That’s not really unusual. Cal Ripken Jr. was a high school pitcher with a 90+ fastball. Due to his ability to hit the baseball, he was drafted as an infielder.
The discussion is not “which league scores more runs or hits better” its “do I want to watch pitchers flail away instead of a professional hitter.” There are any number of reasons for the stats you posted, the primary one in my mind being I think the NL has better hitters than the AL at the moment. As of now, 7 of the top 10 home run leaders are NL players. Anyways, its an old debate that I am pretty sure no one has ever convinced anyone to switch sides so I’m happy to agree with RickJay and say its a good thing we have 2 leagues so everyone is happy. Or everyone is angry. Whichever 
The DH is definitely a hacky solution. If watching pitchers bat wasn’t so painful I would definitely support this argument.
But you won’t know. That’s the trouble, and beauty, of it.
Wayne Gretzky’s not a good comparison to Bryce Harper, actually, because what we see in Harper now is purely his raw physical talent (something Gretzky didn’t possess; Gretzky is a unique case.) He’s impressive as all hell, but he’s still a very, very long way from anything approaching a major league ballplayer. All the strength and speed in the world does you no good if you can’t pick up the difference between a slider and a fastball and learn to lay off stuff out of the zone.
To use a very famous comparison, Billy Beane was an amazingly gifted athlete who flopped in the big leagues because he just didn’t have the ability to make contact with professional stuff. Somewhere up the continuum was Bo Jackson, a phenomenal athlete who just did not have the minute skills to truly excel at baseball. These guys just killed high school competition, but along the way to the big leagues tiny little cracks in their game, that a fellow high school junion cannot exploit, showed up.
Harper is certainly a very gifted athletic specimen but right now (as is pointed out in the article) he’s just beating up on kids. When he hits Double A he might find himself very surprised indeed to take a swing that once sent the ball 570 feet and at that level misses the ball by six inches. Or if he makes it as a pitcher, he might get slaughtered because he can’t master the breaking ball. It doesn’t matter if you throw the ball 100 miles an hour if you don’t have exceptional command, or control of a breaking ball or an off speed pitch, or something that will prevent major leagues from teeing off on a four-seamer they know is coming.
So if Harper makes the big leagues as one or the other, concentrating one one discipline in exclusion of the other (and I assure you he’ll be made a hitter if at all possible) you’ll never really know if his other skill would have survived all those tests. Maybe. Maybe not.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not trying to talk smack about Bryce Harper. He’s a legitimately amazing phenomenon.
The talk of strategy in baseball is amusing. Baseball is just a series of set plays. When you are playing outfield, you analyze all probabilities. You just think of where the ball can be hit and what you will do in each case. You invent nothing.
Managers decisions are the same. Anyone who played at all knows what the situation require. That is why so many dumb people can manage a baseball team successfully.
Pitching changes are simple. Righty vs lefty .who has a weakness to curve ball, who can’t hit high speed, all these are on computer printouts. Managing does not require any arcane knowledge. The GM is the most important person on the team organization chart.
Other posts in this thread withstanding, this is like the 10th thing you’ve said in the last month I’ve agreed with. Please stop - it’s making me uncomfortable.
I guess. But my argument is leaning more and more to - what’s the difference? Using the stats I used earlier, here’s the composite numbers for the two leagues since 1998:
Year R/G H HR SB BA OBP SLG OPS
AL 4.936 9.299 1.101 0.611 0.270 0.338 0.430 0.767
NL 4.657 8.966 1.053 0.587 0.263 0.333 0.419 0.752
Difference 0.279 0.333 0.047 0.024 0.007 0.004 0.011 0.015
You can argue the NL having better hitters right now - but over 10 years, and the numbers are about the same? (Interesting number up there - SBs. Definitely would have thought more SBs/G in the NL.)
I can definitely agree on that one. I’m primarily an AL fan, because I was raised a KC fan. I guess that also has hardened my ability to watch things that may appear painful.
I think what we are seeing here is that as bad as pitchers are at hitting, they are still only 1/9th of the offense. For example, lets say you have 9 .300 hitters in your lineup. Assuming 500 abs in a season per player, that amounts to 1350 hits. Now take out one of those .300 hitters and replace him with a .100 hitter, the # comes down to 1250 hits. That amounts to a difference of 0.617 hits per game, relatively close to your 0.279 # (higher yes, but that makes sense since nobody has lineups that good). Just goes to show that baseball is truly a team game and one person can’t make a huge difference, no matter how much they suck.
Nah. By the time my sister was in second grade, her 15-girl softball team had two regular pitchers and a backup. I think what you’re hearing is that the kids who get in the booth are kids who are really into baseball, and these days kids at that age are only really into baseball if they’re quite good at playing it. Which means they’re pitchers for the reasons discussed above. (And yes, the three pitchers on my sister’s team were the most reliable sluggers as well.)
–Cliffy
We’re arguing in circles now, but the thing I love about baseball is that at every level – building your team, stocking your farm system, deciding on your 25- and 40-man rosters, filing out your line-up card and making substitutions – you’re forced to take the bad with the good. Yes, Adam Dunn hits for power and forces pitchers to throw him hittable pitches because he’s got a great eye. But your grandfather in a Rascal would make a more mobile outfielder. So when you’ve got a two-run lead in the seventh, do you pull Dunn for a defensive substitution so as to have a chance of catching the tying run’s pop fly? Or do you leave him in, knowing you’ll need his power again in the 9th (and 11th?) once your shitty bullpen has blown yet another late lead? I like the duel between the pitcher and the guy in the batter’s box too, because it’s yet another iteration of this, but the central drama of the game for me is that you have to balance the benefit of every player and every pitch against the downside risk. If you eliminate that risk because you’d rather just watch good hitters hit, well, it’s not for me.
–Cliffy
Not true. The hitter in front of the pitcher will get nothing to hit. They know an automatic out is coming up next, so why allow him to hurt you. So ,they pitch around at least 1 more batter when the pitcher hits. Sometimes ,if you have 2 outs, you may give the 7 hitter nothing too. The pitcher hitting creates a bigger hole than just one spot.