The Universal DH, Another Swing and Miss from Manfred

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Written by Sam Gutkin 
Just when you thought all of the nonsense coming out of Major League Baseball couldn't get worse, Commissioner Rob Manfred turned the insanity up another notch. Thursday our beloved commissioner left yet another mark (or rather stain) on the game of baseball, including a Designated Hitter for the National League in the newest proposal for the 2020 and 2021 season. Even though the proposal only specifically mentioned those two seasons, the DH will now certainly be a part of the 2022 Collective Bargaining Agreement and is forever here to stay.
While baseball fans have been waiting for the league to come up with a return plan, and players have been waiting to get back to work, the MLB has had other things on their mind. Instead of coming up with a solution to the real problem plaguing the league (not playing), our scum-bag commissioner has been focused on finding a way to shoehorn in another gameplay gimmick, which is irrelevant to the situation at hand. Regardless of your stance on the DH itself, putting it in a proposal to start the season is contemptible at best

The DH being added to this proposal of course puts the players into a spot where they HAVE to agree to it whether they want it or not. If they reject the proposal they face public backlash AND continue to be unemployed. This gives them only one option if they want to start the season (which they do), and its to accept the DH.
Rob Manfred instituting a gimmick shouldn’t come as a shock to anybody, as it seems like the only way he knows the try to save the league he's ruined.

After deciding that the reason nobody watches baseball is “pace of play”, Manfred attempted to solve his own non-existent problem by trying to implement a pitch clock, batter minimums, and asinine extra-inning rules.

These proposals completely misunderstand why baseball fans like the game. No baseball fan has ever cared about a pitcher taking too long to throw a pitch, as they appreciate the strategy of throwing a pick off or shaking off the catcher, and they enjoy the suspense between pitches. No baseball fan has ever cared about a pitcher facing only one batter, as the left-handed specialist is an integral part of baseball strategy. No baseball fan has ever complained about long extra-inning games, because those are some of the most exciting games to watch. The reason why Manfred didn't understand any of this is that he is not a baseball fan himself.

Manfred has now made the same mistake once again. After tarnishing the reputation of baseball by refusing to pay the players to start the season (And under-punishing teams caught cheating), he is trying to get the fans back by adding yet another gimmick. This time the gimmick is the universal DH. 

The universal DH shows how little Manfred understands about what makes baseball the greatest sport on earth, and how little he thinks of the fans. He sees the fans as mindless lemmings who will forgive his wrongdoing as long as he can cause home runs, and he sees the 150-year-old sport as something he can manipulate at will, for his own selfish purposes.

Pitcher hitting strategy is an important part of baseball, that will often affect outcomes. The decision to walk an 8 hitter to get to a pitcher, the decision about when to pinch-hit for a pitcher, and the execution of a pitcher bunt have been important parts of National League baseball for well over 100 years. Pitchers at the plate also often provide high entertainment value, as moments like Bartolo Colon's home run are far more fun to watch and more memorable than any DH at-bat.

Even though allowing a pitcher to hit is obviously not the way to have peak offensive production (nobody would argue that), peak offensive production isn't the only point of baseball. You could also have even higher offensive production with 2 or 3 or 9 DHs. If higher run totals are all you care about, you would also see more scoring if you forced pitchers to throw underhand. But of course, that would defeat the purpose of the game, and so does this. Higher scores do not equal a better game, and baseball players must play all sides of baseball. 

It’s important in all of this to remember why the DH was made to begin with. The AL implemented the designated hitter, as a gimmick, in 1973 for the sole purpose of increasing viewership and therefore profit. The MLB had lost its spot as America’s #1 sport, and the Super Bowl (which was still fairly new) was crushing the World Series in ratings. On top of this, pitchers were still dominating (despite the lowered mound) so commissioner Bowie Kuhn added in the fake position to “make the game more exciting”. The DH has since served to allow players who are too old or too un-athletic to play the field a chance to hit, something that they don’t deserve, because once again, a baseball player shouldn't be able to just play half of baseball. The Designated Hitter was never intended to be a genuine game-play improvement, and any enjoyment you have gotten out of it is purely accidental. It was a cash grab then and it still is now.

 If you do like the DH though, because some people do, that's fine! We live in a free country and you are free to continue being wrong! There is a league just for people like you, the American League. Before yesterday this system worked fine. One league with the DH and one without. The MLB was bicameral and everybody could be happy. But now tha'ts all gone. You have no more options. Thanks to Rob "Huge Schmuck" Manfred, the whole league has the DH

Ultimately all of this boils down to Manfred's vision for the game. The commissioner doesn’t see any beauty in the strategy or quirks of the sport, and instead, wants baseball to become as sterile and boring as possible. The baseball he imagines is a game where a pitcher, who you’re not allowed to sub out or talk to, and who is forced to throw a pitch every 10 seconds, faces batter after batter who don’t know a baseball glove from an oven mitt and who only know how to swing. What I just described is pretty much a home run derby. It is to baseball what competitive long drive is to golf. Its a farse. We can not allow the highest level of our sport to fall that low.



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