time for DH in national league

Cafe Society
41

He did get the same deal in the NL. He didn’t have to go on road trips with the Astros when he wasn’t pitching, because he wanted to stay home with his family, apparently.

As to the DH, I don’t prefer it. Philosophically, I like the idea of every player having to bat. I see it as a personal opinion, and leave it at that. I don’t think more scoring makes a game more interesting; that’s just how the majority of American heathens feel about it. Ask the average sports fan in the world – who usually watches soccer – if low scoring makes a game boring or uninteresting.

42

I dislike the DL for most of the reasons stated. There is nothing magical preventing pitchers from becoming decent hitters, just the philosophy that they don’t need to practice hitting. Rick Ankiel (yeah, I know, HGH) was sometimes put in as a pinch hitter when he was a pitcher. Now that he gave up on pitching, he swings a mean bat. Bob Gibson was not an automatic out (so-so .206 career, but .303 in 1970). Great lefthanded batter Stan Musial only took to the outfield after he killed his arm. I think there was another pitcher who switched positions and hit a few home runs, in the 20’s and 30’s. His name escapes me, though. Pitchers are athletes. They can learn to hit.

I also think pitchers should have to stand in the box so they can face the music if they bean someone. You throw at one of our guys, you need to stand up there like a man and wait for payback.

With a few notable exceptions, power hitters are slow as molasses. If they don’t hit a home run, they clog up the base paths. How about DRs (designated runners) for everyone?

43

I like the DH, but I actually prefer having it only in the AL, with the NL playing by different rule (no DH). There should be some kind of distinction between the leagues; otherwise what would be argue about? Keep the leagues separate; have them meet only for the World Series and play by the rules of the home park. It’s also why I hate interleague play; it’s an abomination.

And get off my lawn!

44

Yah, that lump used to be David Eckstein until he played in the Stratocaster winter league.

The DH is a tool of Satan. I believe Pope Penitent XVI issued this statement ex cathedra at the Twenty-Fifth Council of Weehawken in 1702.

45

Pitchers aren’t bad hitters because they don’t practice, they’re bad hitters because they don’t have the ability.

For pitchers, the skill of pitching is so overwhelmingly important that how well they hit is of almost no relevance to their value; if a guy can pitch, you’re going to keep promoting him through the ranks of professional ball, even if he bats .050, but if he can’t pitch his career is over unless he can become a position player. Since hitting is not of any significancem players are not selected to be pitchers based in any way on their skill as hitters; from the time they’re in high school they’re being scouted and drafted based on pitching skill alone. So the guys you see in the majors have all gone through a process of natural selection in which hitting was not a selecting criteria. There’s no particular reason why major league pitchers SHOULD be able to hit, just as there is no particular reason why NFL quarterbacks should be able to kick field goals or NHL centers should make good NBA point guards. A pitcher’s skill set is 99% different from a hitter’s. He’s more or less playing a totally different sport, from a skill set point of view. Players who can do both, like Rick Ankiel or Mike Hampton, are extremely rare, and since Ankiel failed as a pitcher and Hampton isn’t a good hitter for a position player, there are not actually any active players who can pitch AND hit at the level of an average major leaguer.

It is interesting to note that although they work on it extensively and and natural skills needed are common to all athletic adult men, most pitchers are ALSO mediocre fielders, and some are brutally bad and yet have successful careers. Randy Johnson is notably inept; his career fielding percentage of .906 is probably worse than I’d do, but he’s the majors and I am not because his career ERA is 3.22 and mine would be 322.00. The reason guys ike Johnson aren’t losing their jobs for their fielding is because fielding doesn’t matter for a pitcher; pitchers just aren’t afforded the opportunity to make enough plays for it to matter. The absolute worst fielding pitcher in the majors, a guy like Johnson, probably doesn’t cost his team more than seven or eight outs or extra bases a year with his shitty fielding, (and I’m being liberal in my estimates.) Seven or eight outs in a season is a rounding error when comparing the performance of pitchers as pitchers.

Well, there you have it; as a hitter Gibson was good for a pitcher, but he was terrible by the standards of major league ballplayers. He did nothing well as a hitter; he was as bad a hitter as Mario Mendoza.

More practice would likely NOT have made Gibson a good hitter. Gibson was one of the greatest natural athletes of the 1960s, a master of multiple sports, and a ferocious competitor who took hitting very seriously and worked hard at it. He was hitting his whole life; he played lots and lots of baseball. And he was clearly outmatched as a hitter long before he got to the majors.

Hitting in baseball requires lots of practice but it also requires a lot of straightforward natural talent in terms of strength, muscle speed, and coordination, and if you don’t have it you never will.

