaps DH dilettantes cannot actually be slotted into the role at will with the assumption that their production will stay the same. Perhaps it’s more akin to changing positions on the diamond, an adjustment that takes skill and should be factored into teams’ decisions.
“Is there a specific skill to DHing versus just hitting?” Cherington says. “I would defer to the people that have done it.”
I would too. So let’s hear from some of them.
“When guys don’t do it often, and they’re playing every single day as infielders or outfielders, it’s hard,” says Bryce Harper, the two-time MVP who DHed in all of 16 games over the first decade of his career before an elbow injury forced him to spend huge swaths of the past two seasons exclusively at DH for the Phillies.
“It was challenging at times, in the beginning especially,” says McCutchen, who DHed in just 10 games before 2020. That year, he hit poorly as a DH for the Phillies, posting the worst offensive numbers of his career. In 2022, he was even worse in the role for the Milwaukee Brewers, and finally seemed to figure it out last season when he returned to Pittsburgh.
“Sometimes when you start as a DH, it’s a little harder for you because you don’t feel loose,” says Atlanta Braves DH Marcell Ozuna, a former Gold Glove outfielder who split time between left field and DH in 2022 and fully transitioned to the latter assignment last season. He played all but two of his games as DH in 2023 and received (way) down-ballot MVP votes for his offensive output.
“It’s a work in progress of what works best for you, ’cause what works good for me might not work for them. So it’s trial and error,” says Giancarlo Stanton, the New York Yankees slugger who was an MVP outfielder in Miami but has struggled to stay on the field in New York even with extremely limited defensive responsibilities. “It’s easier to stay in the game when you’re on defense. When you’re DHing, there’s a skill to staying locked into one side of the ball.”
“It’s a lot of work,” says Ozuna’s manager, Brian Snitker, who has spent decades with the Braves, an NL organization that is still relatively new to playing a DH daily. “Probably more so than people think.”
Harper and McCutchen, who started their careers as outfielders in the pre-universal-DH NL, would typically spend only a day or two at DH over a whole season, as part of interleague play. This was seen as a chance to get a guy playing 150-plus games at a physically demanding position off his feet, a small concession to the volume/load management that has become more central to how teams try to optimize athletes’ performance.
In his 2015 MVP season, Harper was 0-for-4 in his one game as a DH. He went 0-for-5 in his one shot in 2018, and improved to 2-for-8 over two games in 2019.
“I was like, oh, I don’t like this,” he says about his sporadic DH days.
Before 2020, McCutchen was 8-for-34 in DH at-bats, giving him a .235 batting average that was well below his .286 career mark through 2019.
“I hated it,” he says. “I didn’t like to DH.”
In 2019, the speedy center fielder tore his ACL. When he returned the following season, he began the difficult task of accepting a new phase of his career, one in which he is primarily a DH.
“I started to realize, all right, let’s try and develop a routine, because this may help me in the future,” he says.
He talked to coaches who had been around Ortiz in his heyday. He tried running out along the foul line for every defensive half-inning, before turning around and running back to the dugout; but even in the shortened 2020 season, that proved to be unnecessarily taxing on his surgically repaired knee. When he went to the Brewers in 2022, McCutchen found himself eager to prove he could still defend like he’d done a decade before. It cost him at the plate. He chalks up his success in Pittsburgh last season to the comfort of coming home, and his belated embrace of his new role.
“I committed to DH. They told me straight up, ‘You’re going to DH more games than you’re going to play defense. But you’re going to play some games.’ And I committed to that,” he says. “I think the biggest thing for a position player is letting go of the fact that you’re not going to play outfield all the time. And I’m like, I need to be on my feet. You know, that’s how I work, that’s how I operate. So breaking that mold and admitting and committing, I think that was what was really helpful for me. It was more of a mental thing.”
