The DH and the Essence of the Game

Nothing attracts the ire of baseball fans—or, if not baseball fans per se, then at least of baseball purists—quite like the designated hitter. It’s an assault on the very essence of the game: everybody fields, everybody hits—no exceptions. It’s not a question of whether the DH is good or bad for baseball—it flat out isn’t baseball.

There are plenty of interesting things you could discuss regarding the DH: the effects on strategy, the effects on pitcher usage patterns, how it shapes the careers of players afflicted with injuries or of poor-fielding sluggers, or even whether the DH is the best option for removing the pitcher from the batting order. I’m not going to discuss any of them. Once you dismiss the DH outright as an affront to the purity of the game, none of those things matters.

Instead, I’m only going to address one issue: is requiring the pitcher to bat essential to the core premise of baseball?

When we get into things like the essentials and the purity of the game, it is important to understand where the game has come from and how it has changed. How did the pitcher fit into the traditional concept of the nine-man lineup in the context of the era that developed that rule, and how does that context differ from today? If the context has changed, does keeping the rule nominally intact preserve the purity or essence of the original game?

To address these questions, let’s go back to 1872 and the fledgling National Association. It’s not quite three decades since the Cartwright rules were formed, and professional teams are first beginning to organize. While the game still has a long way to go to reach its 20th-century form, it already has come a long way from the earlier variations of townball and other bat-and-ball games that preceded Cartwright. The game is now distinctly baseball, and the nine-man lineup is firmly established.

Among the new professional teams are the Brooklyn Eckfords, formerly a successful amateur club in the 1850s and ‘60s (no relation to the later Brooklyn team that would become the Dodgers). Let’s take a look at their pitching staff for the 1872 season:

1872 Brooklyn Eckfords pitching staff

Pitcher	GS	IP
Martin	9	85
Zettlein	9	75.1
McDermott	7	63
Malone	2	18
O’Rourke	1	9
Clinton	1	9

The abnormally sparse schedule and lack of relief pitchers aside, this looks like it could be a modern pitching staff. It was a major anomaly in 1872. Most teams of the day had one primary pitcher. A team might end up using several pitchers over the course of a season, but not as a planned strategy. It was like changing your shortstop or your first baseman, a move you made when something–say, injury or ineffectiveness–went wrong.

The Brooklyn Eckfords went spectacularly wrong. They started off the season with four straight losses and 77 runs allowed* before changing pitchers. Two more losses and 50 runs allowed later, they changed again, only to allow 36 runs in another loss. They went back to their original pitcher for three more games with similar results. The list above does not represent a regular rotation of pitchers but rather a series of players being moved into the starting role and subsequently being benched.

*Keep in mind that this was when people played defense without gloves and team fielding played a much larger role in run prevention than it does today. The average NA game in 1872 had about 9.3 runs per game per team, with over half of those runs scored as unearned.

Eventually, the Eckfords managed to find some stability and right the ship with George Zettlein and Phonney Martin. The two combined to pitch the final 18 games with a respectable 3-15 record, but it was too late to salvage the season.

I bring up the Eckfords (and I do apologize to any Eckford fans out there) because those pitchers had to come from somewhere. There was no such thing as a bullpen. When the Eckfords needed a new pitcher, it was like needing a new shortstop or a new catcher. They had to dig through their roster for the next ballplayer most suited for the role.

James McDermott, the team’s original pitcher, had played the previous season as a reserve outfielder for another team that already had a pitcher. Martin joined the team as a right fielder. Zettlein played a game in right field. Martin Malone and Jim Clinton were utility men who slid into the pitcher role for a few games.

The point is, this idea that everyone, pitchers included, has to be a complete ballplayer who can hit and play the field comes from a time when pitchers actually did have to be complete ballplayers.

Let’s go back a few more years to 1868. Henry Chadwick has just published The Game of Base Ball, his treatise on what he hoped would become the national pastime. Chadwick addresses the matter of choosing one’s ideal position:

Thus, if he is strong in the arms, can throw a long distance, and can run fast, let him choose a position in the outer field, but, if he is very active in his movements, not afraid to face hot balls from the bat, is a quick and accurate thrower, but cannot throw a ball far, a position in the in–field is the best, and, in fact, the only one suited to him. Having selected the in–field as the locality of his operations as a fielder, the question then arises, ‘what position shall I train for, catcher, pitcher, short–stop, or base player, and if the latter, which base shall I play?’ This question is an important one to answer, for there is as great a difference between some of them as between the out–field and in–field play.”

