Conversions to designated hitter and their applicability to Jose Vidro’s suckiness
I’ve been trying to find comps for Vidro’s conversion. Ideally there’d be a guy named Joe Victor, a good-hitting 32-year old shortstop who got banged up for a few years and converted to DH in 2004. Yeah. Turns out there aren’t. There are a couple of problems with this kind of exercise:
Survivor bias. Players who don’t hit don’t get to hit for too long. Even noted clubhouse leader Carl Everett got thrown off the team. So looking for guys who made a conversion, the only data worth looking at will be cases where they weren’t terrible.
Sample size. Turns out since the designated hitter sprang like Athena fully-formed from the leg of Bowie Kuhn, there haven’t been all that many full-time DHs. Going through team seasons, I found many cases where time was split between two or more players, and I wanted at least 100 games to try and figure splits.
DH composition. Teams have historically used the DH to hide their worst defensive player far more frequently than protect injury risks. The history of conversions is a long series of teams deciding “this lumbering ox is so horrible defensively we can’t even bear to see him play left field or first base”.
That Edgar Martinez converted to DH from third base after two injury-racked seasons at 32 doesn’t mean Vidro’s going to suddenly hit .356/.479/.628 and finish 3rd in the MVP voting. Or, even better, Paul Molitor converted to DH full-time at 34 in 1991 after playing sixty games at second the year before (of 103 total), and then reeled off three of his best seasons before starting to decline in 1994, at 37. Two Hall of Famers experiencing late-career resurgences at DH doesn’t make conversions to DH a guarantee of late-career resurgences.
And I could argue about the validity of the comparisons: Edgar, in those injury-hampered 92-94 seasons, hit about .309/.392/.501, while Vidro hit .287/.353/.423. The takeaway lesson there would be that Edgar could still hit, and Vidro, for whatever reason, has not been able to.
Because there aren’t really good, argument-ending examples of players who made this kind of move. There’s particularly no Joe Victors. I’m going to discard the quest for a second. There’s a larger assumption at play here, and that’s that moving to easier defensive positions, by reducing wear and tear on a player, help their offense, and that moving to DH, by removing that entirely and allowing them to focus on hitting, is the best of all moves. A counter argument is that moving to DH, by taking a player off fielding, hurts their concentration or strains their intangible gland or whatever.
If moving from first base or the outfield to designated hitter does help, you’d expect to see those conversions hit significantly better after moving.
These are testable propositions:
– Does moving to an easier position improve offense?
– Does moving from a fielding position to DH improve offense?
Now these, these we know something about. I’m trying to work out a much larger, serious study on this, but here’s an early cut:
Including 2002, here are all the players who played more than 100 games at DH in a season:
Carl Everett
David Ortiz
Edgar Martinez
Ellis Burks
Erubiel Durazo
Frank Thomas
Jonny Gomes
Josh Phelps
Raul Ibanez
Travis Hafner
See what I mean about the trouble finding an adequate sample? 10 guys in 5 years. In any event: for players who moved, how big was the bump in offense (measured using EQR to adjust for park, league but not position) the year they converted?
Carl Everett (2005, age 34, from OF). Played twice as many games, about doubled offensive contributions from injury-limited 04, but was still way off career highs.
Edgar Martinez. You know this one, or you should. (1995, from 3B). Had his first healthy season since 1993, was about 20 runs better than his 1992 position-playing peak.
Ellis Burks (2001, at 36, from OF). Nope. Dropped about ten runs from the previous season. Rate stats down.
Erubiel Durazo (2003, age 29, from 1b). Tough. His first full season, with over twice as many ABs as previous years, so his total contribution was way up… but his rate stats actually all went down, his power significantly.
Frank Thomas (1998, age 30, and the records say he played first base, thooough…). Dropped 26 runs from the previous year. Rate stats all dived.
Raul Ibanez (2005, age 33, from OF). Added about 18 runs to return to the level of the best seasons with KC (2002-2003). However, he converted back to LF the next year and got even better, at +14. Soooo.. yeah.
(David Ortiz, Jonny Gomes, Josh Phelps, Travis Hafner all drop because they didn’t play other positions full-time or a good chunk of the time before moving)(Even Thomas played 97 games at 1b vs 49 at DH the year before).
