As crazy as an idea this is from the resident baseball madman, it brings up a great image. How different would the game be if any and all positions at once could have their own designated hitter - each team fielding the eight best defensive players they could find?
When young, the best atheletes fill the impact positions: pitchers, quarterbacks, point quard, etc. As they get older and move into more selective teams most of these players move to other positions because they are no longer the best athelete on the team. For pitchers, being a great hitter is not as important as it is for “simpler” positions like first base or the outfield. You see the same thing for short stops. Being a great fielder is more important than being a great hitter. In some cases you find people who are great offensively and defensively, but as a whole the more important/harder defensive players do not hit as well as outfielders and first basemen.
It would be beautiful. There would be fielding highlites in every game. It would show how well the game should be played.
Sheffield bitched until he got to play defense again in Detroit. Not only did he get hurt but he was bad out there. Some guys will bitch. But someone always does.
I don’t think we’re much (if at all) in disagreement here. I tend to think that a large reason major league pitchers can’t hit is because they stopped hitting when they were made pitchers (since all minor leagues have the DH). You claimed that they always sucked at hitting - which can’t be the case because there are number of major league pitchers that were drafted as hitters. Obviously they could hit at some level (college, high school) or they wouldn’t be drafted that way.
As to my claim about the draft I could be wrong but I seem to recall at least one story every year of a two-way player and a quote from some team executive that “we’re gonna start him as ___”. An example this year is Robert Stock from USC (admittedly not a first round pick). He’s a catcher primarily, but can pitch as well and since he’s only 19 it wouldn’t be at all crazy to see him become a pitcher at some point. It would probably be something like what happened with Motte - he fails as a hitter so they try him as a pitcher.
Anyways, I think we can all agree that the reason major league pitchers are crappy hitters is because they are in the major leagues as pitchers. Their hitting ability is not selected for, and they have no incentive (or opportunity) to improve it.
An interesting aside is that every season you have a few innings pitched by position players. Some of them can throw mid-80s and perhaps have a breaking ball of some sort. I’d say it’s about the same quality of pitching as the pitchers’ hitting.
And I have to strenuously disagree with gonzomax - it would not be beautiful if there were a DH for every position… it would be a travesty.
Football became more and more platooned as time went by. There were a lot of 2 way players when I was growing up. Football decided to go that way. Punters and place kickers used to play defensive positions too. The best kicker on the team served as punter. There were few specialists. It did not screw up football.
Yeah, I don’t imagine they’d be any better than “below average” if they worked at it full-time. My almost-entirely uninformed opinion is that typical starting pitchers might get up to .200/.300/.350 instead of .150/.200/.200 (which is obviously not enough to justify the loss of time spent working on pitching). Basically, I think they could be Rey Ordóñez if they spent as much time with the hitting coaches as he did.
I was under the impression that every year there were a handful of players (including the draft and the international market) who might count as dual-prospects. Not so?
Anyway, I’m not all that interested in contradicting what you say here, as you know *waaayyyy *more about baseball than I do.
Oh, I’m sure there are. We’re not in disagreement here; there’s always a few guys, but bear in mind they draft a LOT of guys every year. Double threats are still quite rare even if you find a few a year.
The difference here is:
-
Football specialization didn’t require changing any rules except for the size of a roster. There was never a rule (at least not any one in modern times I was aware of) that the halfback had to double as a linebacker. Baseball would require drastic rule changes.
-
Football specialization didn’t detract from strategy or tactics, since football allows unlimited substitution anyway. Baseball specialization would. Having players both hit and field forces strategic decisions (what players to choose, how to compose a roster, what utility players to carry, etc.) and tactical decisions, such as when to replace sluggers with glove men or vice versa. All of that is gone if you have separate defensive and offensive teams. The DH isn’t a big deal (to me, anyway) because, as we’ve been discussing in another thread, pitchers can’t hit anyway; there’s almost never a decision to be made with regards to balancing a pitcher’s hitting skill against his defensive skill because pitchers are always just pitchers.
-
I suspect you’d reduce the overall quality of play. Who would want to play left field and not hit?
-
Football fans, for the most part, didn’t care. Baseball fans, for a wide range of reasons, would.
Anyone at the AAA level with a better glove than Adam Dunn? Seriously - there are plenty of players out there who have excellent defensive skills but don’t make it in the majors because they can’t hit a curveball. I wonder what the best way would be to develop their hitting abilities though, as they aren’t at the plate every day.
They are different skillsets. I have seen excellent fielders who could not hit. We all have seen major league players who played lousy defense. Some very good fielders never learn to hit major league pitching.