This is a fascinating contrast to today’s game, where the first distinction made is between pitcher and non-pitcher. Chadwick instead considers the distinction between outfield and infield the obvious first step. And while he acknowledges that the differences between infield positions can be as great as the more obvious difference between infield and outfield, he is talking as much about distinguishing catcher from first base from shortstop as he is pitcher from anything else. Nowhere does he indicate that pitcher is in any way the unique position it since has become.

Later, Chadwick addresses the issue of changing positions and notes that pitchers routinely come from other positions:

The short-stop and a base man can change positions better than any other player, but never outfielders with base men or in–fielders, except a change pitcher, and, if possible, your change pitcher should occupy the position of short–stop.”

Clearly, Chadwick is not writing about the modern pitcher. The pitchers of Chadwick’s day tossed the ball underhand*, not from a mound but from a box chalked off 45 feet from home plate. For a time in the 1860s, pitchers were not allowed to stride during their delivery. Hitters were allowed to choose whether they wanted the ball delivered around the knees or the waist, and the pitcher was required to acquiesce.

*The word “pitch” actually means to toss underhand, as in pitching horseshoes—the rules specified the ball must be pitched rather than thrown, hence the term “pitcher.”

Pitchers had relatively little opportunity to distinguish themselves on the mound…err–flat, boxed-off area…under these conditions. As a result, they had to excel in other areas, as well. They had to be good fielders. They had to be able to hit. If they couldn’t do those things passably, it didn’t matter how good they were at pitching. They simply could not make up that value with their arms alone.

Over the course of the 1880s, the restrictions on pitchers were relaxed, and the pitcher’s plate was moved back. Overhand pitching opened up the position to dominant throwing specialists. As a result, two things happened over the remainder of the 19th century that distinguished pitchers from other positions.

One, pitchers could not physically pitch every game anymore. The added strain of the new delivery (along with a more regular schedule) meant pitchers needed recovery time between games, and teams went from a single starter to a rotation.

Two, your typical outfielder or shortstop was no longer capable of filling the role. Pitchers didn’t just have to know what they were doing and be able to place the ball anymore. They had to know what they were doing and be able to place the ball at high speeds while controlling its spin and velocity in a variety of ways no other player would ever need to learn how to do.

Pitchers simultaneously began taking significantly fewer at-bats than any other starter and making a significantly bigger impact on the game in the field. The balance between the offensive and defensive requirements of the position fell way out of line with the other eight positions, and the overall level of offense pitchers provided quickly started to drop off. Take a look at how pitchers compared offensively to the other positions in the first decade of professional baseball and how that had changed by the turn of the century (each dot represents one batting-season):

Pitchers originally hit in line with the other positions—the first graph looks remarkably similar to the graph below for shortstops in the decade before the DH was instituted. By the first decade of the 20^th century, however, the gap between pitchers and the next-worst-hitting position had grown larger than the gap between the best- and worst-hitting non-pitching positions, and pitchers were consistently hitting at levels that no regular at another position could survive.

It was this growing futility that prompted the conception of the DH. Connie Mack lent his support to the idea in 1906. In 1928, the National League, led by president John Heydler, pushed for the proposal, but failed to win the support of the American League owners.

The chasm between pitchers and other hitters continued to grow. By 1973, the difference between pitchers and the next-worst-hitting position was double the same gap at the turn of the century:

Simply put, the once legitimate requirement that pitchers be able to hit had long since become merely procedural. You could continue to force pitchers to take at-bats, but as long as they could pitch, it didn’t really matter whether they could hit or not.

We see ample evidence of this over the years. For example:

• Bob Buhl went the entire 1962 season (70 at-bats) without recording a single hit, with no effect whatsoever on his status as a full-time starter.
• Teams will occasionally send a pitcher to the plate and explicitly tell him not to swing the bat.
• When the Brewers signed Jim Abbott in 1999, Abbott had not taken a single at-bat in a competitive game in his professional career. And he was born without a right hand. Despite probably having the worst hitting projection imaginable, he was signed as a starter and given 24 plate appearances before being released due to disappointing pitching performance.

These aren’t exceptions made for unique pitching talents. Buhl was a good pitcher, but not particularly noteworthy. Abbott was really good at his best, but when Milwaukee signed him, he was a back-of-the-rotation flyer who had been released and out of baseball for most of the previous two years.

