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Let's get it out the way early: I am a fervent supporter of the DH, and consider it to be probably the greatest baseball innovation since the introduction of the lively ball in 1920.
I've seen all the arguments from the "purists" (who really mean they prefer a set of changes from baseball's original form up to a point that ends sometime in the early 20th century), but am unconvinced. I think baseball is better of with the DH -- or at least with one league doing each, since the existence of a controversy probably does more for the sport than if there was just boring agreement between the two leagues.
Baseball, in its ideal form, is a game of balance. This is the appeal to the purist -- 9 men playing both offense and defense, strikes and balls, the perfect symmetry of the infield. This balance and the tradeoffs that result from it are a large part of what makes the game interesting. However, when conditions in the way the game is played (beyond what is specified in the rules) causes that "Platonic" balance to be altered, baseball has never wavered from making changes to restore a competitive and interesting balance of play on the field. The number of balls and strikes have been tinkered with to find the best balance for the batter-pitcher confrontation, the infield fly rule was created to create a balance of fairness for baserunners who could be victimized arbitrarily be fielders. Foul balls were counted as strikes and hit batsmen were awarded first in response to situations where the balance of the batter-pitcher confrontation was jeopardized by a new strategy or approach to the game. There is precedent for responding via rule changes to competitive, fair, and fan-interest inadequacies in the "ideal" description of the game. The same situation exists for pitchers, which led to the creation of the DH.
For an individual player, his value comes as a combination of his offensive and defensive contributions. A slick fielder may stick around despite an anemic bat, while most teams (including the NL teams) will find a way to work a stone-handed slugger into the lineup to get his bat. However, with pitchers, their careers are solely made based on the quality of their defense, namely pitching. No pitcher who can't cut in on the mound will have a job because his bat is so good (if anything, he'll be moved to another position before reaching the majors). There's no tradeoff to make -- when the arm goes, so goes the career of the pitcher. When was the last time a pitcher made the big club ahead of superior pitchers because he was a better hitter than the rest of his competition?
Also, the inherent interest in the batter-pitcher matchup comes from the reasonable possibility that either can win this battle. The range of successes that the sport has settled upon as in roughly a .220 - .340 batting average (or the equivalent OBP/SLG/EqA). Few position players regularly hit outside this range, and those that do generally hit above it, and are regarded as superstars. It has been a long time since pitchers, as a group, have come anywhere close to this level of performance.
This creates a situation in which about 1/9th of the essential matchups of each game are uninteresting -- the pitcher on the mound can so completely dominate the matchup that the tension and expectation that goes with a typical plate appearance is absent. When the balance of success and failure is routinely gone from over a tenth of the game, baseball suffers.
The occasional and rare successes pitchers have when batting are essentally novelties, almost freak occurences that entertain only because they are unexpected from such woeful hitters. The opposing pitcher, more often than not, is seen not as the loser in the battle against a worthy opponent, but the subject of ridicule for losing to such an inferior foe. NL pitchers in the #9 slot have become the sacrificial lamb of the offensive game. The best that can be said about pitchers batting is that they interrupt the flow of the game, and allow enough time for a bathroom break (at least for those watching the game on TV).
Since they are, as a class, so inept at hitting, managers are forced to rely on the sacrifice inordinately when pitchers bat. Sacrifices are not "boring" because they are bunts, or that they are a skill play rather than a "swing for the fences" play. Rather, they are boring because one class of batters, namely NL pitchers, have no other offensive skill to bring to the plate. The regular concession of "this batter has no skill, so we'll at least try to make the out productive" is one of the most aggravating aspects of the NL game, IMO.
