ONCE A BLOW TO PITCHERS' PRIDE, DH NOW UNIVERSAL
There was plenty of pushback when the American League adopted the rule in 1973
When the American League adopted the designated hitter a half-century ago, some pitchers didn't take kindly to the change.
“This robs the pitcher of his manhood,” sneered Philadelphia Phillies pitcher Dick Selma. “It makes him a robot.”
Luckily for Selma, the Phillies played in the National League, so he got to keep his manhood in 1973, the first year of the DH. But after he was sold to an AL team at the end of the season, he lost his hitting privileges. He finished with a lifetime batting average of .172.
“Man, I hate that new rule,” said Oakland A's pitcher Catfish Hunter, who scored a US$5,000 bonus for hitting .350 in 1971. “I can hit the long ball. I can bunt. I take my hitting seriously.” He said the change “kinda hurts my pride. I like to think that if I wasn't a pitcher I could be an outfielder or a first baseman or something and play major league baseball anyway.”
Hunter would get just two more at-bats the rest of his career, going 1-for-2.
The AL'S vote to implement the DH split baseball between the National League, which continued to use traditional lineups, and its more risk-taking junior circuit. By contrast, Major League Baseball's decision to make the DH universal across both leagues in the upcoming season has provoked relatively little dissent. The sorry state of pitchers at the plate probably has something to do with that — collectively, they hit just .110 last season.
The DH division between the NL and AL was perhaps the final relic from an era when they really were two distinct leagues. Each league used to have its own president and employ its own umpires. In 1999, MLB abolished the league presidents and consolidated operations in the commissioner's office.
Largely forgotten today is that the AL'S decision to add the DH — initially called the “designated pinch-hitter,” or DPH — was a gambit by a league that lagged behind the NL in attendance and prestige. Over the previous decade, the NL had outdrawn the AL by 512 million fans.
“The National League, rich and comfortable and therefore disdainful of gimmickry, has refused to adopt the rule,” the New York Times observed.
“It's healthy to see baseball willing to experiment with its rules at the major league level,” said commissioner Bowie Kuhn, after the AL adopted the DH on a three-year experimental basis. “There are some people who thought the game was too inflexible to do it.”
AL president Joe Cronin, who had been a star player-manager for the Washington Senators back in the '30s, framed the change as a way to compete against other pro sports. By this time, the NFL had eclipsed baseball as America's most popular sport, and some commentators thought the national pastime was too slow for modern fans (a problem that has become worse in recent decades).
“We realize there have been inroads into our sport,” Cronin said. “Kids are going into basketball and football, which have built-in farm systems in the colleges.”
But the old-school NL was firmly against the change.
“Baseball thrives on the fact that its participants must be whole athletes, able to do everything,” said league president Charles S. (Chub) Feeney. “Maybe football is different. I don't know. But specialists don't belong in baseball.”
That last sentence didn't age well. But it reflected the mentality of the sport before the advent of specialized relievers, setup men and one-inning closers. In fact, some AL managers said they would carry just eight pitchers, reasoning that if they weren't hitting, starting pitchers could go longer into games, negating the need for a deep bullpen. Other AL skippers scorned the change.
“If the commissioner thinks this will help baseball then he ought to go back to his law office,” said Detroit Tigers manager Billy Martin, referring to Kuhn's previous line of work.
California Angels manager Bobby Winkles expressed empathy for hitters batting ninth in the lineup, a slot previously almost exclusively reserved for pitchers. “We'll have to make the guy batting last feel as if he doesn't have to walk to the plate with a towel over his head,” he quipped.
New York Times columnist Red Smith argued the change would negate the need for strategy, asking, “Why have a manager at all?”
“Some of us are traditionalists who find baseball beautiful and consider it a bloody awful shame when the hucksters wrench the game out of shape,” Smith wrote, adding, “Now they are altering the music, a lot of tone-deaf hacks rewriting Beethoven.”
But in his Washington Post sports column, Shirley Povich mocked DH opponents as “benighted bleeding hearts, sticklers for tradition.” While a minority of fans appreciate the subtle facets of the game, he wrote, many others “see baseball as a bore, and to them it is even more of a drag in contrast to the continuous violence of pro football.”
Hitting pitchers, Povich wrote, “won't be missed.”
A lack of offensive production from pitchers has long bedevilled the sport. Nearly 100 years ago, ironically, it was the National League that had pushed for the DH. NL president John Arnold Heydler — a former sports reporter for the Washington Star — championed the cause in 1928, citing his frustration at watching “hopeless” pitchers trying to hit. But he had to abandon it in the face of AL opposition.
“We may not be ready for it now,” said Heydler, “but I have thought we might get around to it. Innovations are slow to catch on.”
(Heydler was ahead of his time in other ways, too. Back in his reporting days, he compiled stats in his spare time, and as league president, he hired the Al Munro Elias Baseball Bureau to keep the league's stats. A SABR profile dubbed him “a forerunner of today's sabermetricians.”)
And as John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball, wrote in a piece on the origins of the DH, the idea was first proposed back in 1891.
There have been some notable exceptions to the century-plus track record of feeble hitting pitchers — most notably, Babe Ruth, who started out as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox before switching to the outfield. Washington Senators pitcher Walter Johnson hit 24 home runs in his career, and in 1925, at the age of 37, he hit .433 in 97 at-bats, with six doubles, one triple, and two homers. And of course Angels pitcher and DH Shohei Ohtani is the ultimate unicorn, hitting 46 home runs last year while going 9-2 with a 3.18 ERA from the mound. But most pitchers are overmatched at the plate.
The DH finally debuted on opening day at Fenway Park, April 6, 1973, when the Red Sox hosted the New York Yankees. In the top of the first, the Yankees loaded the bases with two outs, and DH Ron Blomberg came up. The sport's first designated hitter didn't get a chance to hit. He walked in a run to give New York a 1-0 lead.
After the Yankees stranded him on base, Blomberg was at a loss what to do, until he got instructions from first base coach Elston Howard: “I was left at first base, and I was going to stay there because normally that was my position. Elston said `Come on back to the bench, you aren't supposed to stay out here.' I went back and said, `What do I do?' He said, `You just sit here with me.' ”
Blomberg finished 1-for-3, while his Boston DH counterpart, Orlando Cepeda, went 0-for-6. But the Red Sox didn't need the extra offence, throttling the Yankees 15-5.
The new rule had the desired effect for the AL, jolting the leaguewide batting average to .259, up from .239 in 1972. It also elevated the social status of pinch-hitters, at least in the eyes of the New York Times.
“For eight dreary decades they plodded along in near-obscurity, mere oddments in the game of baseball's great geometric design,” Wells Twombly wrote. “They were vulgar necessities, people rushed into the lineup to save situation somebody else had already fouled up. They were walking, talking, tobacco-chomping, beer-bloated anomalies, specialists in a sport that prides itself on the flawless versatility of its athletes.”
“But now,” Twombly concluded, “suddenly, pinch-hitters have a chance for real social standing.”