…

“The designated hitter rule is like letting someone else take Wilt Chamberlain’s free throws.” –Rick Wise, 1974

“[pinch hitter] BATTED FOR [pitcher]” -Retrosheet.org, a few thousand times every year

Baseball has long since accepted the idea that one player can bat for another—if Wilt Chamberlain can’t hit, you can simply pinch hit for him. The difference from the DH, of course, is that pinch-hitting comes with a cost. The substituted player is out of the game, and if the pinch hitter doesn’t take over his spot in the field, you’ll need to use another sub for that. So it’s not exactly the same thing.

Still, it’s a difference of degree more than a fundamental difference. Both the PH and the DH are corruptions of the original spirit of the game, where a player was expected to fulfill his role for the entire game. In fact, for a time the rules of organized baseball prohibited substitutions after the third inning except in case of injury. The idea that you could bring in a specialist off the bench to cover for a starter’s weaknesses is something that evolved into the game as that restriction was found to be non-essential. The DH just pushes that concept further than pinch-hitting does.

Pinch-hitting patterns further illustrate the fundamental difference between pitchers and other positions. Over three-quarters of all pinch-hit appearances in the NL are for the pitcher. Less than two percent of NL games are completed without at least one pitcher being removed for a pinch hitter. The DH phenomenon is being imitated, albeit to a lesser degree, even without an actual DH by having pinch hitters severely limit the at-bats taken by pitchers compared to any other position.

Now, what if instead of just pinch hitting for someone a lot, you started pinch-hitting every single time his spot in the order came up? Obviously, you would still have the same costs associated with pinch-hitting, but you would now be violating the premise that everyone who plays the field has to hit, same as the DH does.

This is exactly what happens with relief pitchers.

Even without the DH, that means there are seven roster spots, give or take, that a typical team devotes to players it never intends to send to the plate. Last year, 126 pitchers appeared in at least one game for an NL team without ever coming to the plate. Eighty-nine of those appeared in at least 10 games. Thirty-seven appeared in at least 50.

This is the NL, where there is no DH, and still there is a huge class of pitchers that plays the field but doesn’t hit. With the emergence of the bullpen, even the procedural requirement that pitchers have to stand at the plate whether they can hit or not has eroded.

Furthermore, the allotment of pitchers into either a starting role, where they will bat, or a relief role, where they won’t, is determined almost entirely by their capabilities as pitchers and not as hitters.

Take Micah Owings, for example, the best-hitting pitcher in recent memory. While he was in college, the same scouting report that said his power rivaled any bat in the college ranks also speculated that his role in the majors would be as a reliever if he went pro as a pitcher. When Owings struggled as a starter for Cincinnati in 2009, they did move him to the bullpen, even though it meant effectively losing his bat (he took all of 14 plate appearances in 2010, half of them as a PH, and batted in fewer than half his pitching appearances). Even for by far the best-hitting pitcher in the league, his usage was dictated by how he pitched and not how he hit.

None of this is to say the DH is necessarily the right thing for the game. Maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. What the DH isn’t, though, is a radical departure from the game’s essence. It is simply a response to the natural evolution of the role of the pitcher within the game. As that role moved further and further away from the original spirit of the game, teams began treating pitchers far differently from any other hitter. With or without the DH, the game’s essence had already radically shifted.

Does the DH take that too far? That’s a question of the relative merits and faults of the DH. It’s a question of what aspects of the game you most value and how the DH impacts them. If you don’t like the DH, I won’t try to change your mind.

Even if you don’t like it, though, it’s important to understand where the DH comes from and how it fits into the changes in the game’s essence over the years. It didn’t materialize out of nowhere. And, as different as it might seem from the game of the 1960s, or even of the NL today, that difference is nothing compared to how much the game has evolved from its roots in the 19th century. The DH itself is a fairly minor departure compared to the changes that led up to it.

So, by all means, prefer the NL for strategic reasons, or because you, in fact, enjoy watching pitchers hit, or for whatever reason—but enjoy the AL game as well, because it is, after all, still baseball.

References & Resources

• The Lahman Database and Retrosheet were, and are, invaluable resources
• Henry Chadwick, The Game of Base Ball
• Lincoln Evening Journal, “America Turns Thumbs Down on Heydler’s Plan”
• Baseball-Reference, 1872 Brooklyn Eckfords