The usual argument against the DH at this point is a "slippery slope" tactic that says, essentially "Why stop here?" If substituting a hitter for a pitcher is good, why not do the same for shortstops? Or even go all the way to having separate offensive and defensive teams, like (gasp) FOOTBALL? :-)
The problem with this approach is that (a) no one has seriously suggested have a "designated shortstop", and (b) the magnitude of the problem with pitchers in enormously greater than with shortstops, has only gotten worse over the past 100 years, and has progressed to the point where there is *no* decision or tradeoff being made in the overwhelming majority of cases. This gets us back to the ideal of balance. When decisions about who plays a position are being made without any regard for half of the equation of baseball, the conditions of the game itself are out of balance, and the rules ought to adjust to accomodate it. Shortstops still have to hit well enough *and* field well enough to keep their job, while Hideo Nomo, for example, hit .091/.091/.091 last year, and yet there was no question but that he would keep his job coming into 1996.
The people who play the game have already determined that offense isn't important when selecting a pitcher. There's no reason to maintain an archaic "balance" between a pitcher's offense and defense when no one pays attention to it in practice. It is then better to rectify the imbalance created by removing these weak-hitting players from those tenth of all plate appearances and let someone with a fighting chance stand in against the opposition.
To understand the magnitude of the problem, consider that NL pitchers in the inflated offense of 1995 hit just .149/.184/.192 last year for a measly OPS of 377. The next worst positional average was AL shortstops, with an OPS of 687. This difference of 310 points of OPS between the worst and next worst positions is equivalent to the difference between the 1995 editions of Mo Vaughn and Royce Clayton! That's *enormous*. In fact, the gap between the 2nd worst (AL SS) and the *best* position (AL 1B) in 1995 was only 175 points of OPS. The hitting gap between pitchers and shortstops is almost *twice* the size of that between the defensive-heavy shortstops and slugging first basemen.
To look at it another way, Pat Listach (to tie in another thread) put up the *worst* OPS by a regular in 1995 (min 300 PA's), hitting just a 532 OPS. The gap between the *single* *worst* non-pitching regular player in either league and the average NL pitcher was 155 points of OPS, comparable to the offensive gap between Mo Vaughn '95 and any of Deion Sanders, Dave Hollins, John Olerud, or Chris Jones. I checked these results against the 1994 data, and the magnitude of the problem is comparable. There's nothing even vaguely approaching major league quality about the average pitcher's ability to hit.
There have been suggestions to simply drop the 9th spot in the lineup altogether, and go to a 8-man batting order (Leonard Koppett argues for this in highly-recommended "The New Thinking Fan's Guide To Baseball"). While this solves the problem of pitchers' batting, it does tear down yet another aspect of balance -- namely the 9 defensive slots and 9 offensive slots. Since I've already argued that such rules need not be eternal, I'm not going to turn around and argue for such symmetry here, other than to note that this is probably still unacceptable to the same purist line of thought that dislikes the DH.
Personally, I like having that 9th batter in there from a marketing point of view. It does the game good to be able to showcase the hitting talents of either once great all-around players or developing stars. By resting a position player at DH rather than benching him, it provides a way to give the fans what they want to see (the stars). The DH also provides a way to protect an asset like Edgar Martinez, who is probably still physically capable of playing third base, but is too fragile to rely on him on a daily basis. For all the stereotypes of one-dimensional sluggers who only swing for the fences, I think that the DH has given us some wonderful player-seasons to watch, including Jim Rice '77 (or would you have preferred Yaz to be forced into retirement?), Paul Molitor 91-94 (including a perfect 20-0 in stolen bases in 1994 -- hardly the slow-footed slugger), Hal McRae in the late 1970's, and even a all-time great like Frank Robinson had a fine year as a full-time DH late in his career. IMO, the game was better for being able to show us these great performances at the expense of at-bats for 100 pitchers who couldn't hit their weight. The 8-man lineup is an intriguing alternative to the DH, but I think the DH itself is more fan friendly.
As long as the game is unable to turn out a substantial number of players who can both hit and pitch at the major league level, I will continue to believe that the DH is a good thing. And given that in 100 years of baseball, the game has only produced a handful of even average hitters among the ranks of the quality hurlers (Babe Ruth notwithstanding), I doubt there's any danger of suppressing an upcoming generation of players who can legitimately go both ways.
Long live the DH!
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Copyright 1997-2001 by Keith Woolner. All included authors retain the copyrights to their original works.