So then we should be happy to allow the outcome of games to be determined in advance and let the players work out their plays in rehearsal.
If a game is nothing but entertainment like a film, then every game should be like professional wrestling.
Pitchers do work on their hitting. They aren’t good at it largely for the same reason Richard Sherman, the Seahawks defensive back, isn’t good at punting; it’s not the skill set that got them to where they are.
A pitcher’s hitting is simply not an important part of their skillset so the natural selection process of pitchers getting to the majors is such that they are not likely to be MLB quality hitters, just as most adult men are not. Obviously there is more crossover between good pitchers and good hitters than, say, good accountants and good hitters. But not that much more.
Most pitchers could quadruple the batting practice they take, and they’d still be terrible hitters; the truth is there’s a point at which they’d be tiring themselves out taking extra hitting practice, for no measurable benefit.
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Add to the above the fact that being a world-class pitcher doesn’t keep you from being a pretty good hitter as well. Just ask anybody who thought Mad Bum or Kersh was an easy out.
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Madison Bumgarner is a terrible hitter; for his career he has a season’s worth of at bats and he’s batting .184. He’s hit 16 home runs but he’s still pretty awful. If he was a position player he would be the worst player in the major leagues.
Clayton Kershaw is ten times worse than Bumgarner so I don’t know why he was even mentioned.
There are a few pitchers who, if you forced them to play first base and hit full time, might be decent hitters; after all, Madison Bumgarner and Marcus Stroman are athletes and grew up playing baseball. But there’s no Babe Ruths around right now.
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Having said that, this is a King of Baseball thread. If someone as King wanted rid of the DH that’s the point of the thread. If they don’t they don’t. Let’s cool the jets a little before this gets personal.
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Bumgarner is a career .184 hitter. Kershaw is .152. By all metrics they are terrible hitters. But Bumgarner hits home runs! Yes- 16 home runs in 480 at bats with .184 average, .233 obp and .552 ops is awful. Better then Kershaw and most other pitchers to be sure, but still…awful
Well if you don’t find baseball entertaining, I wonder why you bother to watch. Of course it’s entertainment, and it would not be nearly so much if the outcome were known in advance. There are different kinds of entertainment.
That’s exactly my point. That’s why the analogy to film stuntmen is nonsense. Note that I said "nothing but entertainment like a film. It’s entertainment, but it’s not like a film.
I’m entertained by players who have to play in the field AND come up to bat. I’m not entertained by watching some fat aging slugger who only bats as a DH because he’s not good enough defensively to be in the field. Therefore, the DH rule does NOT add to my enjoyment of the game.
OK got it. You don’t like to watch the Detroit Tigers and Victor Martinez, the only DH who has not played the field this year. And some of them aren’t even the back up first baseman, the spot usually thought to take the weakest fielder. Any time you’re going to have a DH, somebody is not going to play a field position. That doesn’t mean they can’t or that they are fat or old. In fact, I’ll bet there are quite a few pitchers who are fatter than many regular DHs.
And just how many fat aging stars do you think DH in the minors?
There really aren’t many “fat, aging” DHs around, and never have been. MLB players are better athletes than you think, and fat players - especially position players - usually don’t last.
Seriously, how many fat hitters lasted past their early 30s? It’s a damn short list. The fattest good player I can think of was Prince Fielder, an excellent hitter and a better athlete than you’d expect, but he was done at age 32. Mo Vaughn missed his age 33 year entirely, ha da decent year at age 34, and could not make it through the next season. Pablo Sandoval is 31 and appears to be done.
The only guy who was fat who lasted a long time I can think of offhand was David Ortiz, but Ortiz actually lost weight in his 30s, and I’m quite convinced that had a lot to do with his durability. And he wasn’t nearly as fat as Prince Fielder, of course.
If I can make one more argument for the DH, consider this;** it probably improves the quality of play**.
For players to be skilled hitters, they must face skilled pitching. Live at bats in game situations are a critical part of a young hitter’s development, and are a necessary thing for a veteran to keep sharp. That’s why teams will sometimes elect to use a veteran over a prospect as a backup on the MLB team, even if the younger man is a better player; they don’t want the prospect wasting time on a bench when he could be getting at bats.
If pitchers hit, you are effectively saying that a significantly percentage of all at bats - it’s not 11 percent, but it’s got to be at least 5 or 6 - will be handed to players who aren’t good hitters and never will be. By using the DH, you give those at bats to players who need them. You’re also giving MLB at bats to players it MATTERS to. It’s not going to do anything for Sean Manaea to make him hit; it really has nothing to do with his career or how much success he will have. But those at bats do a lot for Ryon Healy, one of Oakland’s DHs this year, whose job it is to hit, and who needs those at bats to learn how to hit MLB pitching.
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Un-juice the ball already.
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In fact, deaden the ball even more compared to the 2015 status quo. Doubles are more exciting than home runs. [Eventually this may lead to severely deadening the ball and lowering the pitcher’s mound or otherwise creating more fielding moments without lowering overall scoring]
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Batters can wear armor on their elbows, wrists, shoulders, hips, or anywhere else they want. However, any ball striking armor, except the helmet, will not be considered to have struck the batter (so it’s merely a ball, or strike if in the zone, not a hit-by-pitch). Fair is fair.
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Umpires will be publicly reminded that granting time to a batter is at the umpire’s discretion, and should be done more than once per at-bat only in extraordinary circumstances. At the same time, there will be a reminder of the rule about delivering the pitch on time.
