Defending the Designated Hitter

Baseball purists--and my brother in particular--may have freaked out when I suggested in my post of May 7 that all leagues adopt the DH. This is one of the Great Debates of the Modern Game, and I enter it whenever possible. Nobody seems on the fence on this issue; everyone either loves it or hates it. Me, I love it.

I think the DH argument ultimately comes down to a philosophical disagreement as to what baseball is "about"--is it really "about nine players who take their turns both in the field and at the bat," or is it really about watching a game that's as exciting and interesting as possible, one in which anything may truly happen, instead of a rigidly followed set of circumstances sometimes mistakenly called "strategy"?

Whether one accepts the DH comes down to whether one is a strict-constructionist, sticking passionately to some mythical original intention of Cartwright and his fellow early "base-ball" players (hey, we've eliminated the hyphen! Sacrilege!), or whether one is willing to offer some flexibility in order to recognize the changes that have occurred in the game, and react accordingly. In its substance, as well as its polarizing nature, the disagreement is akin to Constitutional debates about the supposed intention of our Founding Fathers, who had no notion of the internet, automobiles, space travel, or even a country where women could vote and nonwhite people were free from chattel slavery.

We have already come to a place where pitching is an extremely specialized skill, where we no longer expect a starter to finish a game, nor do we expect him to return to pitching a game until three or four days have elapsed. We have LOOGYs (Lefty One Out Guys), setup men and closers, guys who are regularly called upon for an inning or just an out. Pitching is a skill that has become far more difficult than Cartwright or his fellow players could ever have imagined.

Hitters can regularly play for decades, and offer far more predictable output than pitchers do; the career trajectory of a pitcher, like a football running back, is typically brief and falls as sharply as it rises. Pitchers suffer from irregularities ranging from the physical (TJ surgery is now so common that young pitchers are electing to undergo the procedure proactively) to the positional (tweaking grips, positions on the rubber, windups) to the psychological (see Ankiel, Rick). Hitters may suffer the same problems, but on a much less widespread scale.

Pitching has only become far more difficult through the years; it is now, perhaps, the most difficult skill in baseball. Its only possible competition for that title is hitting, and no great pitcher has ever also been a great hitter in the history of baseball. None. Babe Ruth could not do both simultaneously, not even in an era when pitchers tossed complete games and regularly pitched back-to-back games, even both heads of a doubleheader. Even those pitchers we give the title "good hitter" to have lines far below the Mendoza. It's rare to find someone who can do either one well and consistently, and yet the non-DHers expects us to find someone who can do both, a lightning-strikes-twice occurrence that has (very arguably) happened only once, and only briefly, with the Bambino, possibly the greatest player in the history of the game.

The DH is not a concession to the notion that pitchers can't hit well; it's a concession to the fact that pitchers can't hit at all, and have not ever been able to, not since pitching became more than an underhanded toss to the location demanded by the batter, as it was in the Days of Yore. If you really want to stick to what baseball's "about" from a strict-constructionist perspective, let's go with that definition of pitcher, and maybe then we'll have a guy who can wield the stick with authority, instead of cheering for the occasional rubber arm who can also lay down an adequate bunt.

The shrewd managerial moves which anti-DHers so often crow about are not only not shrewd, they are moves demanded by the fact that pitchers can't hit. They are available to AL managers, too, and they sometimes use them, but only when the game circumstances truly demand it, and not when their hands are forced by a pitcher who can't hit their weight. That's not strategy, that's a workaround to a situation that has become untenable; even the notion that nine men are "taking turns" at the bat becomes ludicrous when that turn is so often removed from them (by substitution or let-the-moron-bunt strategy) because they don't seem to know what to do with it.

One might argue that we may someday reach the place where pitchers can hit, but we haven't done it so far in the 150 years or so of baseball, even as other traditionally light-hitting positions have beefed up considerably. What hope is there for the future?

The point is, in many ways, moot. We live in an era where pitchers do not, in fact, get substantial hitting at any professional level until the major leagues. Only in high school and college (The Lands of The Lively Aluminum Bat) do pitchers hit well, and those that do often become position players. Reversing the DH would not only mean taking on the mighty Players' Union (who love it for the longevity it gives to players) but completely restructuring our minor league systems (which all use a DH) and retraining our pitchers.

For what? A guy who can finally hit .200 and knows instinctively which end of the bat to hold? Yahoo. That's not baseball; that's allegiance to a cause whose time has long since past, if it ever was. If we want to play Cartwright's game, let's also go back to bats with no discernible handle and balls as soft as eiderdown, in a game where infielders stand on their bases, catchers wear absolutely no gear, pitchers toss at sixty feet from no mound and spectators sit in the outfield, so impossible is the chance that someone will hit a ball far enough to interfere with their lazy Sunday afternoon at the ball-fields.

When the game is over, we'll hop in our horseless carriages and go home to stoke up a fire to chase off the chills of spring and hope to God we don't get smallpox. Ah, that feels better, doesn't it?