2025 Positional Power Rankings: Designated Hitter

I feel like we’re all familiar with this Ohtani guy at this point, right? Like, we all know what his deal is.

If some respects, Ohtani’s 2024 season was his most impressive yet. The source of his international appeal and fascination was his ability to be two good players at once. I don’t think we appreciated the fact that not only did Ohtani not pitch in 2024, he didn’t pitch because he was too injured to do so.

And by any reasonable standard, he was the best position player in the National League anyway. He led the NL in WAR, wRC+, home runs, slugging percentage, and runs scored, and was second in batting average and (this was a new thing for him) stolen bases. Ohtani was so good it almost went unnoticed that he came within three hits of becoming the first NL hitter since 1937 to win the Triple Crown.

Ohtani is so good the Dodgers devoted the DH spot to him despite having a number of aging stars who might need to move down the defensive spectrum in the next decade. On the occasions when the MVP needs a day off, one of those players will slide into the DH role.

I’m disappointed, bordering on annoyed, by big hitters with massive batting practice power who can’t deliver in games. Like if you had to move a couch, and your roommate shows up with a guy from work who looks like Alan Ritchson, and the instant you try to pick up the sofa to put it in the van, Reacher cramps up and throws his back out.

This is not an issue with Yordan Alvarez, who has never hit below .270 in a full season and never slugged under .500. He’s on a run of four straight 30-homer seasons, and if you take out 2020, when he only appeared in two games, he’s lowered his strikeout rate every year of his career. In 2024, Alvarez hit .308/.392/.567 with 35 home runs, and one could argue that a .259 ISO and 16.0% HR/FB ratio represented a power outage.

Alvarez has semi-frequently posted up in left field throughout his career, with at least 300 innings at the position every year since 2021. That figure will probably drop in 2025; the Astros have limited his defensive innings out of concern for recurring knee problems that popped up again late last year. Moreover, the Great Jose Altuve Outfield Experiment figures to suck up a lot of innings in left.

When Alvarez is either using his glove or taking a personal day, the Astros can put Yainer Diaz at DH. (The 26-year-old backstop hits like a DH, but also catches like a DH.) The Prodigal Jon Singleton broke into Houston’s lineup regularly and remains a useful platoon slugger, but not much more. And like the Dodgers, the Astros have a surfeit of mid-30s stars (Altuve, Christian Walker) who might periodically cycle through at DH as well.

Congrats to Big Rook on getting paid. A $60 million guarantee is a handsome reward for a 30-year-old DH with three years of team control left, but the A’s needed to pay somebody or the MLBPA was going to yell at them. Rooker — the team’s best player in 2024 by a pretty big margin — is as good a recipient as any of such largesse.

It’s not quite accurate to call Rooker a late bloomer because he beat wholesale ass at Mississippi State. But in a professional context, he suffered the unenviable struggle of making enough contact to access his power against big league pitching. He’s still striking out a lot — 30.6% across two good seasons with the A’s — but he’s hitting enough that it doesn’t matter. Rooker socked 30 homers in 2023 and 39 in 2024. Plus, he hit .293 and stole 11 bases last year, which is pretty neat.

Like most teams, the A’s will probably use DH as a temporary rest stop for their slower starters at other positions — Shea Langeliers and Tyler Soderstrom, in this case. And if you lost track of Miguel Andujar after some Yankees fans were arguing for him to win AL Rookie of the Year over Ohtani in 2018, I have good news: We’ve found him.

It’s been amusing to watch Schwarber slide all the way down the defensive spectrum over his career, but Indiana’s two-time All-American catcher actually lost his glove for two months last season. Left it in the wrong equipment bag and just couldn’t find it all of July and August. (As a nod to the times we live in, I feel obliged to clarify that while Schwarber did not play the field in those two months, he did not literally lose his glove.)

Schwarber is one of the most turn-of-the-century players in baseball, as he’s usually among the league leaders in each of the three true outcome categories. Phillies manager Rob Thomson’s commitment to separating his two big lefty power threats, Schwarber and Harper, previously led to Schwarber serving as the team’s leadoff man. There, his extremely high walk rates balanced out his extremely low batting average, though last year he hit a downright respectable .248. But it also led to Schwarber homering a lot with the bases empty.

This year, he’s moving down the order; after averaging 101 RBI a year with the Phillies while hitting mostly out of the leadoff spot, that number could get even bigger in 2025.

There’s some noise about Schwarber logging more innings in left field or at first base this season. That would open up some DH time for another highly decorated college catcher, Harper, as well as Nick Castellanos or J.T. Realmuto, who’s finally metering his extreme workload in the last year of his contract.

