Billy Butler: Very Talented At Sitting Around

A few weeks ago, Eno tried to make sense of Oakland’s Billy Butler signing by wondering about the holistic impact that Butler will have in the A’s lineup. Eno mentions the designated hitter penalty before examining how Butler could very well help the A’s by adding variation to their ratios of ground balls and fly balls. Batted-ball types could very well be the A’s primary motivation in signing Butler.

But I want to stop at just the designated hitter penalty: what if the A’s signed Butler primarily because Billy Beane both believed in the existence of this penalty, and also very much wanted his team to avoid it?

I’m personally inclined to believe in the existence of the penalty because it feels, to me, like a really elegant combination of intelligence gleaned from both statistics and on-the-field gameplay. On one hand it makes intuitive sense that playing as a designated hitter would be a sweet gig: your full day’s work is just four or five plate appearances! Sweet! So much less risk of injury! So much more ability to maintain endurance over the brutally long season!

There does exist a common-sense argument, though, in the favor of the DH penalty. Baseball is a game of rhythms, we know — even the additional off days in the playoffs, which would theoretically help a team rest, can jolt a team’s daily rhythms of play. It’s not hard to imagine being pencilled in as DH being disruptive just like those unwanted October off-days. These players have been constantly playing games their whole lives, and have only ever known the rhythm of going on the field, off the field, on the field, off the field, inning by inning. If you played left field on Tuesday, it could be pretty weird to suddenly have hours of in-game free time on Wednesday. What do you do with that time? How to you stay fresh and ready? Is it simply too much time to get bogged down with thinking?

For the last few years, the A’s have gone with a DH by committee, so Bob Melvin has had the daily task of pulling a new player off the field. This season, the A’s leader in plate appearances as a DH was Alberto Callaspo, with only 151. Just about everybody in their lineup spent at least a combined week at DH, and there were plenty of other A’s DH’s I won’t get to because of small sample sizes. (Yoenis Cespedes had 69 PA’s as a DH before his trade to Boston; Stephen Vogt had 23; Jonny Gomes had 17; Kyle Blanks had 8; Nate Freiman had 3, and shoot there are probably some others too.)

We know that the A’s constantly switched DH’s because they constantly switched the rest of their lineup in an attempt to play platoon advantages. Only, looking back at the 2014 A’s, it’s easy to see how this lack of lineup continuity backfired. Oakland DH’s who had preseason projections at DH (compiled by Matt Klaassen here) seriously underperformed those projections in their DH-PA’s. And also: they seriously underperformed compared to their own performances on the days when they played defense.

Callaspo had a down year in just about every way you could imagine, and you can see how his offense took an even lower dip when he was called on as a DH (statistics via Baseball Reference’s Splits pages):

John Jaso was second on the team in DH-PA’s, presumably to save him from the injury-inducing dangers of playing catcher. The transition to DH really threw Jaso for a loop, as he dropped at least 100 points in every category the days he was off the field:

Transitioning to DH also rocked Coco Crisp, who struggled as a below-replacement hitter during his turns in the dugout:

Even the team’s All-Stars, Derek Norris and Josh Donaldson, looked profoundly mortal during the rare days when they hit as DH:

Just about the only player who didn’t struggle during his handful of DH-PA’s was Brandon Moss:

Moss as DH is hardly the answer, though. Between his defensive versatility between first base and the outfield, plus his offensive versatility at hitting pitchers of both hands, Moss is one of the most important cogs in Oakland’s platoon-dominating machine. Slotting Moss in at DH makes it extremely difficult to have advantageous handedness match-ups at both first base and corner outfield.

Whether epiphany struck Billy Beane mid-season, or whether the opportunity only presented itself at the end of August, we do know that Beane values a full-time DH: Beane traded for one. He traded for Adam Dunn, who was in the midst of a season playing better as a DH than he did as a fielder:

Dunn has hit considerably worse as a DH than as a fielder for the whole of his career. This, however, can be explained by Dunn entering the American League only in 2011, with his prime slugging years well behind him: he hit better when he was younger, which was when he played the field. What’s important is that Dunn’s AL production when a DH compares favorably to his AL production when a fielder. For the month of September, Beane and Melvin had a guy they could pencil in at DH every day — which they did — and actually know that they would get the player’s best offensive self.

More importantly, you can envision how Dunn’s constant presence in the lineup would serve as a rising tide that could lift all ships: now Jaso and Norris and Donaldson and Crisp and (I guess) Callaspo can all put forth their best offensive performances too, once they went back to the familiar rhythms of playing defense.

Both the A’s and Dunn knew that he was the shortest of short-term options, given his subsequent retirement. Seeing as a full-time DH was a priority for the A’s in September, it’s safe to assume that it was a priority for them going into the winter as well.

So, what were their options? Signing Nelson Cruz means the A’s would have had to top the Mariners’ 4-year/$57M offer, and also Cruz hit better as a fielder last year, the first of his career with extensive DH experience. Even if his 2014 weren’t so scary, Kendrys Morales has also comparatively struggled as a DH for the entirely of his career. Although he definitely seems like a late-career DH, Adam LaRoche has only had 22 DH-PA’s in his whole career, meaning his abilities at the DH-skill are still entirely unknown. Victor Martinez actually totally fits the bill of what the A’s are looking for, having hit well as a DH both last year and for his whole career. Oakland’s winning bid would also have to top Detroit’s 4-year/$68M offer, which would be ill-advised if not also financially implausible for the A’s.

Perhaps the A’s scouting and/or analytics staffs could have found reasons to start up reclamation projects in Paul Konerko, Raul Ibanez, or Jason Giambi. Otherwise, we’re pretty much already down to one dude on the free agent market with the established DH skill: Butler. It’s not like there are a lot of established DH-skill guys in the league, period, for possible trades. David Ortiz or Edwin Encarnacion would cost an unattainable fortune. Adam Lind and Chris Carter seem like intriguing possibilities, although Lind has made it to 100 games played in only one of the last three seasons, and the A’s traded Carter away when they had him.

So, Billy Butler. He had a very poor 2014, and also played worse when he was a DH compared to when he was in the field:

This is Butler at his very, very worst. And still he outperformed the 2014 DH production of talented offensive players like Jaso and Norris.

Steamer assumes that Butler’s below-replacement 2014 is the exception, rather than the new rule, putting him down for 1.3 WAR next year. Butler posted 1.5 WAR in 2013, meaning that the A’s can expect Butler’s 2015 to look a lot like that season, which the projections nailed almost exactly:

Heck, let’s go back to 2012, to the very first FanGraphs Positional Power Rankings:

So Butler performed very, very slightly better when on the field in 2012. Still: the drop when he played DH is barely perceptible, which was not the case for the A’s in 2014.

Even if Butler produces three straight one-WAR seasons for the A’s, he’ll also essentially be giving the team the gift of 600 or so PA’s for his teammates to play the field and, consequently, hit at their best. Whatever in-game routine Butler has in order to come to the plate fresh and focused, it’s still a rare skill across the game of baseball, and it’s a skill that has and will pay dividends for both Butler and his team.