You may be a pitcher, but you still need to be able to hit.
Discuss, but don’t disagree with me because the DH is really that bad. 
You might as well just have seperate offensive and defensive teams if you have a DH. I don’t expect pitchers to get many hits, but having a weak hitter in the lineup requires some actual strategic and tactical moves to win a game. Right now all an AL manager has to do is figure out it’s time to change pitchers when two meatballs in a row get knocked out of the park.
I root for the Red Sox often, because the only thing better than watching the Yankees lose is watching them lose to the Sox. But I’m a National league guy, and the DH is a major reason why.
Well, it’s prolly a pretty bad rule considering I first misread the title as “The Designated Hitler”.
+1
Fucking A.
But, to be fair, let us allow our AL brethren try to defend the indefensible.
I know what a DH, but yeah, I read that too.
I grew up an AL fan, but had no idea what it was as a kid. Otherwise, my opinion is that it is a very minor rule to get worked up about. I do know that if I became an amazing pitcher tomorrow, I would want a DH to cover my crappy-batting ass.
The DH is a fine rule.
It’s unfortunate that pitchers are ridiculously bad hitters, but that’s just the way the evolution of baseball has gone. I understand the purity aspect of letting pitchers hit but it’s a waste of one ninth of at bats. Why not give a man a chance to hit in the major leagues who can actually do something with it?
Baseball is a GAME, first and foremost, not some sort of Old Testament set of rules that we have to maintain. If a rule can be changed that will legitimately improve the game - meaning once you consider all the possible unintended consequences - then I say change the rule, and change it today. And the DH improves things.
What’s gained by having a DH? You have an actual major league calibre hitter hitting, instead of a guy who’s just trying to get the at bat over with. Youget to watch Edgar Martinez, Frank Thomas, and Paul Molitor instead of Whiffy, Flaily and Strikeouty. What’s LOST? Umm… okay, a certain symmetry. I guess. But I don’t see anyone complaining about the fact that teams have never had just nine players on them. They have always had 20-25. Who cares?
The only really substantive argument I’ve heard against the DH rule is the loss of strategy, and to be perfectly honest I don’t see how it’s really a mind-bender to work around the pitcher’s spot. Most fans can figure it out, so you can’t tell me it’s really all that tough.
It used to be that football was played with the same substitution rules as baseball. Once you got taken out of the game you were out. (American football obviously – soccer still is played this way.) Players played both offense and defense. Your kicker and punter had to have regular. For many years colleges used limited substitution between plays as well. I don’t see anyone calling for a return to limited substitution football.
Things change. It’s a sport played to entertain the audience. Presumably some of the audience likes the AL rules as they watch the games. I see no reason why the two leagues must play by the exact same rules. And going by numbers, the NL is in the vast minority on this of professional/college baseball.
Godwinned on the 3rd post.
Ok, then make seperate offensive and defensive teams. That would make more sense than a DH.
The pitcher hitting is a waste of an inning. The single best thing that can happen is that the pitcher gets tired at the right time so that you can double switch, effectively creating a designated hitter so that instead of wasting 3 or 4 innings you only waste 2 or 3.
The NL can start playing big boy baseball and avoid this whole issue in one simple step.
What, exactly, does it improve? In the grand scheme of the game, hitting is only one part of the equation. So you replace a struggling .120 hitter with a legitimate .300 hitter. That also means you give up the sacrifice bunt, the intentional walk to the #8 hitter, not to mention the awesome surprise of seeing the pitcher actually get a hit.
Plus, most DH players seem to be aging sluggers with bad knees. In order to get their bat into the lineup, you have to sacrifice speed. And sometimes, late in the game, when speed could be important, you replace the DH with a pinch runner. So why not add a Designated Runner at the same time?
No, it wouldn’t.
There just isn’t any reason to do this. Offensive and fielding prowess are somewhat correlated; most players who can hit can field competently, and vice versa, with very few exceptions. Expanding rosters to accomodate a fielding and a hitting team doesn’t have any reason to be done. There’s no necessity to it; it’s a waste of time and money as compared to the relatively minor increase in the quality of play. In fact, you would inevitably be making some positions WORSE either on the fielding or hitting side; if you had fielding and hitting teams you’d have lost the fielding skills of Willie Mays, Joe Morgan, Mike Schmidt, and countless others.