That’s right: There are nine names on this list. I guess that’s in keeping with the idea of DH being a parking spot for any starting position player who’s old and/or slow and/or injury-prone. And indeed, the Rangers have lots of those.

They also have Joc Pederson, who molts every few years and emerges as a completely different player. The young Dodger center fielder became a bench bat and glue guy, and in 2024 he somewhat quietly put together a monster season for Arizona: .275/.393/.515 in 449 plate appearances. Pederson’s 23 home runs might not look that impressive for a top-five DH (though he hit them at a rate that would’ve gotten him into the 30s if he’d started every day), but I cannot overstate the value of a .393 OBP.

Among position players with at least 400 PA, Pederson was fourth in OBP, trailing only Aaron Judge, Juan Soto, and Vladimir Guerrero Jr. The two guys behind him on the list (if only by a handful of points) were Alvarez and Ohtani.

The D-backs did shelter Pederson, giving him roughly 10 at-bats against righties for every trip to the plate against lefties. (Pederson actually posted a 124 wRC+ against left-handed pitchers in 2024, but in a heavily BABIP’d 42 plate appearance sample.) If Pederson is a platoon DH, the Rangers clearly think he’ll be an exceptional one. Otherwise, they wouldn’t have signed him to a contract worth $18.5 million a year.

And they can fill in the starts against lefties with a combination of Jake Burger and Adolis García. The latter looks like he’ll start in right field against righties and shift over to DH against lefties, with Kevin Pillar coming in to play right. That de facto platoon of Pederson and Pillar would’ve been dynamite in 2015, and ought to be pretty good now.

The Braves aren’t the last team on this list with a full-time DH by design, but they are the last one where the dedicated DH is any good. Ozuna finished fourth in MVP voting in 2024 by hitting .302/.378/.546 with 39 home runs and 31 doubles. The trickiest part of any depth chart projection, including but not limited to this one, is figuring out who’s going to play where and how much. (If the nine names on the Rangers’ list didn’t convince you that this was the case, buckle up, because it’s only going to get weirder.) This is one of the easiest depth chart positions from that perspective.

Last year, counting the playoffs, the Braves played 164 games, and Ozuna was the starting DH in every single one. On 15 occasions, Ozuna was lifted from a game early, either for a pinch runner or because the game was out of hand and Braves manager Brian Snitker was emptying the bench. But that never happened before the eighth inning. Including the postseason, Braves designated hitters recorded 704 plate appearances, of which 696 went to Ozuna, who never played another position. You’d have to go through and look at his individual routes around the bases, but it’s possible that Ozuna played every game — and almost every inning, at that — without his feet touching grass.

Will that happen again? Ozuna’s 34, and two years ago he was coming off consecutive sub-replacement-level seasons. So there’s some downside risk. The Braves’ glove-heavy bench means they’ll probably cannibalize another defensive position (say, by moving Ronald Acuña Jr.’s heavily-patched legs out of the outfield) to plug the hole.

I have no idea what the plan is here, let alone how much the plan might change going forward. The signing of Alex Bregman and the re-emergence of Trevor Story overpopulates the infield. Rafael Devers seems willing to DH in order to accommodate Bregman, even if he’s not thrilled about moving off of third base. All of this is, of course, necessitated by the emergence of Kristian Campbell, and possibly Roman Anthony later in the season.

Where does all that leave Triston Casas? Boston’s large, colorful first baseman has exhibited 30-homer power at the very least. But he missed the last three weeks of 2023 with shoulder inflammation, then missed most of 2024 with a broken rib.

And it bears mentioning that Boston has a well-paid incumbent DH: Masataka Yoshida. The 31-year-old has been moderately disappointing in general since coming over from Japan; a franchise bat he is not. But Yoshida’s offensive numbers have been fine overall and superb against righties, whom he victimized to the tune of .310/.374/.458 in 313 plate appearances last year. Rob Refsnyder, who returns after playing both outfield corners and some DH in 2024, hit .302/.393/.548 against lefties.

Watch this space to see who actually ends up DHing for Boston, and also to find out whether “Masataka Yoshida Wearing a Trench Coat and Sitting on Rob Refsnyder’s Shoulders, Little Rascals-Style” is a valid vote for AL MVP.

And in case you hadn’t had your fill of established middle-of-the-order hitters who weren’t that jazzed about being displaced to DH by an incoming former Houston Astros star: Behold Seiya Suzuki.

Exiled to DH after the acquisition of Kyle Tucker and the emergence of Pete Crow-Armstrong, Suzuki should nonetheless be a highly productive player for the Cubs. While I understand Suzuki’s initial reluctance to move to DH, if only for reasons of personal pride, he’s not a good defender in right field and won’t lose much value by changing (or losing) his position. At the same time, while Suzuki doesn’t put up Giancarlo Stanton-like batted ball numbers, he does consistently hit the ball hard to all fields. And he reaps the rewards that stem from that ability, namely a league-leading BABIP last year.

