MLB: A Missouri lawmaker resolves against the designated hitter

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.

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.