A DHuMB IDEA AT 25

I hated it. I liked watching pitchers hit, even if my first baseball memories were of Ray Culp and Gary Waslewski and Juan Pizarro flailing away at fastballs in the dirt. And it seemed the designated hitter violated some very important principles, even if I couldn’t then specify what they were. Now I can. The DH is practically the archetype of meddlesome, liberal, tradition-despising micromanagerial busybodiness. After a quarter century of watching baseball, and with the designated hitter used in every baseball league in the world except the National, I see no reason to revise my opinion. It’s an abomination. If I still love American League baseball, it’s in the way a patriot can still love a country that has been disgraced before history.

I’m not alone. Many people have raised their voices against the DH in the course of this bleak quarter-century. The writer Daniel Okrent thinks the 1973 reforms were “an occurrence of such immense proportion, of such stunningly negative effect, that the year can be remembered for nothing else.” Sportswriter Red Smith thought the DH “a loathsome ploy.” Manager Sparky Anderson says, “It stinks.”

The DH rule was a radical and permanent solution to what in retrospect were two short-term problems. First, baseball had just gone through several years of weak hitting. The pitcher’s mound was too high, and better-conditioned hurlers overwhelmed the batters. Relief pitching was being used more scientifically, and baseball gloves were of much higher quality (a seemingly trivial development with monumental implications). In 1966, only two American leaguers hit over .300. In 1967, only four did, and in 1968, only one did (Carl Yastrzemski, at .301). This situation was common to both leagues, but it was masked statistically in the National League by new Astroturf surfaces, which produced cheap hits.

The second problem: Baseball was undergoing an attendance crisis, due partly to competition from other sports (notably football) and partly to the fading of the stars of the 1960s. In 1972, only three American League teams drew more than a million fans. It was thought the DH would kill both these birds — garnering more hits and more fans — with one stone.

There would be drawbacks to the DH: First, it would cut down on managerial strategy, much of which involved deciding whether to remove a good pitcher from the game or to pinch hit for him. According to Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee, himself an excellent hitter, the DH “relieves the manager of all responsibility except to post the lineup card and make sure everybody gets to the airport on time.” And it would mess up the statistics that had served as the game’s conscience since the turn of the century.

What did we get in return? A bit more offense, but that was hardly the point. Privately, the owners figured that innovation for its own sake would draw people back to the parks. While the DH had first been proposed by NL president John Heydler in 1928, the modern rule is the brainchild of the late Oakland A’s owner Charles O. Finley, author of a lot of other novelties, most of which have been consigned to the ridicule that the DH should share. Finley favored orange baseballs and walks that would be three balls instead of four. He initiated those Day-Glo double-knit uniforms that grew increasingly bizarre as the seventies wore on. Finley wanted not just a designated hitter but a “designated runner.” In fact, he wanted two-platoon baseball. There was never any doubt in Finley’s mind that he was a visionary, and he was the sport’s great social engineer. As he himself put it, “They thought I was nuts, but after continuously harping, I finally woke them up.” Like most of his ilk in that era — and ours — he was motivated at heart by loathing for that which he sought to reform. As San Francisco Giants broadcaster Jon Miller remembers, “Charley didn’t really like baseball. He thought it was boring.”

That is, the DH was a means of corralling sports fans who would really rather be watching football. That’s not what the owners said publicly. Their public rationale for the DH had two points: First, it would add offense to the game — here the DH succeeded moderately, if at great cost. Second, it would extend the careers of some of baseball’s big-name stars too old to play in the field — and here it was an absolute failure.

When the DH was passed, an extraordinarily high number of sluggers were ending their careers: Orlando Cepeda, Willie Mays, Willie McCovey. . . . Friends of mine said, “Just think: We could get to see Hank Aaron play.” Well, we did. In 1976, I saw “the Hammer” (quotation marks were necessary by this point) drag his lame and bloated haunches up to the plate at Fenway Park as the designated hitter for the Milwaukee Brewers, to wave at the ball a few times. Aaron did little that year except complain about how badly baseball had treated him. At .229, he was outhit by Mike Hegan, Von Joshua, and all the Brewer defensive replacements. He hit a career low of 10 home runs and had more strikeouts than RBIs for the only time in his career.