When Suzuki does dust off his glove and relieve either Tucker or Ian Happ, Craig Counsell can write in Justin Turner at DH. The 40-year-old Dodgers legend is nearing the end of the line. His defense is increasingly limiting him to first base, though the Cubs could get him to stand at third in a pinch, I guess. And his bat, which is the whole proverbial ballgame, is slowing down. In 2024, Turner hit .259, which is good by most people’s standards but his lowest batting average ever in a season of at least 25 plate appearances. And the decreasing batting average is not the cost of hitting for mower power. Turner’s .383 SLG was his lowest since 2011, his .124 ISO was his worst since 2013, and his 11 home runs were his lowest total in a 162-game season since 2014.

Other reserve options include fellow ex-Dodger Michael Busch, the aforementioned Tucker, and rookie Owen Caissie, best known to a wide audience as a member of Team Canada in the 2023 World Baseball Classic.

Seeing Christian Yelich listed as a primary DH makes me feel so old. It wasn’t that long ago that Yelich was the stringy, baby-faced third man in the Ozuna-Stanton Marlins outfield. His entire career has been contained in the time since Turner’s last sub-.380 SLG season, for goodness’ sake.

But time cometh for us all, I suppose. And if injuries have been a recurring issue, as they have for Yelich, and your team acquires a bunch of short, fast guys to play outfield, as the Brewers have, time can cometh a little faster than you’d expect.

With that said, maybe time should cool its jets, because Yelich isn’t done yet. In 2023, Yelich put up his best offseason since 2019, when he was a close second in NL MVP voting. And in 2024, he was a full step better: .315/.406/.504, or a wRC+ of 153. The 40-homer power Yelich exhibited during the juiced ball era has largely wafted away, but he combined his highest ISO since 2020 with the lowest strikeout rate of his entire career. More down-ballot MVP consideration might’ve been forthcoming had Yelich not had to call time on his season prematurely after suffering a back injury.

The other big DH option for Milwaukee is William Contreras, who is baseball’s best offensive catcher when he dons the tools of ignorance, and too good a hitter to leave on the bench when he isn’t catching. Milwaukee’s surfeit of playable outfielders will bleed over here; with one of them DHing, Rhys Hoskins will end up playing the field more than is ideal. But as a hitter alone, he’s still a decent on-base guy with big right-handed power. If Hoskins and Contreras are needed at their primary positions, but the Brewers are still looking for a right-handed veteran who can get on base, Mark Canha is back in the organization and still knows how to lean into a pitch.

Jesse Winker had a rough go of it in 2022 and 2023, but he re-established himself as an on-base threat with the Nationals in 2024, earning a trade to New York at the deadline. There, his sick flow, exuberant celebrations, and .318/.531/.636 batting line in 10 postseason games endeared him to the organization and its fans. He’s back on a one-year, $7.5 million contract; maybe he can be 80% of Joc Pederson for 40% the cost.

His right-handed counterpart is 36-year-old Starling Marte, who earned a four-year contract with the Mets after a five-win 2021 campaign. He was very good in 2022, then bad and hurt the following two years. The buzz around him makes it seem like the Mets are just hoping he’ll quit, or vanish into thin air or something? I don’t get it. Either way, tough cookies; the Mets still owe the man $20.75 million, and he’s still got one year on his contract.

In addition to this regular platoon — which should be pretty good, even if Marte is most of the way to cooked — the Mets have the usual cavalcade of rotating old/slow/hurt guys to chuck into the DH mix.

I’ll deviate slightly from convention here and start with Curtis Mead, who’s had a weird career so far. The Rays picked him up in a my-garbage-for-your-trash trade with the Phillies in November 2019, then watched him blitz through the lower and middle minors after the pandemic. By the 2022-23 offseason, Mead was a top-30 global prospect, a candidate to become the best Australian position player ever. Meanwhile, the pitcher they’d traded him for had just put together a completely forgettable half-season in Philadelphia as a low-strikeout swingman.

Two years after that, Mead’s chase rates are still problematic and his power, while not as gone as his surface numbers make it look, has not progressed. And the pitcher they traded for him is now

Cristopher Sánchez. And the pendulum could yet swing back the other direction. Sometimes you can’t really judge a trade until everyone involved is retired.

Mead should share time with Jonathan Aranda, a lefty who hasn’t hit right-handed pitching nearly as well as Mead has hit left-handed pitching in his short career. There’s also the compulsory rotation of starting position players who could use half a day off: Yandy Díaz, Christopher Morel, Junior Caminero.