The overall quality of the game would be elevated. There would be more offense and likely more runs scored. You would see spectacular defense every day. What is not to like?
Well, to steal a quote from another sport, “it’s not baseball”.
Baseball is as much about strategy and execution as it is about raw talent. If you abandon the requirement that batters play the field you have created an entirely different sport. A lineup with 9 Barry Bonds and a field full of Ozzie Smiths might be fun to watch (although, not really…) but the beauty, symmetry, and strategy are diminished greatly.
How about no limitations on pinch runners because who really wants to watch our slow sluggers run the bases? Or hey, maybe we can change pitchers after every batter.
You don’t want to make a farce of the game. Must retain its integrity.
Relief pitchers are a relatively new phenomenon. We have long relievers and short relievers. That certainly leans toward platooning. We also bring in a pitcher to face one batter quite often. So it is not so alien to the game after all.
Sometimes I turn it around and wonder, why is that pitchers hit as well as they do? Given that batting ability plays no role in their selection or evaluation, why do they hit any better than average people off the street? (I’m guessing that the average young man off the street, even given an amount of BP comparable to a big-league pitcher, would have trouble hitting .120, which a typical pitcher can manage. I’m quite certain that I would have hit .000.)
The answer, I suppose, is that there’s some commonality between batting and pitching skills, and some level of background athleticism that makes you better than the general population at both, even without much practice.
Superior hand-eye coordination is a common factor in both pitching and batting, even if the gift is used very differently between the two. I suspect that even the worst-hitting pitchers are going to do a better job at the plate than you or I would.
Getting back to gonzomax’s hypothetical, what I don’t like about it, oddly enough, is that nobody gets a chance to make up for their mistakes in that scenario. How often do you see a guy flub an easy grounder or make a bad relay throw in one inning, only to come back and drive in a couple of runs at the plate the next inning? Everyone needs a shot at redemption. Can’t do that if you’re only playing one side of the field.
but once a player is removed, they can’t return to the game. So the specialization is reduced.
Can you imagine how long a game would take if every at-bat had substitutions? A lefty slugger is due up, so the defense brings in their lefty specialist. The batter is replaced with a righty, and so the pitchers change. It’s not like how a football team can have a 3rd Down back, a pass rush specialist, a nickle back, etc.
While there is specialization in baseball, a manager has to be very selective about how he uses his specialists.
As to the OPs question, and to agree somewhat with Freddy’s most recent post, I think that pitchers bat pretty well for not being specialists in that activity. It’s probably due to their athleticism and good hand eye coordination as well as practice. Even Mariano Rivera who recently got his first career RBI (in his 3rd career plate appearance in the regular season) takes batting practice occasionally. Michale Jordan probably hit as well as a good hitting pitcher.
I suppose a similar question might be, why don’t NFL quarterbacks make good defensive backs? Why are punters such poor tacklers? Why aren’t NBA centers good point guards? Same sport, very different skill set.
Some pitchers are worse than that, so evidently some ARE pretty much guys off the street. 
And I assure you if you’re a reasonably healthy man who knows the fundamentals of how to swing a bat you’d have gotten a few hits. A healthy young man should hit at least .050 just by luck.
http://askville.amazon.com/SimilarQuestions.do?req=combined+batting+average+NL+pitchers+2008
Heres the chart for National League pitchers hitting. They are under .140. It does not add to the excitement.
I would say, “extremely rarely”. Unfortunately, I don’t have a baseball-reference.com subscription, and I don’t think they have a very complete database when it comes to fielding data for individual games (at least, the game finder doesn’t have an “error” option). I think it would be very interesting to set it to “‘>=1 error’ + ‘>=1 RBI’” and see what the results would be for a given year. I think the odds of those RBI coming after an error would be so small a sample size to make the “redemption” argument moot.
No point arguing with an AL fan, Jas.
–Cliffy
Not sure what your cutoff point is for “modern times”, but I was able to find this short discussion of substitution rule changes in (USA) college football. A couple of relevant quotes:
The 1922-40 rules would have been in effect during the time in which the novel All the King’s Men is set. As I recall from my reading of the book, there is a scene in which Tom Stark (son of Willie Stark, the Louisiana governor often said to be based on Huey Long) is a star football player at Louisiana State University and is taken out of a game with his team safely ahead in ther second half. He is given the ovation and congratulations reserved for someone who knows he will not be returning to the field that day, no matter what happens.
They come in and out at will in basketball. That has not hurt that game.
Hockey players come in and out over and over.