DHs are in general the least interesting ballplayers on any club. They consistently hit below the league average, and some years, DH is the lowest- hitting position of all — below shortstop, even. The designated hitter isn’t even really a position. In 1995, only five teams had DHs with enough at-bats to qualify for the AL batting title. On the other teams, the DH tends to be any guy who’s too lame, exhausted, or incompetent to put into the regular lineup. Granted, there are some good ones: Edgar Martinez hit .356 in 1995, and Minnesota’s Paul Molitor is a future Hall of Famer. But both are capable of playing infield positions, and both are exceptions. Talk about a bait-and- switch: In general, the DH is either an exercise in sports necrophilia (as in the case of Aaron) or a dumping ground for people who don’t belong in the big leagues in the first place. On Opening Day this year, the American League’s DHs went a piddling 7-for-35 and were outhit by the National League’s pitchers, who were 6-for-27.

The typical DH is more likely some stiff on the order of Juan Samuel, Bob Hamelin, Carlos Delgado, and Ron Kittle. Don Baylor, with a career average of .260, is hardly one of the game’s giants. Yet he’s routinely talked about as the greatest DH of all, having in 1979 become the first at his position to win an MVP. Baylor went on to win the AL Outstanding Designated Hitter award in both 1985 and 1986, for batting, respectively, .231 and .238. Hardly the stuff to elicit a collective, “Take me out to the ball game!”

Meanwhile, the warnings of the damage the DH would do to the game turned out to err on the side of optimism. Take strategy: Handling pitchers was not the only aspect of managerial strategy that disappeared from the AL game. So did the double-substitution, used to camouflage pitchers in the batting order, which brought a variety of players into the game. And the rule created a chain reaction of boredom. Since AL teams generally carried an extra hitter, there was a dramatic increase in “platooning,” the brain-dead managerial practice of starting righthanded hitters against lefthanded pitchers, and vice versa. Achievements have been cheapened beyond anyone’s wildest dread, so that a couple of half-players may even ride their DH-bloated statistics into the Hall of Fame. As noted above, Paul Molitor is a shoo-in when he retires, and even that great disappointment Jim Rice, who could barely scrape his way to 2,400 career hits, will make it eventually. And there were unintended consequences. There were more hit batsmen in the AL, since pitchers didn’t have to come to the plate after brushing back opponents. And until they learned to work with the DH, managers were prone to overwork pitchers; Billy Martin of the A’s ruined the arms of an entire pitching staff in the early 1980s.

The DH is a cheap and pointless gimmick that has left the game lousier than before it arrived. One of the first managers to recognize it as such, the Orioles’ Earl Weaver, used to pencil in as DHs pitchers who were scheduled to start days later — and then pinch-hit for them on their first at-bat. Thus, Steve Stone was in the lineup as DH while celebrating Rosh Hashana in another city. Stone once DH’d while out of the country (in Toronto for his next start). And Tippy Martinez DH’d while attending a funeral. Real DHs have been scarcely less ridiculous. George Brett would work on his golf swing between at-bats. John Lowenstein, explaining how he kept alert, used to say, ” I flush the john between innings to keep my wrists strong.” You can see how this got to me at age 10: Kids used to dream about racing through the outfield to catch flies. What kind of kid dreams about flushing the toilet? Who could dream about being a DH?

What an insult that people are trying to pass off this collection of scrubs as heroes. Listen to Reggie Jackson, for instance, that great self-promoting, .250-hitting pseudo-star of the 1970s — the quintessential DH — who is now a Yankees executive. Jackson defends the DH by saying, “We were reminded of what heroes mean to all of us when Magic Johnson and Michael Jordan returned to the NBA.”

Yes, but Johnson and Jordan returned as heroes. DHs return as league- assisted wards. It’s not only cheating — it’s aesthetically wrong. It wrecks the dialectic between individual achievement and teamwork that is one of the clockwork beauties of baseball. Why should, say, Harold Baines get to take his whacks without having to expose himself to windblown flies? It doesn’t matter if he gets a few clutch hits: A gold medal in the Special Olympics is not Olympic gold.

This is the principle that explains why every Little League team has the DH — even to the detriment of the better all-around players. In a world where parents constitute a dozen outraged interest groups, it allows a coach to play an extra player and be more “fair.”

Does this remind you of anything? It’s affirmative action.

“The NL, which fancies itself too highfalutinly traditionalist for the DH,” says George Will, “plays an awful lot of pinball ‘baseball’ on plastic rugs spread on concrete in cavernous antiseptic new stadiums in Houston, Cincinnati, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Montreal and St. Louis.” This is not an argument, of course; it’s like the Third Reich calling the Red Army a human- rights violator.

But Will has a point. As time passes, it gets harder and harder to argue against the DH on the strongest grounds, those of tradition, particularly as tradition is flouted by expansion and night World Series games and artificial turf and inter-league play. The AL has now gone through a quarter of its history with the DH. The DH is neither popular nor unpopular; AL fans tend to favor it and NL fans tend not to, much as Americans like baseball and Englishmen like cricket. As veteran sportswriter Leonard Koppett put it, ” It’s the biggest nothing I ever heard of in my life.” Over the last 25 years, Koppett says, the AL has a batting average about .007 higher than that of the National League. The AL hits more home runs and the NL has more sacrifices. People have made their peace with it.

But that’s the problem. The corruption the rule engenders in fans is the most appalling aspect of it. Paul Woody writes in the Richmond Times- Dispatch, “One day, perhaps because of the DH rule, we might see Tony Gwynn go after his 3,000th hit and [a] .400 season or Ken Griffey Jr. track down Hank Aaron’s home run record. Those are not such bad things. Who doesn’t want to see history in the making?” But they are bad things, if you eclipse a true achievement with a cheap and shoddy one. Fans like Woody don’t like baseball. They like excitement, which they define as watching people run around. And baseball simply cannot compete with basketball and football in the people-running-around department.

“People come to see players produce runs,” says Wade Boggs. It is not peripheral to our argument that Boggs is one of the stupidest men ever to play baseball. The game as Boggs understands it is basically the moronball you see on the evening-highlight films. If a game ends 6-5 on a suicide squeeze in the 17th inning, you’ll still see only the home runs that were hit in the top of the third. Why? Because Home Runs = Excitement. Look at the ad campaign Major League Baseball has been running for the last two seasons, with the succession of home-plate collisions and speed guns and dust flying off a smashed ball. “I love this game,” says a man’s voice at the end of every commercial. Yes — unfortunately, the game he loves is basketball.

The DH appears here to stay. As Seymour Siwoff of the Elias Sports Bureau says, “It’s become part of working conditions.” Even if most DHs stink, their seniority makes their average salaries the second-highest in the game. At $ 3. 46 million per annum, they’re just behind first basemen ($ 3.57 million), at 250 percent of the average big-league paycheck. Owners have pleaded with the players’ union to let them scrap the DH and offered to add a 26th player to all rosters as recompense. The union isn’t budging.

Does this remind you of anything? It’s featherbedding.

The union is taking the Clintonesque position that it’s not being self- serving, only doing the business the American people sent it here to do. As Donald Fehr, executive director of the union, says, “I don’t know why we’d do something that would take Eddie Murray and Paul Molitor and Chili Davis out of the game while they can still hit.”

Oh, no! Not Chili Davis!

At the end of March, baseball’s owners sent players a letter of intent that would allow them to abolish the DH rule after the 1998 season. (They must give the union a year’s notice for any rules change.) Players were outraged at the gesture, but that’s all it was — a gesture. Owners are about as likely to get real baseball back as Republicans are to abolish the Education Department.

Right now, owners won’t even speak publicly about getting rid of it, even if sentiment (or money) is strongly behind scrapping the thing. In a recent poll of American League clubs, nine voted publicly in favor of keeping the rule (although three of these indicated they’d switch sides if the movement gained enough momentum). The five that wanted to scrap it either abstained or voted undecided. Why won’t the owners talk? “It’s such a powerful issue,” says one statistician, “that I don’t think anyone can talk about it. Because of its labor consequences.”

Does this remind you of anything? It’s political correctness.

All of us sitting there in Fenway a quarter century ago were being rolled over by history. The DH was part of the Zeitgeist. The Philadelphia plan launching affirmative action had just been promulgated by President Nixon in an executive order. Watergate hearings were just getting underway.

A year later, in the city surrounding Fenway park, school busing would be imposed by court order and enforced with armored cars and thousands of troops, wrecking ethnic neighborhoods full of baseball fans. Pretty much everything bad about America, and pretty much every element in the decline of Western civilization, can be linked in some way to the designated hitter.

Baseball teaches many lessons. As Jacques Barzun famously noted, “Whoever would understand the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.” Since 1973, the designated hitter has helped teach us another lesson: that a bad idea, no matter how empty its rationale, no matter how venal and self- serving its proponents, can go on forever and ever.

Christopher Caldwell is senior writer at THE WEEKLY STANDARD.