I'm hearing a lot of clamoring from the Red Sox fans to sit David Ortiz in favor of Mike Lowell or to at least put both players in a platoon at the DH spot. I'll say this much--Mike Lowell is still a good hitter and its a shame to keep him on the bench full-time. However, if they platoon these guys, then they'll have two veterans accustomed to playing every day who are now part-time players. I would think it's a better option to trade Mike Lowell and hope that Ortiz comes around. It's easy to forget that he was awesome for the last 3.5 months of last season.

Anyway, this got me to wondering how many true DH platoons there have been. Since its inception in 1973, here are the teams that have had more than 1 player with at least 50 games at DH:

There have been 33 such cases. Many of these clearly are not platoons in the traditional sense. The 2004 Yankees, for example, played Bernie Williams mostly in the outfield but gave him occasional spells at DH. The rest of the time, Ruben Sierra DHed, with a few dozen games also going to Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield. But this was a case of a team with a lot of aging players and Joe Torre trying to get them all a little bit of rest. This was not a case of a manager choosing to play one guy against some pitchers and another guy against a different set of pitchers.

The Royals of 1984-1986 famously platooned Hal McRae and Jorge Orta at DH and those seasons show up here. In 1985 and 1986, neither McRae nor Orta played a single game in the field. Think about how weird that would be today--to carry 2 guys on the team who both appeared in at least 50 games but never played an inning in the field. In 1987 the Royals actually had 3 guys plays exclusively at DH--McRae, Orta, and Jim Eisenreich (but none of them had 50 games at the spot so that team doesn't make the list above.)

Please add your thoughts in the comments about which of these cases were true DH platoons.

This entry was posted on Friday, April 9th, 2010 at 7:35 am and is filed under Game Finders. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.