Baseball Musings
Baseball Musings
June 22, 2003
The Old Man's Position

In my previous post, I was writing about DHs, and I wondered about two things; were the DHs the best hitters on the team, and how much older were DHs than the rest of their fielding teammates. The following table tries to show each of these:












Hitting, 1987-2002Age per PAOBA+ Slug
As ss25.5 0.695
As cf26.0 0.752
As 2b26.3 0.721
As rf26.4 0.798
As 1b26.7 0.823
As 3b26.8 0.755
As c26.9 0.709
As lf27.1 0.786
All DH29.7 0.781

Notice that the DH for the years in question is less offensively valued than the first baseman, the rightfielder and the leftfielder. DHs should be doing at least as well as the first basemen. Secondly, look at the age discrepency between the DH and the leftfielder. DHs are more than a year and a half older than the oldest position player! Ballplayers peak around age 27, and that (not surprising) is the age of the oldest fielding position. Yet DHs are nearly 30 years old, approaching the age where their production will be falling off.

So while I don't mind the concept of the DH, I don't like the implementation at all. Instead of putting young, stud hitters who can't field at DH, old, formerly good hitters are inserted in the slot. Instead of leaving baseball because they can no longer field, they are kept around at inflated salaries taking up a slot a younger, better and cheaper player could be using.

So why not a 22 year-old DH? I think it's the way clubs perceive players. If you can't field when you are 22, you can't be a real ball player. It's okay for your skills to decline as you age, but they want you to have the skills to begin with. But why not bring up the kid you can't field? There's always going to be some other 22 year-old waiting to take his place. Instead of paying millions to some slugger in his late 30's, spend the money on a real fielder, and pay some kid near the minimum. It makes sense to me. What do others think?

Update: I sometimes forget that not all readers of this site are as versed in the Jamesian way of thinking about baseball as I am. The author of binarytoybox.com didn't quite understand what I was driving at in this post, and that's my fault for not being clear. Let me try again.

In the first Bill James Abstract I owned, the 1983 edition, Bill discusses the defensive spectrum. This is what it looks like:


P SS C 2B CF 3B RF LF 1B DH

The farther to the left you are on this spectrum, the more your defense is valued. That is because these are tough defensive positions to play. The more you move to the right, the more your offense is valued. This is why the Yankees were not afraid to replace Tino Martinez with Jason Giambi. If you look at the OPS column in the table above, you see that the ranking of OPS almost exactly matches the defensive spectrum. RF is better than LF is OPS, but that may be due to more leadoff types being used in left field over the last 15 years. But the big discrepency is DH. Instead of having the highest OPS by position, DH is fourth.

My argument is that teams have a position where all the player has to worry about is offense, and yet they don't go out to find a player who's only value is great offense to fill it. Edgar Martinez is what a DH should be, and he didn't become a full-time DH until he was 30 years old. Edgar didn't get fully out of the minors until he was 26. I'm not sure why, but I bet because no one thought he was a great third baseman. But if the Mariners had realized when he was 21 that all he was going to be was a hitter, he could have been a 21-year-old DH who hit like crazy, took pitches that wore down the opposing pitcher, and be flirting with 3000 hits. Take your aging slugger, and trade him to someone who thinks aging sluggers are valuable. If you are going to use a DH, fill it with some stud with hand of iron and a .380 OBA and a .500 slugging percentage.


Posted by David Pinto at 04:15 PM | Offense | TrackBack (2)