Fresh off his second MVP award, Harper was forced into the DH role in 2022 by an elbow injury that prevented him from throwing. He DHed exclusively throughout the Phillies’ World Series run that season, and when he first returned from Tommy John surgery in 2023. For a guy who didn’t enjoy the job, the transition was stunningly successful. In ’22, Harper was nearly 40 percent better than league average at the plate, and in 2023 he won the Silver Slugger award for DHs.
“At the beginning I was kind of frustrated. Like, I want to play, I want to get out there,” Harper says. But he’s a superstar for a reason: He’s able to seize any opportunity available to him on a baseball field. For much of the Phillies’ successful two most recent seasons, DHing was all he could do.
“So I really had to just find it, and understand that I have to do this to help my team win at this point,” he says. “If that’s in the batter’s box only, I gotta figure this out.”
Both Harper and McCutchen say the idea of DH games as semi-off days is something of a misconception that may stem from the perception of DHing as a part-time gig. From a physiological perspective, DHing provides real rest and a means of accommodating injury limitations. But to do the job to the best of their abilities, Harper and McCutchen had to reappraise it as worthy of their full attention.
“When you’re not doing it [full time], it’s kind of like, ‘Oh, I’m just taking four at-bats, how hard could this be?’” Harper says. However, he adds, “When you’re doing it every day, I don’t feel like it’s too much of an off day.” Put another way: When he stopped thinking of DHing as a break from something else, Harper’s performance as a DH skyrocketed.
“I kind of looked at it like a half day off,” McCutchen said about the time in his career when he DHed infrequently. “I’ve learned that you can’t do that. That’s hard to do. Because you can’t mentally be into something halfway and think you’re going to succeed. Maybe there’s some guys out there who can do that, but for me personally, I couldn’t.”
Cherington says the Red Sox once calculated that Ortiz was on the field for less than 10 minutes in most of their games. But maximizing such a limited window of opportunity is a lot of pressure, and it requires substantive prep work. Most of the DHs I spoke to stressed the importance of a personalized routine, often honed through hearing the advice of other successful DHs. (Ozuna talked to Nelson Cruz when he made the transition, but ultimately rejected the suggestion of a pregame nap, “because I feel like I’m lazy when I sleep before the game.”)
If there’s a moral to Ortiz’s career, it could be that it’s worth it for teams to get DHing right.
“People don’t realize at times how hard these guys work,” Dombrowski says. “I mean, Big Papi, he hit all the time. He worked on his skill. So that’s what made him such a great player.”
“Those less than 10 minutes were incredibly impactful because of what he did,” Cherington says.
Snitker says the Braves are lucky to have Ozuna—someone who recognized that the DH role represented an opportunity for him to prolong his career, and was eager to get good at it.
“There aren’t that many of those true DHs out there to choose from,” Snitker says. “I told him two years ago, ‘Heck, you could be the new-generation Big Papi.’ So many teams, I think, are getting younger, really young, with the athletic guys and so they spread it around a little bit.”
“It’s pretty simple, if you’re only going to DH, the bar is really, really high,” says Mike Elias, the GM of the young, athletic, and newly successful Baltimore Orioles. Their 2023 season demonstrated that the timeshare model can work. Because their catcher, Adley Rutschman, is also their best hitter, they never considered signing a full-time DH, who would prevent Rutschman from staying in the lineup when he needed a day off behind the plate. Rutschman hit even better when he wasn’t catching, and the O’s ended up with the majors’ fifth-best offensive output at DH last year.
“You’re providing no defensive value, and then you’re preventing everyone else from cycling through that rest spot,” Elias says. “So it takes a really special hitter to pencil him in there every day and then move everything around that.”
We’ve reached the chicken-or-the-egg portion of the DH conundrum: Teams aren’t willing to dedicate a roster spot to a defensively limited DH unless it’s someone of Ortiz’s caliber, opting instead to employ a timeshare policy that brings other benefits—namely, the rest that teams increasingly prioritize, and the roster room to carry the maximum number of pitchers (13) permissible.
