Old third basemen become first basemen, and old first basemen become designated hitters.
George Brett
I never liked the idea of the designated hitter. Pitchers are supposed to hit or at least try. And don’t give me that business about the DH prolonging careers. If you get too old to field your position, then just retire, geezer. Let someone else make obscene amounts of money for a while.
To wit: The average annual baseball salary is $4.4 million, and the minimum is something like $730,000.
Pitcher Max Scherzer will make $43 million this year and only plays a little more than once a week. Now he doesn’t even have to bat anymore.
I want him to earn every penny of that $43 million, and part of his job description should include walking out to home plate with a bat and then carrying it back to the dugout while fans hiss and boo at his offensive incompetence.
Last year Scherzer came to the plate 28 times and didn’t get a single hit.
That’s mostly because he’s indifferent to his batting statistics.
Pitchers haven’t always been that way.
Warren Spahn, who won 363 games, had 2,056 plate appearances during his 21-year career and hit 35 home runs. Unfortunately for Spahn, he made less than a 10th of what the minimum salary is now during the years when he was making the most money.
Sure, one could argue that the DH makes the game more exiting, but I would counter that it also makes the game less interesting.
The universal DH in baseball is tantamount to the version of Monopoly where you deal out all the deeds, so the game doesn’t take six hours to complete.
But it’s not the same game.
Sadly, it will never be that game again.
Supporters of the universal DH have won the battle.
OK. Fine. Whatever. Perhaps one day golfers will employ DPs, or designated putters. Some of them already need designated drivers after 18 holes.
Maybe golfers could team up with an SS, a sand trap specialist, called upon to get the golf ball out of the bunker when a golfer gets too old to stand up straight in sand.
If we are going that far, why not just have someone who specializes in long tee shots.
But then golf would become a team sport with a roster, a daily lineup card and, in all likelihood, something akin to a yearly draft. And like all team sports, violence will be commonplace. This is especially dangerous on the golf course, because the players all carry a whole bag of clubs.
But I digress as usual.
Now that the strategies employed to deal with the pitcher in the lineup are no longer relevant, why not just do away with the manager altogether.
You don’t need to pay an extra employee to fill out a line-up card and mutter repetitious drivel at the post-game press conference.
“It was really good, really, really good. He pitched really good. He’s been hitting the ball really good. That hot dog was really good even though it had ketchup on it.”
Let the catcher change the pitchers if it becomes necessary. He knows when it is necessary before the manager does anyway. I’ve always wondered why the manager walks to the pitcher’s mound and asks the pitcher about his condition. The pitcher has reason to mislead the manager, especially if he has incentive clauses in his contract.
“One more inning and I get free Netflix for a year.”
Since we baseball purists have presumably lost The DH battle, I have a “modest proposal” for MLB, a tweak to the DH rules if you will.
As things stand, a pitcher can throw at a hitter without facing direct retaliation from the opposing pitcher since he never has to bat.
My tweak to the rules would require any pitcher who hits a batter to lead-off the following inning, DH or no DH.
If the batter hit by the offending pitcher is forced to leave the game due to an injury, the offending pitcher will be required to stand in the batter’s box blindfolded. Try that with Hunter
Try that with Hunter Greene of the Reds throwing 105-mph heat within a few inches of your most vulnerable body parts.
That would not only bring justice back to baseball but a fair amount of deterrence as well.
It might even help ratings.
I suppose that’s enough about that.
You might be interested to learn that the original version of this column was quite different. It included a lengthy discussion of why the Indian and Antarctic oceans should be renamed.
Don’t even ask. Selah.
Selah.
T. Michael Stone is a former associate editor of the Lake Oconee News. You can contact him at michael@msgrnews.com or follow him on twitter @tmichaelstone5.