Don’t rush on my account, Major League Baseball.
The owners locked out the players in the beginning of December, just the latest of a long line of stoppages to argue over money. The owners gave the players a deadline of today to reach an agreement without delaying Opening Day, and even Commissioner Rob Manfred showed up to work to try to make it happen. It’s that serious.
The vultures on both sides agreed on one thing immediately, leaving the other issues to fight over just as soon as they returned from their tropical vacations.
Yes, the dreaded universal designated hitter is a reality, just as it was in the shortened 2020 season.
The TV will be on, but Opening Day won’t be the celebration it usually is in the Campany household — the DH cuts too deep and changing the distance between bases is sure to follow. I know that people watch baseball in snippets now rather than hanging on every pitch, but the game is so different without the DH.
The main argument for it is that fans don’t want to see pitchers flail away with a bat while trying to accomplish the most difficult task in sports.
It is more than the Rick Camp game or Bartolo Colon dancing around the bases. It is strategy. Can the pitcher go another inning before tiring? If I use a pinch hitter now, will I miss him later? Find a box score from a National League game last year and compare it to any DH game and count the decisions. It is chaos, but a good chaos, like if the NBA forced teams to play a regular-sized human being for 30 seconds every quarter.
The Oakland Athletics sent 145 pinch hitters to the plate last year to lead the American League. The Cardinals had the fewest in the National League with 214. That is what the future looks like.
The smartest people in the game are responsible for the death blow that completely dumbed it down.
For too long analytics guys chirped that a good manager meant only about 10 runs to his team over the course of a season. Then they became general managers and made it true by making those decisions for them. These days, the manager only has to make sure the lineup card that the front office made for him gets to home plate on time. Even pitching use is scripted. We laughed when Tommy Lasorda fell asleep in the dugout, but it turns out that he was ahead of his time.
Cubs president Jed Hoyer is among those geniuses who are intent on twisting the game to make it palatable for people who don’t really watch it anyway.
“Obviously, I love baseball, but I don’t believe that the rules are written on stone tablets,” Hoyer said last year about moving the pitcher’s mound back from 60 feet, 6 inches.
It is not obvious to me that Hoyer loves baseball, but he is dead on about the rules being fluid. The first rule in Major League Baseball’s rule book, rule 1.01, has been ignored by an entire league since 1973.
“Baseball is a game between two teams of nine players each, under direction of a manager, played on an enclosed field in accordance with these rules, under jurisdiction of one or more umpires.”
That’s right, nine players. Not 10.
MLB actually had a revision to the rule ready in 1961, adding a clause stating “plus an optional batter per team to bat for the pitcher.” But the DH was overwhelmingly voted down by the Pacific Coast League. By the time the American League voted 8-4 to adopt the designated pinch hitter on a trial basis in 1973, it seems the only time anyone consulted the ancient texts was when George Brett had too much pine tar on his bat. They still haven’t changed rule 1.01, meaning the 1979 Pittsburgh Pirates are the last true champions. No team since has played 162 games and won the World Series without penciling in a DH at least once.
Just as Manfred referred to the World Series trophy as “a piece of metal,” the rules are a collection of papers that don’t include a single dollar sign and not important except to pillory the Astros for peeking at the iPad the commissioner placed in the dugout for them.
Ah, but it will be OK. Hawaii will have a state baseball tournament for the first time in three years, so MLB’s inferior product can take as much time as it needs.
