Should the Cubs use Nick Madrigal as a designated hitter?

A recent article in The Athletic (subscription required) by Sahadev Sharma suggested in passing that the Chicago Cubs should use Nick Madrigal as a designated hitter. “That’s … unorthodox,” is the radio edit of my first reaction. But on further review, it’s a pretty intriguing idea. Like Sharma, I’m assuming the universal DH is coming in the new CBA.

Nick Madrigal is, as Cubbies Crib recently observed, “a unicorn.”  In an era of the three true outcome hitter, Madrigal avoids those outcomes like vampires avoid running water.  Throughout his professional career he has a home run rate of 0.6 percent, a walk rate of 6.4 percent, and a strikeout rate of 4.4 percent. In his brief time in the majors, he’s kept the same homer rate, while the BB rate is down a bit (4.6 percent) and the K rate is up (7.4 percent).

To put those numbers in perspective, the homer and walk rates are typical of the first dead ball era. To find an equivalent to his professional career K rate, you have to go back to 1899, before the National League adopted the foul strike rule. Even his major league strikeout rate would have been better than average in the 1900s. If he shows up for work in 2022 with baggy pants and a tiny mitt, we’ll have to suspect he’s a time traveler.

So Madrigal is hardly a stereotypical DH candidate.  Madrigal’s major league ISO is .089, an extremely rare figure for a designated hitter. Since the American League’s adoption of the DH in 1973, there have been 293 qualifying DH player-seasons. Of those, in just six did the hitters have an ISO of .089 or less. Five of those involved players in their 30s; the sixth was Mitchell Page’s disastrous plunge into irrelevance at age 27. Most of the DH seasons involve the type of solid corner-power production you would expect; these guys are the155s of the baseball world.

But it’s not always wrong to be atypical. Thanks to excellent contact skills, Madrigal gets on base fairly routinely. His career OBP is .358; compare that to last season’s league-wide OBP of .317. In the minors, Madrigal reached base at a .371 rate. He has a career wRC+ of 113, which would have put him right in the middle of qualifying DHs last season.

And perhaps most helpful of all, Madrigal will work cheap. Under the just-expired CBA, Madrigal would have been eligible for arbitration in 2023 and free agency in 2027. Those dates may move a little, but probably not much. His lack of power may hold down his arbitration salary, so he could be very affordable for several years.

The designated hitter is an odd roster phenomenon: a player who takes up a full non-pitcher slot while only playing at most half of the game (the offensive half). It seems like a position where teams would find economizing especially useful, yet DHs are, on average, the highest paid players in the game. By one measure, they are also the most overvalued.

Chicago Cubs: Nick Madrigal would certainly be a unique designated hitter

There are probably some termites in that wood. Unlike, say relievers, the DH universe is not crowded with minimum wage roster ballast that would bring the average down. Designated hitters tend to be older, and therefore better paid in a system that is still (for now, at least) skewed toward seniority. But the DH does seem to be a position where teams can be particularly insistent that the occupant is either very good or very cheap.

In his brief major league career Madrigal, according to most fielding metrics, has not been great with glove at second. He’s played very few other positions during his college or pro days. So making him the Cubs’ primary DH could be an innovative solution.

If the Cubs intend to compete quickly, they can put the money they aren’t paying an expensive DH to better use. And if the Cubs are taking the dreaded “step back,” Madrigal can provide some cost effective run creation at the top while the front office figures the rest of the lineup out. Perhaps The Unicorn Leads Off will be the feel good baseball movie of the next decade.