That is not true. Of the top home run hitters of all time:

  1. Barry Bonds was known for his speed.
  2. Henry Aaron had above average speed.
  3. Babe Ruth was very slow in the latter half of his career, but good speed in the first half.
  4. Willie Mays was extremely fast.
  5. Sammy Sosa ran very well for most of his career.
  6. Ken Griffey Jr. has run pretty well, slowing down a bit in the 30s.
  7. Frank Robinson ran well.
  8. Mark McGwire was very slow.
  9. Harmon Killebrew was very slow.
  10. Rafael Palmiero was slow, but not like Killebrew.
  11. Reggie Jackson ran well for most of his career, was quite fast when he was with Oakland.
  12. Mike Schmidt ran pretty well.
  13. Mickey Mantle was extremely fast,
  14. Jimmie Foxx had average speed.
  15. (Tie) Willie McCovey was elegant, but slow due to injury. Ted Williams was slow because he was just a poor runner.

So of the top 16 guys, there’s really only two slow-as-molasses players (McGwire and Killebrew) and one who was slow as molasses half his career (Ruth.) Some were a bit slow, but most ran well or very well and some were VERY fast, like Mays, Mantle, and Bonds.

46

<johnny carson>

I did not know that.

</johnny carson>

47

You’re shitting me, right? The DH is the worst thing to happen to baseball since commercials. It’s a close race, too; they combine to make AL ball the most boring sports spectacle this side of professional bowling.

Hooey. I recently realized why soccer hasn’t caught on in the US: nobody here actually enjoys watching sports. Oh, sure, they may like a good excuse to get together with friends and family and throw down brews, eat chicken wings and show off their civic pride, but any sport which offers more than five minutes of continuous, commercial-free action bores us to death. That is the only plausible explanation for why all four major sports keep getting longer and longer and longer, with more and more commercials, and US sports fans keep eating it up. :frowning:

The pitcher hitting during a rally raises the level of suspense. NL baseball is more exciting for all the heartbreak. Ever wondered why the most ardent fans have always been the ones rooting for “cursed” teams? It’s because baseball, like terror, is more exciting in the anticipation than in the event. Every AL at-bat seems ho-hum because it’s just another roid battle.

48

You make a persuasive argument. (And I really should do more research before I post on sports.) I don’t think that any of this is an excuse for the abomination that is the DH, though. Having to field a player who is specialized for one task doesn’t lead me to the conclusion that we need to shield him from the tasks he’s crappy at. And, I do stand by the argument that pitchers need to take their lumps if they bean someone. Having said that, though, I’ll, uh, rethink my primary argument…

49

Interesting. I’ll lead by saying that most (all?) of what will follow is anecdotal, offered conversationally…I don’t think that ML pitchers devoid of the ability to become good hitters are the norm, seems like the practice angle must account for some significant aspect of the abysmal hitting we see from pitchers.

It’s been years since I read Bouton’s book, Ball Four (a terrific read), but I seem to recall how amused Bouton and his buddies were when they saw a high school write-up (some lower level write-up, anyway) describing one of his ML teammates as a “utility infielder” on this HS team. This cracked them up because almost without exception, ML players were exceptional ballplayers in every aspect at the lower levels, the stars of their teams, pitchers included, hitting included. Maybe I misremember.

I coached Little League for many years. Could well be that not a single kid I saw will make the Majors–in fact, I guess that’s probable–but there were several special athletes. Extremely talented. I can’t think of a single dominating pitcher who wasn’t also an outstanding hitter, and I saw quite a few. My two younger brothers played Little League and had a teammate who made the Majors as a pitcher–can’t remember his name, he was not a player of great note in the Bigs–but he was also a stud slugger as a kid. Hit homers at will, it seemed, that kind of guy.

Of course, the fact that at a lower level someone might shine at most aspects of the game doesn’t mean that all those skills have the potential for ML levels of play. But I think the “selection” that occurs is not primarily that of identifying pitching skills from players who naturally can’t hit a lick. It’s more that players who end up on that path get no significant benefit (in fact, it’s a disadvantage) in devoting any significant percentage of their time to developing anything other than pitching skills, since no one this side of Babe Ruth has the colossal capacity to simultaneously be very good at both at the ML level.

An everyday player bats every game, practices every day (Mike Schmidt used to swing off a tee in his garage till 3:00 in the morning when he was slumping). A pitcher does not. Their mediocrity has to have much to do with practice and dedication to the craft of hitting, as opposed to just being inherently crappy hitters.

Just my two cents, love the topic…

50

Most pitchers can not even bunt. They are automatic outs are are embarrassing to watch. They slow the game down.

51

Yep. That makes the strategy the managers employ very interesting, an aspect of the game that is missing with the DH.

52

I don’t like the DH at all, but I’m with you on the rest of this. Split the AL/NL teams, keep em separate, and keep the umpiring crews separate, too.

