Will MLB Change the Rules?

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Baseball diamond home plate

As the first serious proposals for a new collective bargaining agreement come in it seems likely that a significant rule change is on the horizon for Major League Baseball: The owners’ most recent offer to the players included a universal designated hitter, which has been rumored to be on the horizon for some time.

The arguments for the change are perhaps threefold:

• First, removing pitchers from the plate and the basepaths would reduce their injury risk while performing non-pitching activities. Situations like the 2017 baserunning injury that altered the trajectory of Jimmy Nelson’s career could be eliminated.
• Second, pitchers have become increasingly non-competitive at the plate in recent years. After not batting at all in 2020, National League pitchers batted just .110 with a .149 on-base percentage and .140 slugging in 2021. That’s down from .131/.161/.168 in 2019, which was in itself a low-water mark.
• Finally, eliminating pitcher hitting allows those plate appearances to be distributed among more position players, giving them more opportunity to produce value. There’s reason to hope that having an extra spot in the lineup encourages NL owners to spend more on the players who will fill that role. Historically, the DH has also extended the careers of a handful of players who could still hit but could no longer reliably play in the field.

The arguments against the change largely revolve around tradition and strategy. There is a striking difference between the two leagues in terms of in-game management: In 2021 National League teams used a player off their bench 14,011 times, and players who did not start the game still accounted for almost 8% of all plate appearances. American League teams, meanwhile, went to their bench just 3583 times for less than 3% of all plate appearances. The AL numbers would be even lower if they didn’t include interleague games in NL stadiums, where the designated hitter was not used.

If National League teams will have the DH for 2022, then the question turns to how they will implement it. In the early days of the rule in the AL for many teams this was a relatively simple proposition: The DH was often used to provide an everyday role for players who could still hit but couldn’t play the field. In 1978, for example, the Tigers used veteran outfielder Rusty Staub as the designated hitter in all 162 games. Staub batted .273 with a .347 on-base and .435 slugging, hit 24 home runs and finished fifth in the voting for American League MVP without ever taking the field on defense.

The “everyday DH,” however, is largely a thing of the past. In the last ten seasons there have only been 26 instances where a player collected 500 plate appearances in a season out of this role. A small handful of players occupy many of the spots on the list: David Ortiz, Kendrys Morales and Nelson Cruz each did it four times. Only two players batted often enough to be considered a full-time DH in 2021: Cruz, who appeared in 133 games between stints with the Twins and Rays, and Shohei Ohtani, a unique case given the fact that he also pitched 130 innings.

The teams that got the most production out of the DH spot in 2021, however, still tended to pencil the same guy into that spot on most days. The four American League teams that used the same DH at least 100 times were all in the top five in production from that spot: The Angels (Ohtani), Red Sox (J.D. Martinez), Yankees (Giancarlo Stanton) and Guardians (Franmil Reyes).

At the other end of the spectrum, the teams that spread their playing time around largely struggled. The Blue Jays, who had seven different players DH at least ten times, finished 12th in the AL with a .706 on-base plus slugging from the position. The Rangers had eight players DH at least 10 times and finished 13th. The A’s, who split playing time between two primary DH’s, were 14th.

There are, anecdotally at least, other benefits to spreading the DH around: It can be used to keep a regular player’s bat in the lineup on what would otherwise be a day off, can give a valuable hitter an opportunity to stay in the lineup through a nagging injury and can be used to give a variety of players extra opportunities. The production cost of using the position this way, however, is hard to ignore: The four teams that used one DH 100 or more times in 2021 got an .872 on-base plus slugging from the position. The four teams that spread it around the most often (the Rangers, Royals, Blue Jays and Mariners) were at .710.

If the designated hitter rule is in fact coming to the National League in 2022, then 15 front offices are going to have a relatively brief window to determine how they’d like to utilize it. There are multiple schools of thought about how having an extra position player in the lineup can help a team, but recent history suggests that teams with a regular in this role get a pretty significant production advantage.