I’m sad to say that I was very disappointed with today’s column (What is the “Designated Hitter” rule in baseball?). I really don’t want to see Cecil wasting his time on questions that I could answer myself.
I do have to admit that the line Bill James has done for baseball what Aquinas did for God almost makes the whole column worthwhile, but I still felt there was really something lacking. I guess he let us know right off the bat that he was mailing it in this week, but I don’t like to see Unca Cece dogging it!
To some extent I agree. Cecil writes: “You may ask: Why on earth would the game pitcher pinch-hit for the DH? The whole point of the DH is to avoid making the pitcher bat. Answer: Obviously the rule makers were trying to cover all the bases, you should pardon the expression, by anticipating every potential (if unlikely) managerial move.”
Ok…what unlikely managerial moves might those be? I have read of possibilities in baseball that stretch belief (more theoretically possible than actually possible) but it is far beyond me to come up with those possibilities myself. In the interests of my laziness can anyone shed light on what tricks managers might get up to if the rule wasn’t written as it is?
Actually, it’s not all that tremendously unlikely, and not mentioning how it normally happens was a major oversight.
Simply put, let’s say you only have two guys on the team whom you feel comfortable playing at catcher (or any other position, doesn’t matter). Today, you played one of them at catcher, and you used the other one as the DH. Now the guy who’s catching gets hurt. Whoops! In that case, you would probably move the DH to catcher. It forfeits the DH and the pitcher then has to hit, but you’d probably do it anyway.
So basically, whenever you need the guy you’re playing at DH to field a position, this rule comes into play.
Why do they care? Why not allow the DH to play a defensive position and designate some other schlub to be the DH? Presumably the DH is the best hitter you have and likely not so well rounded out in other aspects of the game. If you feel like fielding him and putting a likely worse hitter in the DH spot as replacement why would anyone care? In short I don’t see how this is a potential ‘abuse’ of the DH and something opposing teams would really care about anyway (especially since they could presumably do the same thing).
I think you’re misunderstanding that passage, what he was saying was they wrote the rule to cover a situation that a manager wouldn’t enter into voluntarily just in case it happens. Not that they wrote it to prevent it from being abused. The question he posed was, why is there a rule about what happens when the DH plays in the field because why would you want your DH to play in the field. The answer was they wrote the rule to cover all eventualities.
As to why they chose to penalize the team that plays the DH in the field by eliminating the DH role – now there is a question worthy of the Master.
Diatribes could be written about this by “purists” as myself. I’ll spare you though. The main gripe about the DH rule among those that don’t like it is that it undermines the completeness of the individual players. If “only serious batters shall bat” is a philosophy that baseball wants to follow, then why not field 27 starting players? 9 to field, 9 to bat, and 9 to run the bases. The reason is because baseball is about, among other things, the “weak” links and how a manager chooses to deal with them. For intance, a pitcher with a moderately high ERA but batting .200 stands the chance of sharing equal ground with a pitcher that has a low ERA but bats .077. This scenario may also affect the manager’s decision whether to bring in a pinch hitter or not. This is all, however, academic. The reality is that the rule will now never go away, as the players association won’t allow it. The rule allows many players that would have since retired to remain active.
The DH is a rinky dink allowance. It’s the kind of rule a kid like Eddie Haskell would invent midway through a game he just made up, to give himself or his team an advantage.
I also think soccer would be a lot more interesting to watch if they’d get rid of the offsides rule. Make it more like basketball.
No, Mole, this rule isn’t designed to prevent a trick but to allow one. It makes it clear that, if at some point during the game, you want to stop using your DH, and switch to having your pitcher bat instead, you may do so. But if you do so once, you must do so from that point forward.
I wish to state for the record that I once witnessed the pitcher “pinch hitting” for the designated hitter, and duly recorded the fact for posterity in my scorecard. I won’t bore you with the details.
**Basketball has the three-second rule for similar reasons.
Soccer would be impossible without the offsides rule. Basketball isn’t a fair comparison because the scale is radically different. Not only that, the offsides rule actually introduces an additional level of strategy into the game that would be lacking otherwise.
My father’s opposition to the DH rule is founded on the idea that it takes away the cyclical nature of the game that’s based on the lineup. We’re Red Sox fans, so we see this phenomenon firsthand – our 9th place hitter (Varitek) would be a middle-of-the-lineup guy on a lot of clubs.
Does the rule say the DH has to bat for the pitcher? Or can he bat for any player? I was always under the impression that it was the latter case, but the quotes from the rule Cecil gave seem to indicate it’s the former.
I’ve always wondered that too, dtlique. Rule 6.10b specifically uses the phrase “a designated hitter for the pitcher.” But it also says that the position is not mandatory and it doesn’t explicitly forbid manager’s from DHing for, say, a Rey Ordonez-type hitter.
There has occasionally been some discussion among sportscasters since interleague first started in '95 that teams with decent hitting pitchers (like Mike Hampton or Darren Dreifort, in rare instances when he’s not injured) might want to DH for a slumping infielder instead of the pitcher. However, to date, no manager has tried it. I’m holding out hope that Tony LaRussa might some day. He is a self-proclaimed genius, after all.