So for those six conversions, here’s their total line:
Year before: 2,233 at-bats, .309/.395/.529
Year converted: 3,176 at-bats, .281/.379/.489
That’s not a huge sample of players, no, but it doesn’t support the assertion that the DH revitalizes hitters. If they’re supposed to be converting and healthy off injury years, well, we do see the playing time jump, but their hitting doesn’t seem to improve. Do their performances decline because they’re simply a year older? If so, then we should at least acknowledge that their move to DH didn’t overcome that, and certainly didn’t put them back on age-27 career years.
There’s only one remaining argument for a revitalization of Vidro that isn’t undermined by a reasonable look at the evidence of DH shifts. Those guys were old? In their conversion years, those guys were 29, 30, 32, 33, 34, and 36. Coming off injury? So were they. A special hitter? So were they. They were distracted by the move from fielding? Vidro’s going to face the same problem, if you believe it exists. And so on, and so on.
It’s that 2B is way more taxing than 1B/OF, and that his offense was thus held down more than those guys. Accept the premise that a player’s defense holds down their offense for a minute. First, sure, the position may be more taxing – a second baseman might make 600-800 plays that result in an out being made over the course of a season, while a left fielder can get away with under 200 (though he has to be immobile) and 250-300 is more reasonable.
But players who shift to easier positions don’t see significant offensive increases, either. If 1B is less taxing than 2B and so on, we should see players who move from one position to an easier one spike their offense. And if the reason that there’s no spike from 1B/LF to DH is that those positions are so much easier that they’re like DHing already, then we should see players who move to 1B/LF spike. And that’s not there either.
Take Nomar Garciaparra, a good Vidro comp for this discussion though a shortstop: he’s a middle infielder who hit for a high average, didn’t take a lot of walks, with good power. After a long string of injuries, he moved to first base this year at age 32. He was healthy and experienced an offensive resurgence, but it was still 30-40 runs of offense off his best years in Boston which he racked up while playing shortstop.
There’s no reason to expect that Vidro, moved to DH, is going to have a good year, and it’s extremely improbable we’ll see a return to the performances of his best seasons.
I’ll have more on all this later.
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44 Responses to “Conversions to designated hitter and their applicability to Jose Vidro’s suckiness”
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I just love this sort of Byzantine, in-depth analysis.
Thank you Mr Zumsteg.
Bill Bavasi, December 13, 2006
You do realize this is essentially the counterargument to the “Ichiro playing CF instead of RF will hurt his offense” suggestions.
So if Guillen can’t throw, does he platoon with Vidro?
With Bloomquist in rf?
I should add to #3 – and a good counterargument at that.
Great post Derek. Thank you.
Yeah. We know. This isn’t easing the pain. The more it gets analyzed, the worse it is.
Has any other organization ever changed a 2B into a DH? It’s absurd.
A poor 2B at that, Egaas. Not to mention expensive.
Yes, in general, but also no. Ichiro’s concern, as I understood it, was that because his hitting is so reliant on his ability to run out ground balls extremely well, he would prefer to play a position which could demand range, and make use of his throwing strength, while requiring him to run relatively less often, and not as hard.
We haven’t really seen if that’s true. If he’s right, and over the course of a season it does affect him significantly, we should see that he gets thrown out more on grounders.
I trust Ichiro, if for no other reason than that the only person who understands what it’s like to play like Ichiro is Ichiro.
Do we have any stats at this point to use as a baseline for measuring that next year? I.e. the percentage of ground balls fielded by the IF that Ichiro beat out last year before the position switch and the two years prior, weighted towards the most recent data to account for any loss of speed?
I don’t expect you to have that off the top of your head, but if anyone has that handy it would be an interesting thing to track this year. I always thought the idea was BS, but it would be nice to have an objective way to view it.
guess it all depends on if Ichiro can handle the increase in work-load. I think it is safe to say that somebody as athletic and healthy as Ichiro should be able to handle a shift from RF to CF, while it may not be the same case for somebody like Guillen.
Even if you did look at his 2007 stats of “beating out grounders”, it is going to be very hard to argue that the cause of the decline is his shift in position. The cause may just be pure randomness, age, change in batting style (he might stop starting to run while hitting 😛 ), etc. etc.
Either way, this entire argument is very interesting indeed, a in-depth analysis would be appreciated!
It seems like ever since he was acquired, Jose Vidro has become the symbol for everything that’s wrong with the Mariners front office, and he has been pilloried accordingly.
