MLB may institute a universal designated hitter in 2021. Traditionalists howl. Flash: The NL isn’t allergic to busting tradition.By Yours Truly
https://calltothepen.com/2020/01/30/mlb-designated-hitter-national-league-traditionalism/Allow me to be a big stinker for a few moments and present you a slash line from the 2019 season. The slash line is .128/.159/.163. Its owner also hit 25 home runs last year. Can you guess the owner's identity?
If you guessed the Son of Rob Deer, you have a delightfully wicked sense of humour. (And, you're only .092/.165/.279 short in the slash line and seven per 162 games short in the home runs.) But if you guessed that that was the cumulative slash line of major league pitchers batting last year, you win the Noble Prize for Extinguished Achievement.
What brings this on? "There is a growing belief amongst NL GM’s that the DH will be instituted for NL as early as 2021. FWIW." Thus
tweeted former major league general manager Jim Bowden on Monday. Causing no small social media hoopla, along the usual lines whenever the topic is raised, one line variations on the apocalypse's pending arrival and the other variations on what-took-them-so-long.
To the stubborn traditionalist, Bowden was as good as saying the Huns are coming. To the not-so-stubborn soul, it's anything but. Especially when he or she goes forth from the aforementioned cumulative slash line and isolates that of National League pitchers last year: .131/.162/.166. Those 25 home runs mentioned earlier, by the way, were hit entirely by National League pitchers, too.
Be honest. If you saw a slash line like that attached to any player other than a pitcher, you'd wonder aloud who was asleep at the switch when he was promoted even to a September call-up, never mind if he was taken north out of spring training to start a season. That type of non-pitcher had better have a skill other than periodic home runs to justify blocking another player who's turned the highest minors into his personal batting practise machine.
Yes, it's been a periodic thrill to see Madison Bumgarner send a pair over the fences on
one fine Opening Day. Yes, it was a delightful riot to watch ancient and (shall we say) portly Bartolo Colon hit
his first and only major league home run---in his 226th career at-bat, during his twentieth major league season, at age 43, and resembling a cement truck with flat inner rear tires as he ran it out.
Asking whether a couple of guys bringing down the house a couple of times a year is worth a season and maybe a postseason's worth of a wasted lineup spot is a fair question. It's not a question I ask lightly. I spent years fuming against the designated hitter myself, succumbing readily to the two arguments usually deployed against it: tradition and strategy.
But at long enough last, I understand that both stand on particularly shaky territory. Tradition shouldn't be dismissed without cause, but here's a bulletin: The National League has never been allergic to disposing of tradition.
The American League introduced the DH in 1973. Seven years earlier, tradition took a dive on a National League field, when the Houston Astros introduced first indoor baseball (the Astrodome, which Yankee-turned-Astro Joe Pepitone dubbed "the world's biggest hair dryer" when he first saw the joint) and then rug ball (installed when the specially-bred grass proved unsustainable). In due course rug ball scattered around both leagues but yes, the National League started it. The howling traditionalists decrying the DH forgot that one.
Once upon a time, too, tradition also included that no non-white player was to be allowed into major league baseball and its minor league affiliations. I'm reasonably certain that the "traditionalists" now demanding the DH be kept from (one of their words) poisoning the National League would not wish to see that disgraceful tradition restored. Did I mention it was a National League team breaking that tradition first, with a Brooklyn Dodger infielder named Jackie Robinson?
Time was when the batting helmet was anything but a tradition, with scattered experiments and no mandates even for safety, until---you guessed it---a
National League team just
had to get cute. The ever forward-thinking Branch Rickey mandated batting helmets for his Pittsburgh Pirate hitters starting in 1953. It wasn't (and still isn't) entirely foolproof, never mind the changes it's undergone in the decades since, but it's been a blessing. Especially if you have to stand in at the plate against a pitcher who can throw at three-figure speeds but whose GPS is out of tune.
Tradition once kept major league baseball at play strictly during daylight hours, never mind that assorted minor league teams and at least one Negro Leagues team (the Kansas City Monarchs, in 1930) played scattered night games. Then, on May 24, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt punched a specially-rigged button in the White House and the lights went on in Crosley Field, Cincinnati---for the majors' first night game, between the Reds and the Philadelphia Phillies. The Reds won, 2-1. Take us out to a night game.
