I’ve noticed the bench as an occasional issue of discussion here, and so I thought it would be useful to do a dive into what a team can expect to need in terms of bench players and what a team can expect to get in terms of production from those players.
Expected production is where the disconnect lies around here. I like to use wRC+ not because it’s the best stat in the world or anything, but because 1), It weights on-base percentage correctly (OBP gets short shrift when we use OPS) and 2), It’s on an easily understandable scale. (I know some of you like to yell at clouds about stats that weren’t made up in the 19th century, but I think 100 as average is nice and easy to understand.)
Anyway, last year, 461 MLB players got at least 100 plate appearances. 208 of those players were average or better (100 wRC+ or higher). That’s an average of seven hitters per team. If we raise the number of required plate appearances to 400 (something approaching an everyday player who was mostly healthy), then we have 212 total players, of whom 145 (about five per team) were average or better with the bat.
Now, obviously, better teams tend to have more players who can hit. But the other take away here is that we can’t expect every hitter to be above average. This should be intuitive, but for a lot of people, it isn’t. And guys who don’t play every day, don’t play every day for a reason. Heck, even the mighty Atlanta Braves doled out nearly 200 plate appearances to Kevin Pillar, who is just not good anymore.
So it happens. The best teams are going to give playing time to subpar players because that’s how baseball works. Except in miraculous cases, teams just don’t have 13+ above average hitters to run out there. With all this established, I’d like to delve into what the Reds depth is likely to look like and who they are likely to need. Only nine guys can play every day, so which nine Reds are likely to get the most plate appearances, assuming good health? Here are my guesses from most to least obvious:
