MLB: The designated hitter, the National League, and “traditionalism”

The designated hitter, the National League, and “traditionalism”

Tradition once kept MLB at play strictly during daylight hours, never mind that assorted minor league teams and at least one Negro Leagues team (the Kansas City Monarchs, in 1930) played scattered night games. Then, on May 24, 1935, President Franklin D. Roosevelt punched a specially-rigged button in the White House and the lights went on in Crosley Field, Cincinnati—for the majors’ first night game, between the Reds and the Philadelphia Phillies. The Reds won, 2-1. Take us out to a night game.

The designated hitter was a National League brainchild in the first place, too. And, yes, you can look it up, as baseball’s official historian John Thorn did when a reader (who opposed the Designated Hitter) asked after its origins the last time the National League pondered it. (2016.) The idea was born in a temple; specifically, the intellectual temple of William Chase Temple, who owned the Pittsburgh Pirates in the late nineteenth century.

“There had been a widespread concern among baseball men with the game’s declining offense,” Thorn wrote of that period, prompting Temple to suggest to his fellow National League owners a permanent pinch-hitter for the pitcher in 1892, after the league expanded to accept four teams from the ancient, fallen American Association. The vote was 7-5 in favor of Temple’s idea but it wasn’t a margin large enough to pass it. But still.

The American League first thought about a designated hitter until 1906. That’s when Connie Mack got tired of watching his Philadelphia Athletics pitchers such as Hall of Famers Chief Bender and Eddie Plank swinging at the plate as though with cardboard tubes instead of bats. Mack couldn’t take the Designated Hitter idea anywhere then, but the National League, those stubborn “traditionalists,” took it up again in 1928. The league’s president John Heydler proposed it, but the American League turned it down. The National League tried it in a few spring training games before rejecting it then.

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You can point to any number of arguments against the one that says the designated hitter erodes strategy. “The theory,” wrote George F. Will in 1986, in a column in which he finally dropped his own opposition to the DH, “is that when pitchers must bat, managers must be Aristotles, deciding when to remove pitchers for pinch hitters, or when to have pitchers bunt.”

Remove the pitcher from the batting order and managers must still be Aristotles. What to do with the order without the pitcher but with an extra, bona-fide hitter available to them? Do we have more than one leadoff type whom we can bat ninth and give ourselves the next best thing to two table setters? (Several teams have, in fact, thought just that, and made it work.) What are the chances that we can get a number eight hitter who turns the slot into something as good as a second cleanup hitter?

Managers would have to become six parts Aristotle and half a dozen parts Thomas J. Watson, the genius who made IBM truly international, guiding the company to greatness by innovation. Don’t say it as if it would be something terrible. (The single-word IBM motto under Watson’s stewardship: Think.) Never mind Crash Davis admonishing Nuke LaLoosh (in Bull Durham), “Don’t think, it’ll only hurt the ball club.” The thinking person’s game requires thinking. A lot of it.

I’ve said it before: MLB’s single most automatic out is the pitcher at the plate, and it’s been that way for too long, the aforementioned (and extremely occasional) thrills notwithstanding. (Don’t let Shohei Ohtani fool you. There may be a tiny contingent of two-way MLB players on the horizon, but that’s all it is, a tiny contingent. And Ohtani doesn’t bat during the games he pitches.)