"Pardon?", I hear you ask. "Latin and baseball do not mix."
Well, not often, but here, the idea of "one out of many" is called a roster strategy, and I have no better phrase to recruit you to my way of looking at things.
The "one", of course, is David Americo Ortiz Arias, the remarkable Dominican slugger and now former Boston Red Sox designated hitter called "Big Papi" for many years. Ortiz has retired for good from baseball, and has left a Papi-sized hole in the Red Sox lineup. And if you've ever seen him, well, that's a pretty big hole to fill.
It's an impossible thing to find someone comparable to replace him, either from free agency or trade, given that his on-base plus slugging percentage (OPS), the excellent measure of offensive capability, was 3% above any other player in the game. You would think, though, that we could imagine beyond the dull concept of looking for another Papi, but the press cannot.
No, rather it seems as if every answer to the question about replacing Papi appears to be to sign this or that free agent slugger, whether Edwin Encarnacion or Jose Bautista of the Blue Jays, or Mark Trumbo of the Orioles, or who knows who else. Always one guy, plugging in as DH.
I reject that kind of thinking, on a number of levels. Consider, for example, a couple factors that play into the decision:
(1) Money vs. age -- the replacement types who would be both established enough to forecast a solid offensive performance, and also experienced enough to have gotten to free agency, are old. They will want big, long-term contracts into their declining years. As the Yankees have proven, that is one bad strategy.
(2) Fragility -- even younger players get hurt. When you have a lot of money tied up in one player, it is money you can't spend on another player. When that player gets hurt, and he inevitably does if his name is not Cal Ripken, there is a lot of scrambling that has to be done. Just take a look at the Sox lineup on the days Ortiz was rested as an example.
I would like to hope that by now you're aligning with, and may even have psyched out, my approach to building a team that recovers from the loss of the biggest offensive force in the game last year. "E pluribus unum." Out of many, one. As in, "replace David Ortiz with parts."
Let's get to it. Start with something Casey Stengel said when he was the first manager of the New York Mets in 1962. Asked why his very first player picked in the player draft was a catcher, Stengel replied that, "If you don't have a catcher, you're going to have a lot of passed balls." [Aside -- that catcher was Hobie Landrith, who actually did make the team.]
That's a nice phrase to remind us that one way or the other, someone is going to be the DH. Offensive production is cumulative across nine players. You don't have to replace Ortiz's entire 1.000 OPS with another 1.000-OPS player; you only have to replace the difference between Ortiz and his replacement. In other words, if you put someone in the DH role with an .850 OPS, you can still replace the other 150 points by upgrading other positions some of that, each!
The Red Sox have young, solid starters ensconced at three positions -- center (Jackie Bradley), right (Mookie Betts), and short (Xander Bogaerts). "Young" means under 28, and therefore expected to improve as they're short of their peak age. They will be somewhat offset by the assumed age-related declines in two other positions, second (Dustin Pedroia) and first (Hanley Ramirez). While you can't know how these five will perform in 2017, it is safe to assume that the likeliest scenario is that they cumulatively represent an expected offensive 2017 about the same as 2016.
That leaves three spots in the lineup -- third, catcher and left. In order, the Red Sox players at those positions had OPSs of .686, .665 and .759. So if you replaced Ortiz at DH with someone who would be a really good hitter and give you an .850 OPS, then if you could upgrade those other three spots equally -- to .736 at third, .715 at catcher and .809 in left -- you have put together a plan that replaces Ortiz with only an .850 OPS hitter at DH.
How possible are those upgrades? Well, left is already taken care of, since Andrew Benintendi, the young phenom whom the Red Sox put in left at the end of 2016, produced an .835 OPS, more than enough to take care of the need in left field, if he were to continue. I can't tell you that he can be expected to continue that, but he has hit at every level of the minors, and even if he slumped 30 points over the year, you have still taken care of 30 of those 150 points.
Catcher needs a .715 OPS. The one player the Sox used the most behind the plate was Sandy Leon, and Leon was not the problem -- his OPS was .840. All that is needed there is better offense from the backup catcher position. Finally, at third, well, there are issues there. You need .736 and. while the primary third-baseman, Travis Shaw, was at .753, it is certainly a place where a somewhat-better bat could give you a lot of points as well. Either way, if Shaw played 150 games at third the same as he did 104 games last year, you have the .736 covered.
So ... the above is rife with assumptions, of course. But the thought process -- making multiple changes, or looking at multiple positions, to offset an inevitable drop at one position, is a realistic and cost-effective way to build a regular lineup. There's a guy under contract, name of Pablo Sandoval, whom we haven't even mentioned as he missed most all of 2016. Perfectly reasonable option to put at DH even if he can't field all that well any more.
Multiple options, and we haven't even added one free agent. It's something to think about.
E pluribus unum. Works in baseball, too.
Copyright 2016 by Robert Sutton
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