Oh, and this is where Eloy Jiménez floated out to after the Orioles cut ties with him. I don’t know how much of Jiménez’s original potential is still there to be salvaged, but the poor guy was in dire need of a change of scenery. The Rays’ equally dire need of power and tolerance for groundball-heavy swings make them an interesting fit.

Jiménez will start the season in the minors, but if he works out the kinks down there, he can win a major role in the big leagues.

This is an evocative list of players, if nothing else. Giancarlo Stanton knocked off the cobwebs in a standout ALCS performance last October, but come March he’s back on the injured list with tendinitis in both elbows. General rule of thumb: If something can be accurately described as “bilateral” and it’s not an international summit on nuclear nonproliferation, it’s probably a bad thing.

And if you love a tall, aging right-handed hitter who’s struggling through injury, the Yankees are the team for you: DJ LeMahieu is battling a calf strain, and still has one additional year left on the six-year, $90 million contract that kicked in in 2021.

In Stanton’s absence, the Yankees have a chance to give an extended look to Statcast darling Ben Rice. The Dartmouth alum hit just .171/.264/.349 in 178 plate appearances in 2024, but his contact was of much higher quality than his results indicate. It’s not a huge sample, but Rice had basically the same barrel rate (on both a per-batted ball event and per-plate appearance basis) as Oneil Cruz.

Behind Rice, there’s Everson Pereira, who turns 24 next month. He’s put up some big power numbers in the minors (where he’ll start the year), unfortunately accompanied by even bigger strikeout numbers. And the Yankees are the latest team (the fifth in the past four seasons) to shake Dominic Smith and see if another 2020 season falls out.

Anthony Santander is currently at the top of this depth chart, and I imagine he’ll spend plenty of time here. But on the days he’s out in left field, the DH spot will be in the hands of a platoon. The big spoon, as Davy Andrews has coined it, is Will Wagner, a left-handed hitting former Liberty third baseman who came to Toronto in the Yusei Kikuchi trade of 2024. Wagner is almost 27, which is old for a rookie, but considering that he was drafted in the 18th round as a college senior, he’s due some leeway. Over 83 games and 383 plate appearances at Triple-A, Wagner has just six home runs, but he also has 61 walks against just 39 strikeouts, and a .445 OBP. That freakish plate discipline didn’t translate into a 24-game cameo with Toronto last year (just four walks and 16 strikeouts), but Wagner posted a .305 batting average.

The little spoon is Davis Schneider, the diminutive, bespectacled New Jerseyan with an extreme lift-and-pull approach and some of the tightest pants in baseball. Jays fans know Schneider well, as this is the start of his third major league season. Unfortunately, he’s used up a lot of the social capital he earned with a white-hot 35-game rookie season. Now we’re looking at a guy with a career 31.4% strikeout rate, a .211 batting average, and no obvious defensive home. That last bit matters not at all for a DH, so this seems like a great place to put him.

Those three — Santander, Wagner, and Schneider — should get the lion’s share of DH reps. The other non-rotating starters to watch are rookie infielder Orelvis Martinez and second-year man Addison Barger, who hit .197/.250/.351 in 69 games last year.

Brandon Hyde has 13 position players on his roster and he will deploy them in whatever configuration he darn well pleases.

There’s gonna be some Ryan Mountcastle out here, unless he’s playing first base, in which case it could be Ryan O’Hearn, unless the Orioles are facing a lefty and need to load up on right-handed bats. In that case, they’ve got Gary Sánchez, unless they want to use El Gary at catcher, in which case Adley Rutchman could slide out from behind the plate. Like William Contreras, Rutschman’s too good a hitter to put on a standard catcher’s workload, so he’s managed to play 302 out of 324 possible games the past two seasons by making 40-plus starts at DH both years. This has the effect of a four-man platoon across three positions.

Of course, maybe the left-handed bat Hyde wants in the lineup isn’t O’Hearn’s but Heston Kjerstad’s. Obvious Kjerstad could DH, if he’s not in left field or at first base, and in the latter case that’d just kick either Mountcastle or O’Hearn back over here.

Seems simple enough to me. These guys are all good hitters; I’m not sure it matters who plays what position. Let’s move on.

Minnesota has a little bit of everything here. First, there are the superstar talents who must be shielded from injury in Byron Buxton, Carlos Correa, and Royce Lewis, who’s already going to miss Opening Day after popping his hamstring earlier this week. (The Twins have suffered through a decade of watching Buxton look like the best player who ever lived for three weeks at a time, only for it to all fall apart whenever he sneezes too hard. It is a cosmic cruelty that they’re getting the same thing with Lewis.)

