Author: Luke Lilienthal (lukelilienthal2024@u.northwestern.edu)

A pandemic has crippled the global economy; war rages once again in Europe; the DH is in the national league. These signs of apocalypse arguably hold varying degrees of importance to humanity, but the MLB’s departure from differentiated league rules this year certainly represents a monumental shift in the future of America’s pastime. So let us reflect on the era that was, and use some analytics to quantify the impact of the non-DH rule in the past as we turn our gaze to the future of the MLB in the new age of the designated hitter.

The designated hitter, known as the DH, is a rule in baseball that allows for a team to choose a single player to hit in place of an inferior hitter in the lineup, usually the pitcher. Notably, the designated hitter does not need to play in the field and therefore only contributes offensively to their team. There are many intricacies to the century-old debate over designated hitter rules, but the bottom line stands — for over a century, baseball teams have been forced to send out sub-optimal lineups. Forcing pitchers to take the place of much more adept batters, as well as great hitters with poor defense to take the field has inarguably contributed to less efficient baseball, but the degree of harm has been far from consistent across teams in MLB history. To fully grasp the magnitude of the new rules, let’s take a look at who could have most benefited from a universal DH. 

The search for the ideal DH candidate from MLB history is the primary goal here, thus, we will be searching for great hitters that otherwise harmed their team with their subpar defensive skills.

To compare how much players’ individual skills helped or hurt their team across time, we need a consistent metric that gives the general efficiency of players in comparison to that of average players in similar conditions. Baseball Reference’s “wins above replacement” (WAR)  statistic provides just that desired metric. In essence, WAR describes the number of wins that a player adds to a team when they are substituted for a statistically average “replacement player.” The formula for calculating WAR is a somewhat complicated combination of available performance statistics, but in general it captures the value of a player to their team in a given year. 

Most importantly, we need to consider players’ offensive and defensive skills in isolation, and WAR offers the sub-statistics Offensive WAR (OWAR)  and Defensive WAR (DWAR). This will allow us to easily sift through available data to find players that had the largest difference between their general offensive and defensive value to a team. More simply, it allows us to identify those who would have most benefited from a DH rule that allows them to specialize in their specific skill without hurting the team with their weak other skills.

Using Baseball-Reference’s comprehensive dataset on historical player performance, we can identify some candidates for missed DH opportunities with some simple python script. There are certainly more complex methods of filtering this list, but for the purposes of this article we will look for seasons in which a player had a OWAR 10 points or greater than their DWAR. Alone, this criteria might favor players with huge offensive seasons and average defense, but we want seasons in which a player actively hurt the defensive efficiency of their team. As such, we will further filter our list to only include seasons in which a player had a notably low DWAR. This list, therefore, reflects players whose team would strictly benefit by allowing them to play exclusively DH and replacing their defense with an average player (under the reasonable assumption that average pitcher has a negative or low OWAR, such that the average player also improves the runs scored by the offense).

When we restrict this list to only include players that lost their team an average of 2 or more games than an average defender (DWAR < -2), we are presented with a manageable shortlist of optimal DH candidates. This includes some notable names such as former NL MVP Joe Torre and homerun specialist of the PED era Mark McGuire. When we restrict our DWAR upper limit to -3, however, we are presented with our single optimal DH candidate — Frank Howard. 

Standing at 6-foot-7 and weighing upward of 275 lbs, the Washington Senators’ slugger  certainly fits the mold of an offensive specialist, and his career statistics back up that notion. Specifically, the two seasons of interest that our model selected were 1968 and 1969. In 1968, while playing far lower than average defense, Howard batted for an average of .271 with 44 home runs. For this performance, he finished 8th in the AL MVP vote. In the next two years he would finish in the top 5 of the MVP vote, solidifying himself as a premier offensive player of the decade.

It would not be but four years later that the American League would vote to experiment with the DH, and in Frank Howard’s last professional season, 1973, he would serve on the inaugural class of new DHs in the American League that helped to usher in a new offensive era of baseball. In the years following, fans saw the potential of more offensively potent baseball, and the increased attendance led the AL to opt to keep the DH indefinitely.  The MLB has been chasing that attention ever since. From the PED era of the 80s to the “juiced balls” of the late 2010s, offensive explosions have consistently captured the interest of the public across MLB history. Batters like Frank Howard highlighted the potential of a DH rule in making the sport more appealing to fans via more efficient offenses. Certainly, many teams in history like the 20th ranked 1968 Washington Senators missed opportunities for creating the best and most appealing to watch lineups available to them because of the no-DH rule. 

Our final submodel will consider a more relaxed interpretation of maximum DWAR. Specifically, it will include any player with a negative DWAR, meaning simply they hurt their team on average during the defensive half of the game in that season. This criteria gives us a much larger list with some incredibly notable names. 

From Babe Ruth, to Lou Gherig, to Barry Bonds, to Ted Williams, we see some of the biggest names in baseball history with multiple seasons entered onto this list. The model presented thus far certainly favors great hitters, so big names are not unexpected, but the realization that so many of baseball’s heroes had multiple seasons where they were detrimental to their team without the bat in their hands is a telling conclusion. In any of these seasons, allowing these stars to play exclusively as a DH and replacing their defense with a completely average MLB player would have, on average, given their team more wins. There are many ways to extrapolate this conclusion, but most evidently it speaks to the nature of notability in MLB history. The sheer amount of superstars that appear in our filtered dataset indicates just how much we, as MLB fans, truly gravitate towards offensive prowess in the sport of baseball. Even though these icons of the sport were notably below-average for the half of the game that they were defending, fans think of them as irreplaceable to the development of the game that we see today. Who knows how popular baseball would have become if Babe Ruth never popularized the traditional “home run hitter” in the 1920s? 

In all, it seems that we have reached an obvious decision. These WAR analytics show that we like to watch people that hit the ball further and harder! It seems reasonable to say that, If baseball truly wants to make more superstars and appeal to a larger fanbase in the United States and beyond, supporting the offensive production of its most prolific hitters is a net positive. We have seen this support drive interest many times in MLB history, most relevantly in the American League implementation of the DH in 1973. The universal DH, therefore, seems very likely to be a positive development for the sport of baseball. MLB fans will find heroes in generational hitters like Frank Howard, no matter the implications of their defense. Unless one is truly a fanatic of watching pitchers struggle to produce offensively, then, why should we accept an inefficient and less appealing version of baseball? The DH is here to stay and the future of baseball seems all the better for it.

All data and formulas sourced from baseball-reference.com

Luke Lilienthal, lukelilienthal2024@u.northwestern.edu, Weinberg, 2024

Tags: MLB, Designated Hitter, WAR, Frank Howard, Babe Ruth, Python

Sources:

WAR Dataset: Baseball-Reference WAR Archives 

WAR Information: MLB Wins Above Replacement

History of the DH: The Historical Evolution of the Designated Hitter 

Frank Howard Info: Frank Howard Wiki