The Designated-Hitter Rule

So you're paying how many millions a year for that pitcher to play in the major leagues and he can't hit a baseball?

As a baseball fan since well before this rule came into effect, I gotta say I don't have a problem with it. The argument that it reduces strategy is nonsense. Given how poorly most pitchers hit, it was generally a no brainer for managers to pinch hit for pitchers, and if you watch the National League, it still is. If anything, this has improved the game.

Bogus and fallacious: while you're at it, you may as well go ahead and substitute poor-hitting star infielders and outfielders, too - there certainly have been plenty of them throughout the decades. The Babe would'a scoffed, fumed and boycotted it.

sure, the national league pinch hits for the pitchers. when they're ready for them to come out of the game. not every at bat.  every pitcher should know how to bunt or put the ball in play. not much esle is asked of them.  but putting in a homerun hitter in their place for every at bat is ridiculous. it was nothing but a move to boost ticket sales.  but hey, at least we get to laugh at american leauge pitchers trying to bat in the world series...

Probably the grossest crime in the history of baseball. It moved the game away from pure sports like basketball and soccer and toward football (which I love to watch, but you have to admit it lacks any kind of natural flow as a game). The idea that certain players get an exception from having to see the field from both sides has led to all kinds of problems, with pitchers not bothering to learn to bat anymore and 45-year-olds with a very specific muscularity (all arms and no legs) continuing careers that should have died years ago, finding themselves pulled for pinch runners in almost every key situation. The very existence of Rafael Palmeiro is an argument against the DH. Pitchers can't learn to hit? Tell that to Babe Ruth, not to mention some of the very talented pitcher-hitters of our own time like Livan Hernandez, Brooks Kieschnick, and Carlos Zambrano. But we may see fewer of these talented players now that pitchers know that there's always the AL.

Mixed feelings about it. If you are a fat, 38-year old ballplayer, you think the DH is BRILLIANT!!! Stat genius Bill James once explained in detail that the axiom of managing in the NL requires more strategy because the pitcher's have to bat was pure myth. His gerneral argument was, the decision to pinch-hit for the pitcher is usually a no-brainer anyway. My general gripe is that while I bought the idea of the DH in the 1970s, when there was a true distintiveness and separation of the NL and AL. But today, there is interleague play, the leagues use the same umpires, and so on. Bud Selig has done everything in his power to erase the distinctions of the AL and NL, with the one nagging exception that one league uses pitchers to bat and one doesn't. I just say, Commish, make up your mind -- DH or no DH in MLB.

The DH was actually a brilliant idea which was administered poorly, showing the operational disfunction of Major League Baseball (the corporation) still painfully evident today. What was a terrible idea was the replicating of this rule at the lower levels of competition, from Triple-A ball down to the scholastic and Little League levels. It is an artificial machination which allows coaches, who should be primarily focused on teaching and skill development, to focus exclusively on stacking their batting orders in order to win. The game at the lower levels should be pure baseball.

if pitchers didn't look like stephen hawking at the plate, i would probably bother me more.

This is the worst rule in pro sports.