Anyway, there are some slow guys to cycle through as well: Trevor Larnach, Ty France, Jose Miranda, even the occasional Ryan Jeffers appearance. DH is also an option for whoever of Willi Castro or Edouard Julien is not playing second base at the moment. Luke Keaschall is down in the minors.

This will all sort itself out in time. Lewis will not be the last one of these guys to get hurt, and France and Julien are on a short leash if they’re not hitting. If all 10 of these players are both healthy and playing well enough to demand a spot in the lineup, I’m sure Rocco Baldelli will be happy to have such a knotty problem to solve.

I don’t hate this DH situation for Cleveland, but it’d be way better if everyone involved learned to hit from the other side of the plate. David Fry, a 2024 All-Star, has just started swinging a bat again after offseason elbow surgery. The Guardians will miss him, but not as much as they would if they didn’t have Big Christmas, Jhonkensy Noel, to fill the void.

Here’s the problem: Last season, Fry had a 179 wRC+ (and a preposterous 18.2% walk rate) against left-handed pitching, but a 94 wRC+ against lefties. That’s fine for a catcher, but less than ideal for a DH. Noel, in an admittedly small sample, had a 165 wRC+ against lefties but a 95 wRC+ (and a 34.1% strikeout rate) against righties.

Cleveland’s left-handed option here is Kyle Manzardo. He also had big platoon splits, but from a lower baseline performance level: 104 wRC+ against righties, 60 against lefties. So the Guardians’ two best platoon options, Fry and Noel, not only both hit from the same side of the plate, it’s the short side of the platoon to boot.

All of this gets solved if Manzardo can flush a disappointing rookie year and make good on the promise he showed in the minors. Even as a hit-over-power first baseman, he was the no. 5 prospect in Cleveland’s system coming into last year. There’s enough thump on the other side of the plate to make this a position of strength for the Guardians if Manzardo can just scramble up to average, and he’s still too young to give up on completely.

Jorge Soler has posted a walk rate between 10% and 12% in nine consecutive seasons, and an ISO of .200 or better in seven consecutive seasons. The one time he failed to hit that mark, his ISO was .193. If you can hit for power and take a walk, you can DH most places. Whatever else you can say about the Angels, I don’t think Soler is going to be bad.

But he strikes out a lot, and his platoon splits are pretty big. He’s still perfectly competent against righties, but he doesn’t crush them the way he does lefties. Again, this is (to build on Davy Andrews’ delightful neologism) Little Spoon Syndrome. The Angels, having committed to a full-time DH on a multi-year contract, probably don’t want Soler to sit too much, but when he does get a day off, it should be against right-handed starters.

This the Angels should be able to accommodate. Yoán Moncada is a switch-hitter with pretty even platoon numbers (when he’s healthy, which is rare). Logan O’Hoppe sprays line drive mayhem all over the diamond and might need to DH some on account of fringy catcher defense, and despite being a right-handed hitter, he actually has a slight reverse split for his career. And you already know Mike Trout.

Last season, Kerry Carpenter was fourth in the league in SLG and sixth in the league in wOBA, which is absolutely incredible. (reshuffles notecards) Oh, that’s only against right-handed pitchers, and he hit .107/.194/.214 against lefties. I’ll confess to being a little confused as to how a guy can bleed almost 600 points of OPS based on the opposing pitcher’s throwing hand. I know breaking ball spin is a big thing, but like… is he facing the right way?

I guess it doesn’t matter much, because two-thirds of the time, Carpenter hits like… not even a poor man’s Aaron Judge, but a comfortable working class man’s Aaron Judge. A union electrician’s Aaron Judge, if that makes sense.

On the other side of the platoon, the Tigers have Spencer Torkelson, who has all too frequently hit like a union electrician, full stop. The 2020 no. 1 overall pick has bounced from position to position, in and out of the lineup, and eventually the Tigers are going to give up trying to get blood from this particular stone. If Tork ends up as a platoon DH, that’d be disappointing given his expectations, but it does seem like a job he can do. The former Arizona State Sun Devil posted a 122 wRC+ against lefties last year, and a 111 wRC+ over his career.

The Cardinals’ second base/DH rotation of Brendan Donovan, Alec Burleson, and Nolan Gorman is a nightmare for people who aren’t good with names and faces. They all bat left-handed, and they’re all about the same size (within an inch and 15 pounds; Donovan’s and Gorman’s listed dimensions are identical). Their batting stances are even identical from the waist up, though they do different things with their legs. (Donovan crouches, Burleson’s more upright, and Gorman has an open stance.)

One of those guys is probably going to start at DH against right-handed pitching. Thank God they wear their names on their backs.