Fair enough, but if they want a different nine people for offense and defense, I’d imagine that would’ve been addressed. If it was meant to be like football, with 9 batters and 9 defenders, don’t you think the rule would say “18 players”? So why is 10 okay when the rule says nine?

53

While few catchers can run (it’s gotta be hard to be limber enough to be a good baserunner when you spend so much of each game in a crouch), plenty of them can hit. Not many of them are Johnny Bench, but catchers who routinely flirt with the Mendoza Line find themselves as backups or minor-leaguers.

And by the simple definition of how a catcher’s market value is defined, all catchers can hit. It won’t matter to Jake Peavy (who won this year’s NL Cy) at contract time that he boosted his hit production from 10 in 2006 to 17 in 2007. But a catcher’s offensive production is part of any salary negotiation.

Which is only natural. In this era of five-man rotations, a starting NL pitcher might get 60-80 plate appearances during a season. A starting catcher, by contrast, will run about 400-500 PAs in a season. The potential variation in a starting catcher’s hitting matters about six or seven times as much as that of an individual starting pitcher. Take Carlos Zambrano - in his best year (2005), he created 10 runs in 84 PAs. The starting catcher on the same team, Michael Barrett, created 70 runs in 477 PAs. If Zambrano’s run creation goes to zero, it matters a lot less to the team’s fortunes, hence to Zambrano’s salary, than if Barrett’s slumps to 45.

And this is why pitchers, as a group, don’t hit well, even if they have the ability to do so: the incentives are all wrong, and there’s really no way to right them. Unlike everyone else on the diamond, you’re not paying pitchers to hit, and you really can’t meaningfully pay pitchers to hit.

So the choices are:

a) expect pitchers to try to do something well that you’re not paying them to do well;
b) acknowledge that there’s little if any reason they should do it well, but insist they keep on doing it badly anyway, because it’s part of the game; or
c) give up and pay someone else to do it instead.

Option (c) obviously means the DH. Options (b) and (a) are both about maintaining the NL as it is, just with different attitudes towards pitchers’ hitting - one realistic, and the other not.

54

There is no strategy as such in baseball. It has been around for 100 years. There is nothing new. In the NL they just make more pitching changes. They do not develop a new and interesting way of taking out a pitcher or telling guys to steal. it is recipe.

55

No, you don’t, but that’s in high school.

In high school, Little League and senior teen baseball, the best baseball player is probably also one of the school’s best football players, basketball players, and track stars. At that age level simple natural athletic ability will overwhelm practice and skill.

As players progress on to more serious levels of baseball - going from high school ball to either the very low minors, semipro/amateur senior ball, or college - players who USED to be tremendous hitters because they were just strong and athletic begin to drop away one after another, unable to climb the ladder because they simply aren’t good enough. There are lots of guys out there who were terrors in their Little League and just as good as Ken Griffey and Alex Rodriguez were who’re selling insurance today.

As to the original point, I like having the two leagues different.

56

I agree with the basic point, and I realize this is unprovable speculation, but it’s plausible to me that some of those special athletes who chose pitching would have been better-than-wretched hitters in the Bigs (not necessarily good, though some perhaps would have been) if they chose that path and dedicated themselves to it. Again, I do agree that the higher the level, the greater flawed skills are exposed, the likelier that pure athleticism will not overcome inherent limitations.

I’m sure you’re right that previously terrific hitters look not so terrific and start dropping like flies the higher the level of competition. Same with pitchers, I’m just as sure. With pitchers who continue to succeed, though, I think it’s also true that they begin to dedicate less and less of their time to hitting the higher the level of play. For those guys, don’t know why we’d assume that pitchers just naturally can’t hit when it’s also obvious that they really don’t work on it. Not trying to turn this into a great debate, however–just my two cents…

57

Joe Mauer won the AL batting title in '06 and most catchers can hit decently. The best defensive catcher in the world won’t last very long in the bigs if he hits like a pitcher.

58

but without the DH we would have never seen Edgar Martinez STEAL HOME!!!

for those who dont get it, Edgar, especially late in his career wasn’t exactly known for his speed. seeing him waddle towards home plate literally had me stunned, you seriously have screwed up when Edgar is stealing home plate.

yeah its not much of an argument but damnit its a great memory

59

Baseball is an athletic team game. The players should be expected to play as athletes and as a team. That means they should play both offense and defense (the same goes for that travesty of athletics, football).

Far from introducing the DH to the National League, what baseball needs to do is eliminate substitutions except in the case of debilitating injury.

Nine innings for nine players. Period.

60

Yep.

I don’t think we need the DH to keep aging hitters in the game. If you can’t field your position, it’s time to retire.

If juicing up offense is so important, why not change the rules to allow each team three DHs? We could go back to the days when players were carried almost entirely for their defense. Dal Maxvill (.217 lifetime average, 0 for 22 in the 1968 World Series), where are you now?