The Wall Street Journal featured an excellent article Friday that discusses the disparity between the American and National League. In it, the writer argues the designated hitter role allowed teams to pick up offensive superstars, which brought fans to games, which added to teams’ revenue, which allowed them to obtain stadiums, which allowed AL teams to add payroll and buy quality teams.

The DH may not have been the biggest factor in the decline of NL ball, but it certainly has not helped. During Interleague play and World Series games, it gives the AL an advantage over its older brother. Because no NL team carries a hitter on its bench that can match the firepower of a DH, they are already at a disadvantage.

That is the problem with the DH rule: It allows one dimensional (i.e. all hit/no field players) to stay in the game. Taking away a huge and underrated aspect of baseball, defense, strikes purists as wrong.

Purists also decry the DH position in that it keeps pitchers from hitting. That dampens the chess match between managers, the game within the game. Gone are the double switch and the sacrifice bunt. The DH position puts more emphasis on brute power, which is an element that attracts the average fan, but not the purist who loves thinking through the game.

The NL Should Embrace the DH
Jonathan Leshanski 
Maybe it’s time for the NL to grow up and adopt the designated hitter.  Yeah, I hate to think it, let alone mention it, but the idea of a pitcher batting has become an anachronism.  The National League is one of the last of the holdouts (the Central Division of the Nippon Professional Baseball League is the other), but almost every other league, from the Mexican League, Dominican leagues, amateur and colleges, and of course the American League have adopted the DH. 

The DH serves two major purposes; firstly it promotes a lot more offense per game, and second it protects pitchers from injury, but it’s the third factor which should really convince the NL that it’s time to abandon the DH.  The third factor is reality. 

The NL’s record in Interleague (1193-1325) play, in All-Star Games (9-0 and a tie), and the World Series (3-7) in the past decade show one clear thing, either that the National League is an inferior league, or that teams with a Designated Hitter win more games.  That last one should be of major concern to all of the sixteen National League team ownership groups - especially if they hope to bring a World Championship home.   

And since getting rid of the DH isn’t being discussed seriously anywhere in the majors the answer is to adopt it.  Sure it will change the strategy of the game, sure it will make a lot of marginal guys who play only because of their defensive skills unhappy, but for how long can the NL turn a blind eye to the advantage the AL has? 

The purists will argue that losing that strategy would be a tragedy, and maybe it would be, but games, like technology, or anything else in nature are forced to evolve or perish; and the NL’s evolution hasn’t shown a reason to keep the pitcher in the lineup.  Pitchers are restricted in their batting practice, often turned around to bat from the unnatural side to prevent getting hit by a pitch on their throwing hand, and routinely batted ninth as the biggest liability in the lineup (except in St. Louis), behind all those mighty .200 hitters. 

There was a time that wasn’t true, a time when many pitchers used to be great hitters, and there may even be a few of those guys still floating around, but financial issues and pitching scarcity have forced many teams to protect pitchers, especially ace pitchers, and treat them like they were made of glass.  That’s a hard reality too.  Good pitchers are hard to find and paid vast amounts of money - and no team wants to see them hurt.  Heck, most pitchers can’t even lay down a decent bunt because teams don’t drill them on it on the off chance they’d catch a pitch on their fingers. 

No, it’s modern baseball, not the DH which has turned the NL pitcher into a creature who usually has a sub .200 or even sub .100 batting average at the end of the year.  Somehow that doesn’t seem like something worth preserving.

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