Heading into the year, everyone thought this would be the season that Shohei Ohtani, rehabbing from elbow surgery and DHing only, stepped aside and yielded MVP to someone else before resuming his place as the de facto favorite for the award in 2025. Instead, Ohtani decided to make a run at the first ever 50-homer, 50-steal season. The other primary competitor for NL MVP is Francisco Lindor, who isn’t chasing any statistical milestones and plays for a team whose most interesting narratives involve an amorphous fast food mascot, the musical endeavors of a part-time utility infielder, and the failure to extend Pete Alonso. And yet, Lindor’s position atop the NL WAR leaderboard demands consideration.
The marginal difference between Lindor and Ohtani’s WAR totals (7.4 and 7.0, respectively, at the time of this writing) creates a virtual tie to be broken based on the personal convictions of voters and anyone else with an opinion and an internet connection. For most, the choice between the two distills down to whether Ohtani’s 50/50 chase overrides his DH-only status. I’m not here to disparage Ohtani for not playing defense, but if you find that disqualifying for MVP recognition, I feel that. Then again, WAR includes a positional adjustment that does ding Ohtani with a significant deduction for not taking the field, and he’s still been keeping pace with Lindor on the value front anyway, so there’s not much more analysis to do there.
Instead, I want to explore how Ohtani’s one-dimensional role interacts with the value of a roster spot and the limitations that it places on how Los Angeles constructs and deploys the rest of its roster. In a two-way Ohtani season, he brings tremendous value to an individual roster spot as a frontline starter and an elite hitter who takes 600 or so plate appearances. But this year he contributes only as an offensive player.
Meanwhile, the 2024 Dodgers defense kicked off the season by declaring Mookie Betts a starting shortstop, and officially moving on from the notion that Gavin Lux would take over the position. Shifting Betts to the infield means no one has started more than 50 games in right field for the Dodgers so far this season. The most consistent presence in the outfield has been Teoscar Hernández with 94 games started in left and 49 in right, where between the two he’s accumulated -12.5 defensive runs above average. Five Dodgers have played at least 20 defensive innings at three or more different positions; Enrique Hernández has played every position but right field and catcher. Altogether, Los Angeles has struggled to field a consistent defense, forcing many of its players to be jacks of all trades yet masters of none. Between the inconsistent roles and lackluster defensive talent at several positions, the Dodgers clock in below average in terms of both OAA and FRV.
The roster gymnastics required to field a minimally competent defender at each position dominoes into circumstances where hitters with distinct platoon splits find themselves in suboptimal matchups. Early in the season when still operating under their intended plan for the season, it was clear the Dodgers preferred that Lux, Jason Heyward, and James Outman start only against right-handed pitchers, with Enrique Hernández, Chris Taylor, and Miguel Rojas primarily starting against lefties. But with Betts, Rojas, and Max Muncy missing chunks of time throughout the season due to injuries, Plan A has been difficult to maintain.
After choosing to let Corey Seager and Trea Turner depart as free agents in consecutive offseasons, it’s hard not to wonder what the Dodgers might look like with a player of Seager or Turner’s caliber at shortstop and Betts stabilizing the outfield instead of learning to play infield. Enter Francisco Lindor. What if Ohtani’s DH-only roster spot were occupied instead by Lindor? In a vacuum their value-add to a team is similar, but in the context of a league with limited roster spots and a team in need of defenders, would Lindor be more valuable to the Dodgers than Ohtani?
An obvious caveat before we proceed, this thought experiment applies only to the 2024 season. The Dodgers knowingly made a short-term tradeoff in favor of a long-term payout, and I’m sure they have not wavered on that decision, even as they submitted the paperwork to acquire the likes of Nick Ahmed, Amed Rosario, and Cavan Biggio. This hypothetical is purely to explore the value of roster spots and player versatility, not to suggest that the Dodgers shouldn’t have signed Shohei freaking Ohtani.
For the first 148 games of the Dodgers’ season — heading into this past weekend — I went through every starting defensive alignment and penciled in Lindor at shortstop. Then based on the handedness of the opposing pitcher, reorganized the rest of the defense accordingly and replaced Ohtani at DH. Generally speaking, this meant moving Betts to right field (before the Dodgers made that move themselves after he returned from the IL in August) or sliding Rojas and his above-average defense over to second, letting Lux DH versus righty pitching, and getting both Teoscar Hernández and Austin Barnes some DH opportunities against lefties. We’ll get more into the “why” behind those decisions shortly, but first let’s take a big-picture look at how this realignment would’ve impacted each player’s WAR totals.
In this realignment, Rojas and Barnes see a large bump by virtue of increased playing time, while players like Andy Pages, Enrique Hernández, and Outman benefit from getting a larger share of their plate appearances in advantageous platoon matchups. Meanwhile, the bump for players like Betts and Lux comes from optimizing their defensive output. For Betts, that means more time in right field, his strongest position; for Lux, less time playing any defense at all. (His play at second has been below average relative to others at the position, but roughly average overall once the positional adjustment is included.) The declines in WAR correspond entirely to reduced playing time.
Summing up the projected WAR totals and comparing to the team’s actual WAR reveals a 3.0 WAR increase overall when adding Lindor and subtracting Ohtani. The largest gains come on the defensive side of the ball (see below), where moving Lux off second base in favor of Rojas, adding a full season of Lindor at short, and getting more innings from Betts in right lead to an improvement of almost 19 defensive runs above average (including all positional adjustments). Given that the run environment this year sets the bar at approximately 9.7 runs per win, the improvement on defense basically accounts for two-thirds of the increase in team WAR.