The designated hitter was a National League brainchild in the first place, too. And, yes, you can look it up, as baseball's official historian John Thorn
did when a reader (who opposed the DH) asked after its origins the last time the National League pondered it. (2016.) The idea was born in a temple; specifically, the intellectual temple of William Chase Temple, who owned the Pittsburgh Pirates in the late nineteenth century.
"There had been a widespread concern among baseball men with the game’s declining offense," Thorn wrote of that period, prompting Temple to suggest to his fellow National League owners a permanent pinch-hitter for the pitcher in 1892, after the league expanded to accept four teams from the ancient, fallen American Association. The vote was 7-5 in favour of Temple's idea but it wasn't a margin large enough to pass it. But still.
The American League first thought about a designated hitter until 1906. That's when Connie Mack got tired of watching his Philadelphia Athletics pitchers such as Hall of Famers Chief Bender and Eddie Plank swinging at the plate as though with cardboard tubes instead of bats. Mack couldn't take the DH idea anywhere then, but the National League, those stubborn "traditionalists," took it up again in 1928. The league's president John Heydler proposed it, but the American League turned it down. The National League tried it in a few spring training games before rejecting it then.
You can point to any number of arguments against the one that says the DH erodes strategy. "The theory,"
wrote George F. Will in 1986, in a column in which he finally dropped his own opposition to the DH, "is that when pitchers must bat, managers must be Aristotles, deciding when to remove pitchers for pinch hitters, or when to have pitchers bunt."
Remove the pitcher from the batting order and managers must still be Aristotles. What to do with the order without the pitcher but with an extra, bona-fide hitter available to them? Do we have more than one leadoff type whom we can bat ninth and give ourselves the next best thing to two table setters? (Several teams have, in fact, thought just that, and made it work.) What are the chances that we can get a number eight hitter who turns the slot into something as good as a second cleanup hitter?
Managers would have to become six parts Aristotle and half a dozen parts Thomas J. Watson, the genius who made IBM truly international, guiding the company to greatness by innovation. Don't say it as if it would be something terrible. (The single-word IBM motto under Watson's stewardship: Think.) Never mind Crash Davis admonishing Nuke LaLoosh (in
Bull Durham), "Don't think, it'll only hurt the ball club." The thinking person's game
requires thinking. A lot of it.
I've said it before: Baseball's single most automatic out is the pitcher at the plate, and it's been that way for too long, the aforementioned (and extremely occasional) thrills notwithstanding. (Don't let Shohei Ohtani fool you. There may be a tiny contingent of two-way players on the horizon, but that's all it is, a tiny contingent. And Ohtani doesn't bat during the games he pitches.)
Since the DH’s original American League advent, it went all the way down to junior high schools, never mind college and the minors, so pitchers going untrained even minimally with a bat or on the bases didn’t begin with the turn of this century or the last one. The world hasn’t imploded because of it. If the world implodes, it’ll be for reasons having nothing to do with whether you don’t get to see Bumgarner (.177/.228/.303), Jacob deGrom (.189/.226/.237), Clayton Kershaw (.159/.203/.183), Max Scherzer (.193/.221/.215), or Stephen Strasburg (.152/.196/.200) at the plate.
(Speaking of Scherzer and Strasburg: As the man on the radio once said, leave us not forget. The Washington Nationals, the defending world champion Nats, won the World Series entirely on the road. In the American League park. Where they were compelled by the rules to play with a designated hitter. I don't think the Nats are going to ask for or accept an asterisk upon their triumph because they didn't win any of those games playing "traditional" National League baseball.)
That was
how long the Chicago Cubs clung stubbornly to daytime baseball until they, too, finally surrendered? P.S. They won their first World Series since an earlier Roosevelt administration under the lights. If the world and Chicago survived Wrigley Field under the lights and the Cubs
winning a World Series likewise (they forced Game Six under the Wrigley lights and won the other three in Cleveland at night), the world will survive with the National League adopting the DH.
Put the tradition argument to bed, once and for all. There are traditions worth keeping and traditions worth eroding. (This nation once fought a civil war on behalf of ending one very much worth eradicating.) The National League broke four traditions referenced above, and only one (artifical turf) was a terrible break. Introducing the DH would raise its tradition-busting batting average to .800. Real hitters would ponder homicide for a batting average half that.
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