However, you don’t want to be the guy in the clubhouse who just got DH’d for while the pitcher batted.
Anyway, above all, the DH is a bad rule and baseball would be better off without it. Despite the almighty Bill James’ claims to the contrary, it does hurt “strategy” since the most important strategic decisions a manager makes involve pitching substitutions. The DH has dilluted that decision-making process.
There are only two choices–no DH at all, or a DH for the pitcher. You cannot DH for any other player.
This refers to the portion of the rule which states,
I’ve never read a solid reason for this rule. No other position is “locked into” the batting order; in the National League, of course, they do double switches with the pitcher and a defensive position all the time.
All I can suggest is that this reflects uneasiness with the concept when the DH was created. Without this rule, you could, for example, pinch-hit for your shortstop, have the pinch-hitter remain in the game as the DH, and have your former DH take the field as shortstop. That somehow would violate the Zen of the DH concept. Or something.
Everyone (except Dogfaceand BooksWoods) who has quarreled with the DH in this thread has done so on the basis of how it weakens the “strategic prosecution” of the game.
Baseball is a gift to mankind from GOD. In its most divine and heavenly form, it is played by children. And let there be no mistake, there are moral lessons to be learned in its proper play. One of those moral lessons involves the concepts of delayed gratification, earning one’s privileges, and taking one’s proper turn at exercising a privilege. The privilege of which I speak is taking a turn at bat. Just as, according to cliche, the most difficult athletic feat to accomplish is to successfully hit a [competently, one presumes] thrown baseball with a baseball bat, the highest privilege is to be allowed to make the attempt (the reason that regular-rules pinch hitting does not undermine this lesson is because it is allowed as a strategic measure, and the player who benefits from the exception is only allowed to take ONE unearned at-bat). The privilege of batting in a regular order must be EARNED by the player, by putting in the time on the defensive field.
That grown men who are, for better or for worse, paid millions of dollars per year to play this game of the gods, are allowed to flout this moral principle is why it became impossible for me to support, or even to follow the fortunes of, an American League team since 1973. The fact that in alternate years, the National League contender for the World Championship was forced to play against a team that was engaging in this abominable practice, was difficult to accept, but because the Dodgers weren’t the contenders very often between 1973 and 1995, the issue wasn’t that bothersome to me, on account of my not having any use for a postseason when Los Angeles wasn’t involved. Then came 1995 and regular Season Interleague play, an abomination all its own, for similar reasons, and I had to give up following the Major Leagues altogether. The Dodgers being sold to the AntiChrist confirmed that I had done the right thing.
The rule specifically states that the DH must hit for the pitcher (rule 6.10 (b)).
As to the moves it’s meant to avoid, consider the following; if a DH were not locked from unlimited switching, you could have a situation where a manager could legally hold up the game after every single batter by switching his DH with a player in the field.
Personally, I like the DH, always have. The notion that baseball is somehow perfect the way it was played in 1972 is kind of stupid. Baseball is just a collection of rules, and some of the rules could use tweaking - I can think of half a dozen rules I’d like to see changed, and I’m not talking about stupid “put land mines in the outfield” stuff. Getting pitchers out of the game and getting professionals up to bat, IMHO, makes the game more enjoyable. I’d rather see Paul Molitor or Edgar Martinez hit than some .140 hitter.
Furthermore, having the DH rule in one league and not the other is also pretty cool. I LIKE having two distinct leagues with slightly different rules. I like having the teams have to adapt their lineups when playing in the other league’s park. It’s like having all the parks be slightly different.
I’m actually the guy who sent the letter that Cecil replied to, and I’m honestly a little dissapointed in his response. This thread goes into more depth about the DH than his column did. I would have expected him to talk about the various rules involved in moving the pitcher to a different fielding position, having a current fielder hit for the pitcher…
It pains me to say this about Cecil, but he could have done better.
This goes to the root of our fundamental disagreement You seem to see baseball as something that is primarily there to watch other people play. I view the game as one that should be played by EVERYBODY. Spectating is morally dubious, acceptable only with a tacit understanding that the watchers would prefer, in their heart of hearts, to be playing.
Nonsense (well, not nonsense, really, since I am addressing an issue of your subjective personal preference. I need to use a term that allows me to dismiss your personal preference in this issue as inconsequential. How about piffle? Works for me.). Piffle. If the leagues HAVE to be different in some aspect, simply for the sake of being different, let the American League play with red, white, and blue baseballs, much like the ABA used to do with basketballs.
When the designated hitter rule was introduced in the winter of 1972, there was a lot of hesitancy about it. So to assuage some of the opponents, there were a lot of restrictions placed on it.
That’s why it has to be for the pitcher. That is why it is locked into a slot in the batting order. That’s why the DH can’t go in to play the field one inning, then get replaced and go back to being a DH.
As for the theory that the DH rule encourages more HBPs in the AL than in the NL, I’ve never found anyone who has looked at HBP data and shown that there is any connection.
I watch a lot of baseball and I’ve never been able to tell that there are more bench-clearing incidents or brawls incited by beanballs in AL games than NL games. Neither happen with enough frequency to create a meaningful sample.