The individual decreases in defensive production result from players getting reduced playing time, with the lone exception being Teoscar Hernández, who sees a bit more time in left field, where he is not a positive contributor. Betts and Rojas spend more innings at positions where they are proficient, while Enrique Hernández and Taylor see less playing time at positions where they are not.
But defensive improvements aside, one might still expect the offense to take a hit without Ohtani. Lindor is an above-average hitter, but he’s not Ohtani. Yet, with Lindor in the fold, it’s possible to make enough improvements on the margins to close the gap between Lindor’s 136 wRC+ and Ohtani’s 168 wRC+. The chart below highlights the differences in individual player output, indicating that some of the improvement results from addition by subtraction. Giving less overall playing time to Outman and the fringier players on the roster such as Ahmed, Taylor Trammell, Rosario, and Biggio helps, as does devoting more plate appearances to more productive players like Barnes and Rojas. Another plus is curating playing time to players’ platoon splits. Pages, Lux, and Enrique Hernández all see their plate-appearance ratio tilt toward their preferred pitcher-handedness matchups, and getting some strategic days off for Teoscar Hernández versus righties boosts his numbers a bit.
Barnes is worth digging into specifically, as he benefits from the increased playing time, which maximizes his particularly strong performance against lefty pitching this year (145 wRC+). Sure, this projection might be overly optimistic; this season Barnes has only 43 plate appearances versus lefties, running the risk of representing more noise than signal. His career mark against lefties is closer to average, but the platoon split does still persist, and since this exercise exclusively covers 2024, it feels justified to use this year’s mark. Even if his performance were to dip over a larger sample, it would have a long way to go for Barnes to stop being a productive choice for about an extra 80 plate appearances against lefties.
Admittedly, this isn’t a perfect exercise. Swapping players in and out and assuming they will continue to maintain their production in slightly different contexts while getting more playing time leaves plenty of room for error. These changes interact with each other and other external factors in ways that are difficult to account for. But numbers aside, one can look at things from a more strictly baseball perspective and see the benefits of granting players more consistent roles and crafting those roles to include more of what they’re best at doing instead of just what they are capable of doing. And though it’s straightforward to blame the suboptimal defensive alignments and lineup oddities on Ohtani’s not playing defense, the team’s ratio of role players to lineup mainstays is not really what you’d expect from a powerhouse like the Dodgers. A roster with Enrique Hernández, Taylor, Heyward, Rojas, Vargas, Outman, and Lux creates a tough puzzle to piece together, one that becomes slightly easier with that extra lineup spot to use. Granted players like Lux and Outman weren’t thought to be role players in the early going, but it’s on teams to plan for those contingencies. A team with one or two more consistently average or slightly above-average players would have no issue working around a DH-only season of Ohtani.
Furthermore, Los Angeles’ stable of role players shaped its approach at the trade deadline. As the Dodgers managed injuries to Betts, Rojas, and Muncy, their needs spanned the entire diamond. There was no single-player or single-position solution. The Dodgers needed Ahmed, Edman, Rosario, and Kevin Kiermaier to plug holes. With Lindor, maybe they’d still get one of those players as a depth piece, but they’d be able to focus their time and deadline resources on getting one impact outfielder (say Jazz Chisholm Jr., Jesse Winker, or Randy Arozarena) worth a win or two on their own, instead of setting out an entire set of replacement-level Tupperware to account for a leaky defense. Then, manager Dave Roberts could more fully maximize the strength of his depth pieces to plug any remaining holes, increasing their ability to contribute positive value, as we’ve already seen demonstrated.
So even though the method isn’t perfectly precise, and we can’t really begin to calculate the cascading impacts on the trade deadline and how greater consistency in playing time and roles influence performance, an estimated three-win surplus is not a small number in the context of a playoff race. The Dodgers’ division lead over the Padres currently sits at 3.5 games and would feel much safer at five or six games. Perhaps more importantly, the Dodgers are only two games ahead of the Brewers for the second first-round bye. As injuries continue to bite the Los Angeles rotation, and the team works to get one or two of its sidelined pitchers healthy and built back up before the postseason, the extra time for rest and rehab, coupled with fewer playoff innings to cover overall, is a luxury it desperately needs.
If there’s one thing to take away from this article, it’s that players provide more value to their teams than what is reflected in their WAR totals, especially those who do multiple things well. That’s why, in a year when the Dodgers feature more one-dimensional role players at the same time that Ohtani is relegated to DH-only duties, we can conclude that Lindor would be more valuable to this season’s team than Ohtani. Even so, I can’t help but marvel that Ohtani is so good at hitting that not only does he make up for his own lack of defensive contributions, but he also does enough to almost entirely account for the negative defensive contributions of his teammates who are forced to take the field because the DH spot is occupied. That is so impressive.
So don’t take this as an indictment of the Dodgers’ roster construction, but rather as an object lesson on the value of a roster spot, the different ways in which that value is accrued, and how the ways different players accrue value interact with one another when they’re on the same team. Not every player needs to be a Lindor, and most players can’t be an Ohtani, but there are ways to purposefully build an effective roster around either type of player and every type in between.
And if you came to this article hoping for a definitive take on who should win the NL MVP, I’m sorry I don’t have one for you. But assuming Lindor’s back issue doesn’t force him to miss significant time, the decision deserves to be a difficult one if we’re considering all sources of value.