Yet players say DHing is a skill that requires some level of commitment to truly excel at. And with fewer opportunities to be everyday DHs, fewer players attain the status of a great “true” DH. When front offices consider how to construct their rosters and see a limited pool of DHs to choose from, they then find other ways to make use of the spot.
All of those trends are perpetuated or exacerbated by modern player valuation.
Some position players expressly don’t like to DH. The Mets’ slugging first baseman Pete Alonso has repeatedly professed that he “will never think of myself as a DH.”
“I’m a first baseman and I’m a position player,” he said in 2021. “I’m not a DH, and I don’t want to be labeled as that because I’ve worked too hard.”
But DHing isn’t just an uncomfortable experience. It’s one that the market doesn’t reward as richly as it used to—something Alonso is surely aware of as he approaches free agency next winter.
Cherington says, “I’ve definitely heard players complain about DHing over time,” and concedes that these players are just being savvy.
“Teams are just looking at what are the wins that this player is contributing, however this player is contributing. If it’s only through offense, well, we can place a value on that and assess that and figure out what makes sense for us, for each team, and how much to invest in it.”
It’s never been easier to compare baseball players across positions. The holistic metric wins above replacement, or WAR, quantifies a player’s production in a single number that folds in all facets of their game. The hitting aspects are straightforward enough, but to account for the demands of different defensive positions, the public implementations of WAR, like the version at FanGraphs, make use of a positional adjustment. For a full season spent at DH, a player is dinged minus-17.5 runs—a significant (and arguably overly harsh) handicap even compared to other negative adjustments like those for first base (minus-12.5 runs) or corner outfield (minus-7.5 runs), and a huge blow compared to defensive positions where a player is credited with value. Teams have their own proprietary versions of a WAR-like algorithm, but this component of their win-value frameworks is probably pretty consistent.
“A lot of clubs, whatever their system is of analyzing, just say ‘WAR’ in general. Well, that encompasses playing defense, running bases. Where we didn’t do that years ago, there was a lot more emphasis on the offensive production,” Dombrowski says. “So we value guys differently now. The desire to pay big numbers for the guy who just hits isn’t quite there as much.”
Players are not incentivized to master DHing at the expense of a position in the field because it limits their value and fit on a roster, and thus their earning potential. Teams approach player development from that same perspective: Snitker cautions against pigeonholing a young player as a DH because it will suppress what he’s worth on the trade market. In an era of bigger bullpens and fewer bench spots, teams tend to emphasize positional versatility.
In 2023, the top four teams in terms of DH production (as measured by wRC+) each had one player make at least 55 percent of the plate appearances at DH. No player on the bottom four teams made more than 40 percent of the total DH plate appearances. Of course, if any of the rotating DHs on the unproductive teams had proved more capable, perhaps they would have been given more days at DH. In the absence of their success, teams resorted to the timeshare model, which seems to be less effective. Chicken, or egg?
Looking at roster construction in terms of WAR has made teams unequivocally smarter and more agile. The point is not to reject the precepts of Moneyball by overvaluing past-their-prime sluggers who often find refuge in the DH role. But in the 20 years since that book was released, baseball has been grappling with how to understand the skills that slip through the cracks and aren’t fully captured by spreadsheets—the unquantifiables like “clutch” and “chemistry” and “Bruce Bochy.”
Maybe knowing how many swings to take in the cage between at-bats, how much rest you need on a given day, whether it’s better to stand or sit in the dugout or to ride the stationary bike or stay close to the action, how to keep your head in the game when an hour can pass between chances to participate, and how to make the most of your plate appearances without putting too much pressure on yourself are all skills, just like getting a good jump in the outfield. We can’t see them, so we don’t measure them. But the good DHs know they’re real.
Hannah Keyser is a baseball writer and occasional television analyst living in Brooklyn, N.Y.