Then shouldn’t everyone in the USA be watching basketball and ignoring all the other sports?
I actually agree with this. The reason I like the DH is just because you don’t waste 500 plate appearances on joke at bats.
Do you think they also would’ve been good basketball players? Football players? Soccer players? Hitting and pitching are very different skills.
Don’t know how else to explain what my point was. This is definitely not critical from my perspective. Short answer, maybe, maybe not. I know virtually all of them were outstanding hitters at lower levels. Everything else, as I freely admitted, was speculation, just as it is for anyone who “knows” that pitchers are just inherently bad hitters, period. That’s all I was saying.
I think you might. Edgar was a pretty decent third baseman before his injury. Without the DH rule, he’d still probably have been able to play 1B well enough to keep his bat in the lineup anyway. The rule has permitted a doubling of the number of good-hit, no-field (or at least no-run) types on AL rosters.
Ah yes, I do get so nostalgic for the days of going to the ballpark just for the thrill of anticipating if the manager would make a double switch … 
NL Baseball is the only game where players are regularly asked to perform tasks that they are not expected to be good at.
The prototypical 5 tool position player can: hit for average, hit for power, field, throw and run the bases. We judge players, and prize their abilities in these 5 categories.
The 5 tool pitcher can: pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch and pitch. Nobody chooses the guy on the mound based on anything other than pitching ability. Do NL fans immediately look up their new pitcher’s OPS, in order to decide whether to be happy about the signing? Ultimately, nobody cares how well the pitcher can hit, but they’re asked to do it every game.
While it may introduce some strategy, it’s based on how to avoid having the pitcher’s incompetence ruin your chances to win. I don’t think of that as a plus for the game.
The DH is evil. It sucks strategy out of the game. It’s the bottom of the 6th inning and your ace is throwing a shutout. Trouble is, you haven’t scored either. Your pitcher leads off. Do you hit for him? Gives the fans something to second guess. Sure some pitchers can’t hit a lick. But when they do, as when Hank Aguirre got one to roll behind the monuments in old Yankee Stadium, it’s a lot of fun.
I agree games are too long. Solution: shorter commercial breaks.
The games are not too long. Americans have short attention spans. If you are a fan the games are fine in length. The little battles of the catcher and pitcher trying to out guess the batter. If a major league batter knows what is coming his hitting percentage would skyrocket.
http://www.hardballtimes.com/ Here is a fans source of entertainment.
No, you don’t. No manager will pinch hit in the sixth inning for a pitcher throwing a shutout.
For all this blather about how the L has more strategy, it’s just not true. 99% of all decisions related to the pitcher batting are automatic; they’re predictable, straight up conventional moves. Out of 162 games the number of games in which an NL manager will make an unusual, unexpected or controversial decision regarding the pitcher’s spot in the lineup might be, oh, three games, five tops. Most NL teams will probably not gain or lose anything in the standings as a result of these moves.
I had the double switch figured out when I was eight years old. It is not some amazing, Sun Tzu-like strategic trickery.
I wouldn’t put it that strongly. Remember, I said you’re in the bottom of the sixth. Your man has already thrown six innings, which these days is as far as most starters go. A lot might depend on who your middleman is, who you have available to pinch hit, etc.
A similar situation is you’re in the top of the sixth. Your pitcher is starting to tire but he might be able to get one more inning for you. They put some guys on base. Your pitcher leads off in the bottom of the sixth. Do you leave him in and hope that he can get through and then pinch hit, preserving your batting order? Or do you pull a double switch and take the #8 hitter out of the game? All these are infinitely more interesting than the AL pitching strategy whereby your pitching decisions and your offense decisions are entirely unrelated.
Nowadays we have middle relievers and savers. The middle guys are supposed to shut down or keep the damage within reason. In the 9th ,you trot out your ace who will shut down the opponents for 1 inning or max 2. This is not masterful technique. It is the evolution of the game.
A pitcher has to give 6 or 7 innings. If unable to , we bring in a long reliever. Not rocket science ,recipe baseball.
If Bonds signed with an American league team now,he would draw. Many to see the all time homerun hitter, some to boo ,others for curiosity. He would fill seats. That is good for the game. He can not field well anymore but he can still hit.
Well, there’s holding the runners, but your point is well taken: that just changes the toolkit to ‘pitch, pitch, pitch, pitch and hold the runners.’