At this point, I think everyone gets that a lot of people here don’t expect this move to work. But I’m getting the sense that some are going beyond that, and secretly (or not so secretly) cheering for him to fail, which I don’t get. Can we wait until he at least takes a spring training at-bat before we chalk up this move as a disaster?
You’re reading too much into this, and we’ve dealt with this before for a guy like Bloomquist. A reasonable evaluation of a player’s ability and the choice that brought them in isn’t cheering for them to fail. Certainly, there are some people who want the team’s bad moves to be as horrible as possible in order to get the team on a course where they don’t make those kind of moves. But rational evaluation is not a mark of traitordom.
And no, we don’t have to wait until the first spring training at-bat.
Well, bless you for trying this! I am not sure how you would. I think the transition success or failure is based on too many things like mental make up in addition to the physical. I think Edgar was so special in that he not only accepted that role but worked his butt off to overcome physical defects. Also, hitting starts with the legs, Lose your legs and you are total arm/wrist guy. Edgar developed workout programs to compensate for his leg problems, did the others? Could they? Will Vidro? That was a great read, thanks!
Isn’t it a bit short-sighted and misleading to use only the conversion season as the benchmark for effectiveness of a move to DH?
As an example, yes, Frank Thomas didn’t hit well (for him) in 1998. But he did continue to hit well through his mid-to-late 30’s, with several seasons that approach his career highs. Would he have done so well in his mid to late 30’s without the move to DH?
I don’t think statistics are going to be of much use here. It’s a terribly small sample set, and it requires analysis of how *not* moving to DH impacted a comparable hitter’s career, IMHO. I think anecdotal examination of similar players and their outcomes (those who DH’d and those who didn’t) would be useful.
Okay, but then it’s amazingly short-sighted to argue that Vidro’s going to have the best season of his career next year because he’s Edgar v2.
The question at hand here is: “Does a move to DH cause a player’s offense to greatly increase?”
There’s no need for a counter, or to test players who didn’t move. The argument being made is not “compared to their peers” or anything as similar. It’s “move a guy to DH, he’ll be as good as he ever was before”. We can already see that that’s clearly not true.
Whether it stems decline versus leaving them in the field – that’s not the claim tested here. And would you really want the version of Vidro that’s been playing the last three years to only have his decline slowed?
I think you’re misusing anecdotal, but whatever — if you’re interested in testing the claim that DH makes player declines slower, you’re welcome to test that claim.
Another important factor, it seems to me, is injury history.
One school of thought re: Vidro and the DH effect would be that he’s had a history of injuries, and that as a result, the move to DH will more significantly impact his performance than it might a comparable player with no injury history.
It’ll be very intesting to see how this plays out. I fully believe the Mariners are *expecting* a return to his previous level of performance after the move to DH.
Whether or not that happens (or can reasonably be expected to happen, given historical comparables) is a valid question.
Does Derek Jeter possibly have the biggest intangible gland ever?
Okay, except that a bunch of those guys in the example there had exactly the same problem with injuries and we didn’t see that.
I think about clutch hitting whenever this comes up. If you make it to the Bigs, you’ve consistently shown that pressure doesn’t get to you; thus clutch hitting doesn’t really exist (as most people define it).
Injuries aside and on a major league level, I can’t see the fatigue of playing a position other than pitcher affecting the athleticism involved in an AB. I just think that players with this problem would be weeded out beforehand.
Of course injuries are a part of the Vidro picture. Will less time on his feet make the power return? His surgeon might be able to make a better projection than we can. Great post.
In general, this principle seems to hold, even if you expand the boundaries a bit and include guys like Wil Cordero, Dmitri Young, Rondell White, etc. (guys who didn’t make the 100 games cut-off).
I still say the Ray Durham-as-DH experiment is a great case, as it’s almost like a controlled experiment, where you get to see a guy play 2b, then DH, then back to 2b. But he probably doesn’t have enough injury history to satisfy some.
Great DHs are great hitters. DHing is not a gigantic vicodin/nandro cocktail. Middle-infielders generally don’t become full-time DHs for a good reason. This is what I’ve learned yesterday and today. Earth shattering stuff, really.
Let’s assume Vidro pans out and the Mariners’ hunch somehow pays off. The difference between Bavasi (or the M’s) and Beane (or the A’s) is that Seattle is paying a lot of money and squandering young talent (and precious trading value) on this hunch. Oakland would’ve paid very little.
Notice that of those 10 guys, we’ve had 4 of them. Why is our approach so different from other teams?
