MLB: A Missouri lawmaker resolves against the DH

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Jack Flaherty #22 of the St Louis Cardinals (Photo by Norm Hall/Getty Images) /

State Rep. Jim Murphy wants the DH kept out of MLB. He wants a “traditional” National League as his state isn’t quite as “traditional” as he thinks.

Think of a baseball question, practically any question, and you may not have to wait very long before some politician somewhere gives his or her two cents’ worth and sits guilty of overspending. But at least he or she would waste their own money doing it, if you can call that good news.

Missouri state Rep. Jim Murphy boasts that he’s filed a concurrent resolution in his chamber objecting to the prospect of the National League introducing the DH. (More than a few think it may, in 2021.) Murphy tweets the boast and adds, “In MO we stand for tradition!” As if MLB didn’t have enough troubles and nuisances as spring training begins.

Resolutions such as Murphy’s aren’t intended to become binding law, of course. But so much, too, for government restraint, and for keeping its meathooks away from things it’s neither competent nor constitutionally sanctioned to bother about.

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Murphy’s resolution may not become binding law, with or without being laughed out of the chamber, but it still says there’s little enough left in American life that’s immune to political attention.

Of all the mischief you can accuse baseball’s government of committing or ignoring, the DH isn’t exactly the worst of the lot. But Missouri, like MLB, has essentially stood for tradition until it didn’t when the tradition(s) in question deserved not enhancement but expiration.

Once upon a time, American tradition included slavery in about half the country. It took at least one erroneous Supreme Court ruling in a case that began in a St. Louis court, and the subsequent blood, sweat, and tears of a national civil war, but Missouri’s government abolished legal slavery in January 1865.

One hundred and five years later, a St. Louis Cardinals center fielder—objecting to being traded like chattel at nothing more than the will of his master—spent his Christmas Eve day writing to baseball’s commissioner declaring his intention to challenge the old reserve clause that bound baseball players to the will of their teams’ owners.

Proclaiming along the way that a $90,000 slave was still a slave, so long as he lacked the right of any other American worker at any level to an open job market, Curt Flood‘s second shot heard ’round the world eventually went all the way to the Supreme Court and lost. (It took Andy Messersmith to blow off the hinges the door Flood bumped open.) But not for nothing was he nicknamed by one writer “Dred Scott in Spikes.”

Miles Mikolas #39 of the St. Louis Cardinals (Photo by Todd Kirkland/Getty Images) /

MLB: A Missouri lawmaker resolves against the DH

MLB’s traditional playing time, so much rhapsodized and romanticized, was the good old sunny afternoon. Until a major league-level team in the Negro National League played under the lights in April 1930—the Kansas City Monarchs. Missouri stood so foursquare for tradition then that it took a mere five years before night ball hit the majors where black players weren’t yet permitted to play.

The disgraceful tradition of segregated baseball came to its end, by the way, when the Brooklyn Dodgers’ chieftain Branch Rickey, keeping a close eye on Negro Leagues talent he might sign once commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis died, sent scouts to pay attention to a Monarchs infielder named Jackie Robinson.

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Baseball’s traditional playing surface was and remains grass—until it wasn’t, in too many stadiums, for too long. That was how many years the Cardinals and the Kansas City Royals played home games on pool table surfaces that might have compelled grounds crews to push Hoovers instead of ride John Deeres?

Murphy might care to notice that the tradition for which he now stands, however ceremonially, has a wounding flaw that mandates its final erasure: The National League lineup slot the DH would supersede boasted a .131/.162/.166 slash line in 2019. Show me one MLB team paying a pitcher big enough money because they absolutely must have him hit so far below the Mendoza Line that he makes Mario Mendoza resemble Mickey Mantle.

Remember: the National League itself isn’t averse to ending traditions that should be ended on behalf of a better good. Strictly daytime major league baseball was one. (Cincinnati, 1935, with President Franklin D. Roosevelt himself throwing the switch from the White House.) Baseball segregation was another. A third was batting with nothing more than the soft regulation cap. (The Pittsburgh Pirates first made helmets mandatory in 1953.) And the earliest known proposal for a DH came from a National League owner in 1892.

Mr. Murphy, in the unlikely event you’re reading this, be reminded that the team playing in your home district has been to 29 postseasons, winning 23 pennants and eleven World Series titles. They got to the 2019 postseason in the first place by winning the National League Central at practically the last minute. Their 2019 postseason pitching staff spent the regular season hitting .137 in 234 official at-bats.

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In other words, sir, there’s a Missouri tradition that’s worth upholding far more than a single lineup spot that’s still your team’s and the game’s single most automatic out, which the DH would take off automatic in favor of a few more runs on the scoreboard that might make the game just that much simpler. That tradition is winning baseball.

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