Apparently Ryan Doumit was Terrible
It’s a myth that no one realized smoking was unhealthy. People knew tobacco was dangerous a long time ago. It’s really common sense; the act of inhaling smoke into your lungs repeatedly simply must have a negative effect. It’s just a matter of degree. People knew tobacco was dangerous 100 years ago, but not how dangerous.
When Ryan Doumit was an active player, we knew he was an awful defensive catcher. It was plain to behold. However, just as with smokers of yesteryear, we didn’t realize just how bad his defense really was.
Ryan Doumit was the worst defensive player we’ve ever seen in MLB.
Remember Ryan Doumit?
Doumit was a major leaguer for parts of ten seasons from 2005-2014. He spent most of that time with the Pittsburgh Pirates, but also played for the Minnesota Twins and Atlanta Braves.
The reason for Doumit’s longevity was evident in his bat. The 6’1, 220 lb. switch-hitter finished his career with a .264/.324/.432 batting line. His 101 wRC+ suggests he was almost exactly a league average hitter overall, though his career high was an impressive 133.
While 100 wRC+ is league average, and Doumit’s 101 is just one percent above, this is independent of positional adjustments. On the whole, catchers always hit significantly worse than average. In the span of Doumit’s career, catchers averaged between 84-95 wRC+. Therefore, Doumit was a substantially above average hitter for his position.
The problem was always his defense. Playing mostly in the NL with no DH, Doumit was pretty much stuck behind the plate. He spent some time at first base and the outfield corners, but the bar for offense is much higher at those spots. Besides, his defense certainly didn’t look good at his secondary positions, either. As such, he spent his career as an offense-first catcher.
Doumit was framed!
In a way, Doumit’s timing was perfect. Had he been born a little later, his career would have come after the pitch framing revelation of the sabermetric movement. Which is to say, he might not have had much of a career at all.
Pitch framing was once thought of as an afterthought for catcher defense. How well a player blocked pitches in the dirt and gunned down base stealers mostly determined his perceived defensive value. Now, we know that framing is exponentially more important.
On March 20, FanGraphs added framing to their player valuations. As stated in the linked article, no player was hurt from this change more than Doumit. His career fWAR dropped by 16.1. In 2008 alone, it decreased by 5.7!
FanGraphs’ framing data goes back to 2008- Doumit’s third major league season. In 2007, he posted 2.1 fWAR, which gives an indication of what kind of player he was before framing is taken into consideration. When framing enters the equation, his fWAR dropped to -2.8 the next season, despite nearly doubling his playing time with a strong 123 wRC+.
2008 was the beginning of seven consecutive seasons of negative fWAR. We have to assume that with framing factored in, he would have been negative from 2005-2007 as well. Likely, he was below replacement level for every season of his ten-year career, yet still managed to stick around because nobody realized how drastically he was hurting his team.
Doumit’s Inafamy
Here are the worst position players in MLB history according to fWAR:
| Player | Career Span | fWAR | wRC+ |
| Bill Bergen | 1901-1911 | -16.2 | 22 |
| Doug Flynn | 1975-1985 | -8.4 | 52 |
| Jim Levey | 1930-1933 | -8.2 | 45 |
| Ryan Doumit | 2005-2014 | -7.7 | 101 |
In spite of his MLB average offense, Doumit’s defense was so abject that he now owns the fourth worst career fWAR in the history of baseball. Prior to the framing update, his fWAR was 8.4.
It’s almost impossible to comprehend how unimaginably abysmal a player has to be at defense to accrue -7.7 fWAR with 101 wRC+. The next worst player after Doumit with at least 101 wRC+ is Bob Chance, a first baseman and right fielder from the 1960s.
Chance has -0.5 career fWAR with 103 wRC+. He is the 1,767th worst player in baseball history by fWAR. Doumit and Chance are the two worst players ever with above average offense and they are separated by 7.2 fWAR. There are 1,764 poor-hitting players between them!
If Doumit played today, there’s no way he would accrue so much negative value. With a pretty decent bat, he’d never get anywhere near the high minors before switching positions. Maybe he wouldn’t have lasted ten years, but he probably still would have had a major league career, most likely as a first baseman/designated hitter.
Notorious chainsmoker Jim Leyland managed the Pirates from 1986-1996. He never managed Doumit, who was selected in the second round of the 1999 draft. It’s for the best that their careers never coincided; Leyland’s tobacco intake might have become unsustainable. Even with the data-free ignorance of the past, surely we’d have seen that smoking and historically awful pitch framing are both dangerous for managers.