Of all the guys you use as examples, Nomar and Molitor are the best comps in terms of age/position switch. While I don’t expect Vidro to go crazy, I wouldn’t be surprised to see him post numbers similar to his 2002-2004 numbers or his career line of 301/363/459.
prob. because Edgar was such a success, they hope lightning strikes twice.
DMZ-
Howe seriously would you take a case made up of this small a sample size that argued against your position?
In terms of at-bats, it’s not all that small. In terms of players, certainly, six isn’t fifty, but here’s the thing – in making the fairly extraordinary claim that DH is the fountain of youth for hitters and will revitalize Vidro, I’d be asserting that it’s a wide effect, it’s huge, and we can expect it to be generally applicable.
And this refutes that, certainly.
Yeah I’d agree that DH has a negligible effect on the player’s offense (unless you’re a catcher). I think our only hope with Vidro is that he was really hurt last year and is going to be really healthy next year.
I’m pretty sure Derek’s right about this.
However, we should expect Vidro to improve over his ’06 season simply based on one simply concept: regression to the mean. Studes had a great article about the concept yesterday, and he’s right on – regression is a huge force. If we look at Vidro’s MARCEL projection, which is strictly a regression based system with an aging curve built in, Vidro’s projected to hit .282/.345/.415. There’s no league or park adjustment on that, so you might ratchet it down a little bit to adjust for Safeco, but the point remains the same – Vidro should be a little better next year than he was last year, and it would still have nothing to do with him moving to DH.
Keep this in mind when you’re thinking about writing an “I told you so” post in June.
Derek, do you think that Vidro switching leagues for the first time in his career makes a difference as well?
Looking over the list of guys you pulled (nice work BTW) seems like all of them that I know of were career AL players even before they became DHs.
Even if Nomar is the best case scenario, it seems to me that he was moving to the “easier” league for a hitter whereas Vidro is doing the reverse. I guess I’m still skeptical that Vidro will hit anything close to what the Ms expect. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to see Vidro have a season more like Beltre’s first trip round the AL.
Is there really any evidence (besides 2 or 3 players who have failed when they came to Safeco) that the NL is easier for hitters? I keep hearing this and I wonder if anybody has actually done any studies on league moves.
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/is-the-al-really-superior/
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/is-the-al-really-superior-part-2/
http://www.hardballtimes.com/main/article/is-the-al-really-superior-part-3/
thanks Dave.
26-
I understand what you’re saying, but my point is that it’s a stretch to say that a sample group of six players can confirm or refute anything.
I would say that there’s no evidence of the DH effect based on the current data, but not that it has been refuted because of the current data. If that makes any sense.
Thank you.
In general, I agree entirely. A group of six, even if they provide in total a pretty good sample size of at-bats, is not definitive.
However, I do think it can suffice for refutation of the claim that moving to DH helps *everyone* and/or that moving to the DH is certain to provide an offensive boost that will restore a player to the peak of their ability.
It’s as if someone said that everyone over six feet tall plays professional basketball. I’m not a pro basketball player, so all I need is a proof of one.
If the claim is then changed to “almost everyone over six feet plays pro basketball” and I take the next six people off the street and they don’t, sure, it’s possible that I’m hanging out in the wrong place, but you’d be right to be skeptical of the initial claim and even more skeptical after taking that sample.
Two things:
Even if Vidro hits like it was 1999, on a team that really needs a patient, powerful hitter, he’s not going to add enough.
Second, moving from an tougher to an easier position may well have no positive effect on hitting. However, it does not then necessarily follow that moving from an easier to a harder position has no negative effect on hitting.
I suspect that switching Mark McGuire from 1st base to 2nd base on defense would have had a measurably bad effect on his hitting.
It is also possible that any switch of position, in whatever direction on the defensive spectrum, has some kind of negative effect on hitting simply because it takes away from the general homeostasis that the player is used to.
I’m sure all these things would be easy for the right data base.
Also, I have several old Who’s Who in Baseball that list Willie McCovey as playing 2nd base his first year in the minors. If true, I would pay a lot of money for videotapes of a 6-4, left-handed second baseman making the turn on a double play.
Larry Dobrow, Special to CBS SportsLine.com:
I am happy that my whining and complaining prompted a terrific long post and great replies. I still feel that the Vidro thing could work… perhaps brilliantly. But ultimatley it is a chance that doesn’t justify the cost in money and players.
In reply to #6: Julio Franco and Paul Molitor were 2nd baseman that became good DH’s
Not really. The first year Molitor played a majority of the time at DH in 1987, he’d been a 3B for three years, an OF in 81, and a 2B before that. He then played 3B in 88-89, in 1990 he played 60 2B games but 37 1B and after that he was a DH. In his career he played almost twice as many games at third compared to second.
Franco, meanwhile, kind of — he was a 2B until he lost a year in 1992 (15 games at DH, 9 games at 2B…) and then transitioned to DH in 94, moved back to 1B in 96, back to DH in 97, then when he resurfaced in the NL played 1B. So one of those conversions you could count, if you wanted.
This stuff isn’t that hard to look up.
DMZ, going back to post # 12
This is what I was talking about with my first post.
I definitely get the sense that you and some other here, to put it charitably, would not shed one tear if Vidro turned out to be a disaster, because it would vindicate your views on building an organization and discredit the one seemingly espoused by the current regime. He could hit .390 and set a Seattle record for home runs, and there would be people who would never forgive the team for giving up Snelling and Fruto to get him. Fine. I don’t disagree with the approach, just hoping that it won’t take this kind of spectacular failure to get the team there.
But I think in setting up your comps, you’re moving beyond rational evaluation and into advocacy. Reading your initial post, you’re dismissing the people who did improve when switching to DH as viable comps for subjective reasons, and you’re taking an extremely small sample size and drawing large-scale conclusions from them. Moreover, if I’m reading the copy right, three of the six saw their rate stats go up in the year of their conversion, which would certainly lead me away from the utter gloom-and-doom outlook that some here have.
I would argue instead that the fact that only six players can be cited as comps in this case means there’s not enough information to make such a confident judgment. Heck, there are no middle infielders in that group at all.
I understand the notion that Bloomquist sucks … everyone here has seen him play, a lot more than most would like. I don’t understand the attitude epitomized by the title of this thread (“…and their applicability to Jose Vidro’s suckiness”) when he hasn’t even had one at-bat in a Seattle uniform or as an American League DH.
(Speaking of small sample sizes … as near as I can figure, he’s played six games at DH since 2004, going 8-24 with a double, three RBI, and a walk. He was 2-8 with a double in that role last season).
Okay, so…
I don’t know what to say about this any more, really. I’ve written about how much I want the M’s to win, my joy in their victories and my depression in their defeat, my appreciation for some players and my longing for a pennant. I’ve written, for free, about the Mariners here for years, producing a frankly ridiculous amount of content that amounts to free promotion to the team and a testament to my fandom.
If you really believe that I want any player to fail, or the team to collapse, or even to lose a game, then either you’re not reading these things or you don’t believe me, and re-iterating my stance isn’t going to help.
If you really think I’m fucking around with picking my comps by only going back five years and in the criteria I picked, go do your own study.
Seriously. Prove me wrong.
Go get every DH conversion project since 1973 and run the stats. They’re available, you’ll be working from exactly the same positional data I have. If you believe there’s a great set of counter examples that I’m covering up at year 6, or lurking at 99 games played, well, either it’s going to be there or I’m such a master conspiracist I’ve managed to change the records themselves to match my twisted desire to… what, win an argument about Jose Vidro?
Go. Knock yourself out. But this pissing about how I’m somehow cooking the books — if you have that little respect for our work and integrity after everything we’ve done, I’d rather you stopped reading us.
MLB is truly great. The office can put together a lousy team seemly destined for mediocrity and the possibility remains that if the team plays well enough they can win the World Series. However unlikely and improbable it is still possible.
I apologize if I offended, DMZ. I definitely appreciate all the work you do here. I just can’t reconcile this:
and this
Look, nobody here is arguing that the Vidro trade was a good one. But he’s being turned into the poster child for What’s Wrong With The Mariners before he’s even played a game for the team. I don’t get that attitude at all.
I think the point is that Vidro *could* be good… but if you weigh all the factors the move shouldn’t have been made.
Like sucking out on the river to win a big hand in poker… just cause it worked doesn’t mean it is a good strategy.
An arguement could be made that as the ultimate fan you want it to fail so we stop making those types of decisions and in the end the ballclub is better off.
I’m not one of those people but I can understand the reasoning if someone was.
The thing that gets talked about a lot less is the better pitches Vidro is going to see as a M vs. as a Nat… As bad as we were offensivly last year we are still better than the Nationals/Expos of Vidro’s last few years. What about team changes?