Gimme a break. I am a fan, have been since I was a kid. But 9-inning postseason games that take four hours are for the birds.
If the additional time was due to more baseball being played, that would be one thing. But all they’re really doing is spreading the same amount of action over a longer stretch of time.
I’m also an avid reader, but books are generally improved by editing, which often involves tightening up the plot, getting rid of digressions and nearly extraneous elements of the story. Having to read a novel that’s longer because it’s poorly edited is less fun, rather than more so. Finding that to be true doesn’t mean I’m not a fan of books.
How about throw strikes, hold the runners, mix speeds, mix pitches, get outs?
I totally agree with the rest of your post, BTW. Well said.
Pitchers also pick runners off first base with varying degrees of skill.
Baseball and football are both hampered by commercials. I used to watch sports before the commercials were as bad as now. When football was first televised there were arguments whether the game should be held up for commercials. i guess we know who won that one. When the commercials were over , the networks would signal to a guy on the sideline. He wore a bright yellow hat. He took it off to signal when refs should restart the game. All sports are longer now.
The DH is a moral hazard.
More importantly, it makes the game too long, IMO. Not only are there fewer quick innings, but a far higher percentage of pitching changes in the AL occur in the middle of the inning as opposed to between innings, which means nothing else besides more commercials. Blech. I’m a Mets fan, and Mets games the past few years have generally been coming in at about 2h 40m. When I accidentally turn on a Yankees game – ETA 3h 30m – I just don’t enjoy the experience.
That’s no doubt part of it, but I’ve seen some research and testimonials that would suggest that Stratocaster’s explanation has at least as much to do with it. A player is going to have more value as either a hitter or pitcher, and once he gets put onto one of those tracks there just isn’t any margin in spending his baseball time practicing for the other one . . . and if you’re not seeing 90 MPH fastballs every day, you’re timing at the plate is going to be for shit, no matter how ridiculously good at it you used to be.
No regular starting pitcher would be pulled after six shutout innings. Starters usually only go 6 innings, but they’ve usually given up some runs, too. The only time you’d yank a starter after six shutout innings is if something else were up - an injury, or perhaps it’s a reliever pressed into service because the starter was hurt, or the game’s now 13-0 and pulling him doesn’t matter anyway so you may as well rest him.
It’s an interesting dillemma. And it almost never happens. I agree that these decisions ARE cool, and add something to a ballgame; I’m not denying it’s an interesting problem to deal with. I also admit that on the rare occasions a pitcher gets a hit it’s neat; as a Blue Jay fan it was awesome to watch Mark Hendrickson launch one (in 2003; he is the only Blue Jay pitcher to hit a home run.)
What I am saying, however, is that people have grossly exaggerated impressions of the frequency of this sort of thing, and how much of an impact it has. The number of games with such hard decisions is very small and the number of games where clever strategy in such situations will actually decide the outcome of the game is miniscule. In my opinion, the loss of an enormous number of ridiculous at-bats, and giving those at bats to professional baseball players whose careers are actually enchanced by having them, outweighs the benefit of the very rare occasions when the strategy actually has an impact. I also think thatthe DH rule actually rewards the smarter team. In-game management of double switches has very little effect on a team’s success, but the assembling of talent has a LOT of impact, and teams that assemble more talent benefit more in a DH league than a non-DH league, since it is harder to assemble a lineup of nine quality hitters than of eight.
It’s not just old decrepit guys who benefit from this; young hitters get a chance as a result of the DH rule. If the AL had no DH rule, you don’t really think David Ortiz would be out of a job, do you? Of course not; they’d live with his glove at first, and Kevin Youkilis, a fine young hitter, might not have gotten a chance. Sufficiently good hitters, be they Frank Thomas or Edgar or Ortiz or Paul Molitor or whomever would just have been shoehorned into a corner position and someone else would have gotten bumped. I’d rather see the someone else hit than watch some .090 hitter flail away.
Not soccer.
Whats soccer?
Baseball game length is somewhat related to the year your team is having. 3 or 4 years ago Tiger games were long and boring. When they started to win the games were fun to watch(after 20 years). I did not find the games boring the last 2 years. When they were losing 100, they were endless.
Cricket - back inthe 1970’s, there was a guy played for India called Chandreshekar who had one arm withered by polio and they still made him bat.