But pitchers cannot hit. At all. Pitchers who are anything less than utterly putrid hitters are almost nonexistent. The best hitting pitcher in the world, Carlos Zambrano, is still a terrible hitter, and he’s miles better than any other pitcher right now. Mike Hampton was a better hitter than Zambrano and Hampton was still a bad hitter. The only pitcher I can think of who was an MLB caibre hitter is Rick Ankiel and he had to go back to the minors to actually learn how to do it.
The DH causes a minimal amount of disruption while replacing a completely ineffective player; a football-style split would cause a huge amount of disruption while replacing many effective players.
[QUOTE=kunilou]
What, exactly, does it improve?
[/QUOTE]
The calibre of play.
First of all, watching an incompetent hitter attempt a sacrifice bunt is neither strategically interesting nor compelling baseball, IMHO. Secondly, while I will grant there is some loss in strategic play, the truth is that it’s not much. Go through the game logs of any NL team and you’ll find that decisions regarding the pitcher’s spot in the order are always always pretty much automatic, and games where a surprising or original decision makes the difference in who wins or loses are… well, I can’t remember the last time I saw it happen, and I would imagine an NL team could easily go the whole year without it happening.
As to the surprise of the pitcher getting a hit I wholly agree it’s fun as hell. I still remember Mark Hendrickson, the only Blue Jay pitcher to ever hit a home run, hitting his homer to the hooting and amazement of, well, everyone. It was a legitimately awesome moment, and I am not denying that we’d have lost a really cool moment had Hendrickson not batted for himself that day. But it’s not even close to matching the joy I’ve gotten watching Paul Molitor, Adam Lind, Cliff Johnson, Dave Winfield, and the like. The very odd time a pitcher’s at bat will result in something interesting but the vast majority of the time it’s a hapless out or a shitty attempt at a bunt.
All of this is IMHO and of course anyone is free to disagree, but it’s how I feel. I simply enjoy the game with the DH; I enjoy watching nine real hitters.
So have the best 9 hitters on offense
I don’t care too too much. I prefer NL baseball in general. My main complaint is that it should be one way or the other, uniform for both leagues.
Joe
Even the “strategy” argument doesn’t hold water when you examine things a bit closer. What NL fans call strategy usually boils down to forced moves that any manager with an IQ higher than a rosin bag would do automatically. Runners at 2nd & 3rd, no outs, the pitcher is going to bunt, right? Bottom of the 8th down by two runs, you pinch hit, don’t you? True strategy involves choices: with an actual hitter up there you thus have more choices (he can swing away, or hit-and-run, or yes even bunt).
The slippery slope argument isn’t persuasive either; that would mean radical changes in how the game is played: 9 behemoths batting and 9 jackrabbits fielding (and occ. pinch-running for the behemoths). Nobody nowhere has ever seriously suggested such a thing, so it is pointless to prop it up as an example of how the DH precedent will “ruin” baseball in the future.
Not to mention the fact that the AL has been playing with the DH for over a generation now, and none of those other changes have happened.
It makes the game far less interesting.
However, I would not be opposed to a DH in the National League because it’s used in every other league. It’s one thing for a pitcher to be a bad hitter, but if his first time in the batter’s box is against a major league pitcher, he’s going to be even worse.
Well, I for one am glad this topic came up… finally we can come to a consensus over which rule of baseball is superior. It’s about time baseball fans hashed this out.
Oh, and for my money NL baseball is “real” baseball. There, I’m sure that settled it.
I agree with RickJay, and for the same reasons. I like the DH, and I don’t see “added strategy” in the NL. People know when the bunts are coming and when the switches are coming. It’s not rocket surgery, yet we treat it like it is.
I just don’t care to see a free out in the form of a pitcher trying to hit. That’s bad baseball.
I’m not a terribly big fan of the DH, but I’m even less of a fan of the “added strategy” the NL uses instead to get the same effect. In neither league do the pitchers actually hit. In the AL they sit on the bench while the DH hits, and in the NL they strike out, or bunt, or get replaced by a “pitcher” who will get replaced again before the next inning starts and who are therefore effectively designated hitters anyway.