Against lefties, the logical thing to do is to go with whichever of Willson Contreras or Luken Baker isn’t playing first base. I’m glad Baker, the Cardinals’ 2018 comp-round pick, made it to the Show. Back in 2016, I thought Baker had a remote but non-trivial chance to be a two-way star like Ohtani. I watched him throw six shutout innings against Rice and hit a ball all the way out of what was then Minute Maid Park in the same game, when he was an 18-year-old freshman. Baker hurt his arm later that season and never got around to pitching again, but he was an unbelievable college player.

The unreconstructed Josh Bell dead-ender was once a cliché; now it’s been so long since Bell was good that believing in him is more a matter of faith than science. No matter; count me among those who can’t shake the one time he hit .277 with 37 home runs and a strikeout rate under 20%. Sure, it was six years ago now, but I will never ever let it go. Mostly because whenever I try to quit on Bell, he gets hot. For example: After a sub-replacement-level first half with Miami last year, Bell posted a .361 OBP in 41 games with the Diamondbacks.

This is Bell’s second go-around in Washington, and the last time he was in DC, he played the best baseball of his life: .278/.363/.483, with 41 home runs in 247 games. If you haven’t kept up with him since he got traded to San Diego in 2022, you probably think his one-year, $6 million contract is the bargain of a lifetime. And it might be. On the other hand, Bell has been below replacement level since then. And when he signed with the Nats in February, it was the fifth time he’d changed teams in the preceding 31 months.

In other words, let’s see what Juan Yepez has got. The former Cardinal got into 62 games for the Nats last year, hitting .283/.335/.429. If he can do that over a full season, I imagine Mike Rizzo would be thrilled. But this is Bell’s job to lose, or to retain until he gets traded at a fourth consecutive deadline.

The Luis Arraez backlash is picking up steam. (Thanks for ruining everyone’s fun, Ben Clemens.) It does feel a little persnickety to question a three-time batting champion who strikes out maybe once a week. But even insofar as Arraez never walked or hit for power to begin with, he did both of those things less than ever last season. Arraez’s .078 ISO and 3.6% walk rate were both third-lowest out of 129 qualified hitters. Defensively, “stretched at second base” has devolved rapidly into Arraez splitting his time between first base and DH. As I said in the capsule about Jorge Soler, walking and hitting for power are core requirements at those positions.

With that said, the Padres don’t have a ton of pop from their other options either. Tirso Ornelas hit 23 home runs in 128 games at Triple-A last season, but 23 home runs doesn’t mean as much in the PCL as it does elsewhere. Gavin Sheets, who got promoted on Thursday, topped out at 15 home runs with the White Sox, and that was in 2022.

If it’s not Arraez, Ornelas, or Sheets at DH, the Padres can cycle through any one of half a dozen infielders at DH, including new arrival Jose Iglesias. Imagine if you could go back in time 10 years and tell people that Iglesias would be a DH option for a National League team with playoff aspirations.

The Royals are in a bit of a bind when it comes to finding a designated hitter because they really don’t have that many big league-quality hitters to begin with. This is a parking spot for whichever of Jonathan India or Michael Massey isn’t playing second base at the moment. The Royals will also want to keep Salvador Perez’s bat in the lineup as much as possible, even if he’s too old to catch 150 games a year. Again, a free DH spot is a useful thing to have, either for Perez himself, or for Vinnie Pasquantino if Perez is playing first base.

I’m going to get ever so slightly ahead of myself here and bring up the enormous Floridian stomping around the Royals’ minor league system: Jac Caglianone. As a sophomore, he took the Florida Gators to the College World Series final as a two-way player with 80-grade power and an upper-90s fastball. His game was a little crude at the time, but you can get away with that if you’re as physically gifted as Caglianone.

In 2024, Caglianone more than tripled his walk rate (to 18.4%), more than halved his strikeout rate (to 8.2%), and hit .419 with 35 homers in 66 games, his second straight 30-homer season. The Royals picked him sixth overall in the draft. Yeah, he’s a first baseman, and yeah, he’s probably not going to hit for a high average or walk that much. But the power potential is unbelievable. Caglianone jumped straight into High-A after the draft and held his own. I would not be the least bit surprised if he appeared in the majors at some point in 2025.

Just 13 months ago, I wrote an extremely optimistic post about how the Reds had more infielders than they could possibly use.

Turns out that wasn’t true for long. Matt McLain got hurt, Noelvi Marte got suspended, India got traded, Jeimer Candelario had a brutal start to his Reds career, and Christian Encarnacion-Strand was so bad I had to take a couple minutes to think over whether “abject” was too strong a word for his 2024 campaign. You be the judge: In 29 games in the big leagues, Encarnacion-Strand hit .190/.220/.293 (a 33 wRC+) and walked just four times against 35 strikeouts. Then he broke his wrist in early May and the rest of the year was a write-off.