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The King of Baseball will be studying the DH issue, in anticipation of issuing an edict [Not that it will be publicly admitted, but this is purely to encourage debate, controversy, and otherwise draw attention to MLB]. (Honestly, the King likes well-rounded players and strategic choices, but has been reluctantly beginning to understand the pro-DH point of view, and by now is only mildly anti-DH)
You can be a real baseball fan and hate the DH, you can be a real baseball fan and love the DH. I personally like the increased strategy of non-DH play, I prefer to see teams play “little ball” than “a bloop and a blast” baseball. But neither position is superior to the other, it’s a matter of preference.
One thing I’d like to end is the circus atmosphere in ballparks today. Music must be blasted between innings, we need to have a host and have silly games between innings. How about some peace and quiet so fans can discuss the past inning and speculate on the next?
Maybe those fans are a dying breed. The reason for all the constant entertainment is that the modern “fan” requires it to even come to the park.
I’ll admit to being closer to the “dying” side of things than most. However, I’d be interested in seeing any data on whether this is true. My proposal up-thread was to require 10 home games a year to be “quiet games.” Then we could compare attendance figures and see what fans prefer. It might be that there are two (or more )kinds of fans and that quiet days are at least as popular as “Bark at the Park” days, or–god help us–Star War Days.
Do they? How do you prove that’s true?
Baseball attendance is a LOT higher than it used to be. It’s plateaued since the fiscal crisis of 2008, but it is incredibly higher than it once was, to an extent not entirely explicable by population.
Last year the average per game attendance was a hair over 30,000 per game. 25 years ago, in the very exciting 1991 season, it was 26,000 per game. Just six years prior to that, in 1985, it was 21,248. Ten years before that, in 1975, a terrific season, it was 15,403. I should point out that even after adjusting for inflation, tickets are more expensive than they used to be, too. (That’s actually a fairly recent development, historically speaking.)
So whatever else is happening, people want to see baseball games. They’re flocking to the ballpark by the millions; granted that MLB plays a lot of games, it is the most-attended sports leagueon the planet by a huge margin. More people will see an MLB game this year than will see a game in all of Europe’s major soccer leagues combined. People are paying good money to see baseball, and I’m really struggling with the idea that a lot of them don’t like baseball or that they would not go to the park without loud music. I mean, I live in a large MLB market and almsot everyone I know has gone to see a baseball game, many of them many times, and have never once heard any of them say they’re going to the game to hear loud music.
Why do they blare loud music at the ballparks? I’m not sure; I don’t like it either. Maybe a lot of people do. That doesn’t mean they don’t like baseball. Maybe MLB just doesn’t know what its fans want; businesses are NOT perfect at guessing what their customers want and often make mistakes.
Maybe if TV cut out a few commercials they jam in between innings, the fans wouldn’t get so restless and need all those distractions.
When I went and watched a recent Cubs v. Braves game in the new Atlanta ballpark, I watched the between-innings activities several times. They seemed to be essentially identical to what I used to see growing up watching games at Wrigley. Pitcher comes out, throws his 8 warmup pitches, the ball goes down to 2nd base, gets tossed around the horn, and comes back to the pitcher. The batter slowly heads to the plate, steps in, and the game re-starts.
I know that they’ve been cutting down on the time between innings. There’s a clock now in center field. But the way that clock operated was substantially different than what I recall them saying would happen in 2015. Still, I thought the game went fairly quickly between innings. It’s what happens during an at bat that really slows things down.
As for what stadiums now offer in the way of non-baseball entertainment:
Baseball is a business. It tries to lure customers in who have numerous entertainment options. It’s quite successful in doing so, and that success has followed a paradigm shift in how baseball is presented. I remember the way a baseball game used to be: dads and their sons scoring the game, watching the play, and getting vendors to give them hot dogs and peanuts (and beer) in the seats. That’s so far and away from the current stadium atmosphere that it’s jarring for me when I go. There were almost no vendors in Atlanta (you get up and go back into the stadium to get your food). No one was scoring the game; I didn’t even see scorecards for sale! TONS of people at any given point are wandering around in the stadium not really watching the game. And, of course, in between innings, there is always some silly thing happening to distract your attention. Weird.
How much is there to discuss in the long-ass time between innings? “They should have pulled the shift on this guy!” “I wish they would have switched pitchers there.” and “Man I wish we could have gotten that guy on second around.” is about all I can see. Anything more than that is overkill and probably not going to be discussed amongst the casual fan.
This would be interesting to see because I would think that attendance would dip way low for those games. The serious fans would go but that’s about it.
I, for one, like the games and activities between innings. I enjoy baseball a lot, but it’s boring enough without having some kind of entertainment as the dudes on the field are playing catch with one another. I’m a big fan of the baseball shell game and, obviously, the kiss cam.
As for the DH rule, like I said in my own proclamations, pitchers can do more than just try and eek out a single. They can bunt guys over, take walks and, yes, hit singles. Make that as much of a strategy in your game playing than when to sub a pitcher or pull a double switch.
Pitchers don’t contribute to either, though. They just make outs.
All that stuff, and the mascot acts and the races, isn’t for you or me. It’s to get the kiddies to think of going to the ballgame as being fun. Later on, they might start to wonder what those men are doing between the fun things, but that’s less likely if they never start to pay attention. Four hour games where the guys mostly just stand there (and pitchers pretend to hit) work against that. So, pick the pace back up and you might need less of the circus stuff.
The highest athletic honor to which a human being can aspire is the opportunity to attempt to hit a thrown baseball with a baseball bat. This is an honor which is earned by playing defense in a game. For a “player” to be given the privilege of a spot in the batting lineup with no requirement that he play a defensive role in the game is a sacrelige. Similarly, a pitcher who is willing to forego his earned chances to take his turn in the batter’s box is effectively denying that the holy honor is in fact, a holy honor.
To oppose the practice is not “whining.” It is recognizing the difference between right and wrong.
I don’t think chess even HAS farm teams…