Encarnacion-Strand, Candelario, McLain, and Spencer Steer are listed here as refugees of that infield. Even if it was a bad season all around, the Reds still have more players than positions. And trading India didn’t ease the logjam much, because the Reds brought in Gavin Lux.

Here there is some cause for optimism: Lux was a platoon bat for the Dodgers last year, but a pretty good one, especially in the second half, when he hit .304/.390/.508. The Reds would probably rather he contribute with a glove on his hand, but DH is always an option.

Arizona’s got plenty of thump at the tougher defensive positions, so to some extent it’s understandable to treat DH as an afterthought. At the same time, I think I’m more optimistic about the Diamondbacks’ DH production than our projections seem to be.

Once you filter out the starters cycling through on a half-day off (Ketel Marte, Gabriel Moreno, Eugenio Suárez), what we’ve got here is a four-player platoon across three positions, featuring Lourdes Gurriel Jr., Pavin Smith, Josh Naylor, and Randal Grichuk. Naylor and Gurriel will play every day, with Naylor at first and Gurriel in left in most cases. Grichuk can play either outfield corner or DH, while Smith can play those positions in addition to first base.

At this point in his career, Grichuk is a full-time short-side platoon bat. Last year, he hit .319/.386/.528 (a 151 wRC+) against lefties. He actually did just fine against righties too, but that’s all gravy, because Smith hit .282/.356/.564 in 135 PA against right-handed pitching. That’s a small sample, so consider the former UVA standout’s career numbers: 107 wRC+ against right-handed pitching, 66 wRC+ against left-handed pitching.

If Smith can’t be the new Joc Pederson, there’s always Adrian Del Castillo, who has grown into big power since leaving the University of Miami, and climbed as high as no. 30 on our offseason Top 100. Del Castillo has enough upside that he could end up displacing Smith even if Smith plays reasonably well, but that’s a problem for later in the season.

Seattle has a monopoly on active position players named Mitch, not that it did them a lot of good in 2024. Mitch Haniger hit .208/.286/.334 on what should’ve been a triumphant trip back up the Pacific coast, and Mitch Garver made fools of those of us who thought he would be one of the best hitters in last year’s free agent class. The former Twins and Rangers catcher hit .172/.286/.341 and struck out 30.9% of the time. Marines designated hitters ended up right at replacement level in 2024.

The plan, it seems, is to run out the Mitches once again, at least insofar as they can, as Haniger is currently dealing with a shoulder injury. That’s nothing for a guy who has “ruptured testicle” in his medical history, but it does make it hard to swing a bat.

Enter newcomer Donovan Solano. Solano’s second act as an all-offense utilityman has been one of baseball’s least explicable stories of the past half-decade, and maybe he can sprinkle some magic on this benighted lineup. At any rate, I don’t think the solution is to add Rowdy Tellez to this problem.

Wilmer Flores, who once wept at the trade deadline because he wanted to be a Met for life, is now only 39 games and 65 plate appearances from having spent more time with the Giants than with the franchise that originally signed him. He’ll probably reach those markers, but I don’t know how much more playing time he’ll get if he performs like he did last year.

Flores had posted a wRC+ of 100 or better in eight consecutive seasons, including a career-best 134 in 2023, when he face-planted last year: .206/.277/.318, with a measly four home runs in a 71-game season in which he battled patellar tendonitis. It was Flores’ first time below replacement level since his 27-game rookie campaign in 2013.

As cover for Flores, there’s hard-swinging Jerar Encarnaicon, a former Marlins prospect whom the Giants plucked from the Mexican League last year. He slugged .989 and hit 19 dingers in 26 games with Oaxaca; suffice it to say not all of that power survived the trip north, but he still hits the ball hard. San Francisco can also use Heliot Ramos, who probably shouldn’t play center field as much as he did last year, (or at all), but a 120 wRC+ with the batted ball numbers to back it up is just fine at any position.

As much as all of these predictions involve some degree of guesswork, God knows what the White Sox lineup is going to look like four months from now. If you told me they were working on a machine to bring Sherm Lollar back to life I’d believe you.

Because that’d be about as good a plan as what I’m seeing at the top of this list. The White Sox traded away three good players to get Vargas at the deadline last year. If Vargas, a middle infielder who hit .104/.217/.170 after the trade, were to put in more than 150 plate appearances at DH that’d be really bad.

And what happened to Drury last year beggars belief. He was a legitimately very good hitter in 2022 and 2023, and he was already on the Angels in 2023, so we can’t blame his nightmare 2024 season on the Curse of Tungsten Arm O’Doyle. Then, in 2024, he hit .169/.242/.228 in 97 games. Drury missed six weeks with a hamstring injury (he was hitting .173/.230/.240 when he went on the IL), but not even the White Sox would’ve given more playing time to a guy who was in such a bad slump. Even though he only played 60% of the season, Drury was the worst position player in the majors last year, by WAR.

I do like seeing Tim Elko’s name here. In 2021, Elko tore his ACL while playing for Ole Miss, played through it, and hit two grand slams to help his team advance out of the regional round of the NCAA Tournament. (Here’s the clip; if he makes the majors, you’re going to see a lot of it.) The following year, he hit 24 home runs and Ole Miss won the College World Series. “Grit” and “heart” aren’t the first two attributes I’d look for in a DH, but it’s better to have them than not.

Andrew McCutchen is entering the third year of his Dwyane Wade’s-Second-Tenure-with-the-Miami-Heat Era, and it’s going well insofar as he’s playing regularly and the fans in Pittsburgh treat him with a reverence usually reserved for football players. In 2023, McCutchen walked 15.9% of the time and posted a .378 OBP; last year, his walk rate dropped to 11.3% and his OBP to .328, which is OK out of context but subpar for a full-time DH, even one who hit 20 homers.

Look, it’s pointless to criticize McCutchen’s play. Partially because he could hit an empty .150 and still be one of the coolest players of the past 20 years. Partially because he could hit .350 and it wouldn’t matter, because the Pirates don’t have anyone to drive him in. To that point: McCutchen’s .378 OBP in 2023 was exactly the same as it was in 2019. In 2023, he scored 55 runs in 112 games and 473 plate appearances. In 2019, hitting in front of Bryce Harper and Rhys Hoskins, McCutchen scored nearly as many runs (45) in roughly half the playing time (59 games and 262 PA) before he tore his ACL.

Behind McCutchen, the Pirates can also use backup catcher Endy Rodríguez, a switch-hitter who was one of the team’s top prospects before a brutal big league debut in 2023 (65 wRC+) and a 2024 campaign that was almost entirely lost due to injury.

The projected leader in DH plate appearances is 21-year-old Deyvison De Los Santos, who’s already had an interesting career: Signed out of the Dominican Republic by the Diamondbacks in 2019, taken in the Rule 5 draft by the Guardians in 2023, then swiftly returned to Arizona, and most recently sent to Miami in the A.J. Puk trade last summer.

De Los Santos is listed at 6-foot-1, 185 pounds, but looks like he hasn’t been measured since he was a teenager. He’s got big, big raw power, as evidenced by his 40 home runs in 137 across Double- and Triple-A last year, but he never walks, even against minor league competition. He’ll be interesting to watch, but he has to make the majors first.

The incumbent DH is Jonah Bride. Bride’s path to the majors was circuitous, taking him from a junior college to three years at the University of South Carolina, where he was an OBP-over-power third baseman whose carrying tool was getting plunked. Bride wore 43 pitches in 186 Division I games; his nickname at South Carolina was “Hit-Bride-Pitch.”

Now entering his fourth season in the majors (ish — he’s spent his whole major league career with the A’s and Marlins), Bride is taking revenge on the entity that caused him so much pain: baseballs. The 28-year-old hit .276/.357/.461 in 71 games, which makes him one of Miami’s better hitters.

Matt Mervis should cycle through DH as well. He didn’t hit much in extremely limited playing time with the Cubs, but he also didn’t get enough of a chance to write him off. The Marlins bought low on Mervis over the winter, trading Vidal Bruján to get him. He’ll strike out a lot, but this is also a guy who slugged .600 in the minors like clockwork, and Miami might as well see what he can do.

Talking about Kris Bryant just makes me sad anymore, so I’m not going to do it. If you’ve followed his Rockies career, you know what’s up. If you haven’t followed his Rockies career, you can probably deduce what’s up from the fact that this is the first time you’ve heard his name since 2021.

Behind Bryant, there will be some playing time for regulars at other positions: Nolan Jones, Kyle Farmer, and Jordan Beck. If and when Bryant gets hurt (I’m not being glib; he’s played 159 games, total, over three years in Colorado), the Rockies can plug in one of their reserve outfielders at DH. There’s Hunter Goodman, who’s a career .192/.233/.409 hitter in 301 career plate appearances. A Hunter Goodman who strikes out a lot is easily confused with Hillary Duff’s Character in How I Met Your Father, who was on the hunt for a good man but struck out a lot. (Yes, I watched How I Met Your Father, and it was worth it if only to make that joke possible.)

Sean Bouchard was sub-replacement-level in 2024, but showed flashes of offensive potential (along with a propensity to swing and miss) in two previous major league cameos. He’s an option at DH as well.