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Labels: Baseball

On this day 35 years ago, the American League adopted the Designated Hitter.

As a baseball fan, I can't begin to tell you how much I loathe the concept of the DH. The next commissioner should dump it post-haste. Any presidential candidate promising to back a Constitutional amendment banning it permanently has my vote in November. I'm considering naming my firstborn James Gillespie The-Designated-Hitter-Sucks Gilmore VI. (I'm keeping the VI despite the minor cosmetic change in the name.)

Why does the DH suck? Here are three reasons.

• Managers no longer have to manage. It's the bottom of the 6th and the number 8 man gets aboard, but your pitcher's throwing a gem and you're tied 0-0. Do you put in a pinch hitter, or keep the pitcher in? If you're a bench player in the AL, you basically don't play; in the NL, you have to be ready in case of the double switch.
• DH's don't have to be good baseball players, just good hitters. Imagine if Babe Ruth, after he was no longer even able to patrol the outfield, had gotten to slip into a role where all he had to do was hit and never had to put on a glove. He'd have hit a hell of a lot more than 714 dingers. A designated hitter isn't a ballplayer; he's a hitter. This is counter to the whole concept of baseball.
• The DH gives a competitive advantage to the American League. National League teams don't carry an additional fake-ballplayer who can beat the hell out of the ball but doesn't play in the field; to do so would be shortchanging their teams in the 154 or so games a season where the DH didn't come into play. Thus, when they meet in the World Series, the AL team has one more good bat than the NL team, because they've collectively decided to carry one non-ballplayer on each team.

The DH is bad for true baseball. This is a sad anniversary; 35 years ago, real baseball in the American League died. Let us pray that the National League stays true to the game Ruth, DiMaggio, and Williams played and never makes the AL's mistakes, and that we finally get a commissioner who puts the good of the game ahead of the supposed money advantage from the DH and gets rid of it once and for all.

Labels: Baseball, Designated Hitter

There are three things in my life which I really love: God, my family, and baseball. The only problem - once baseball season starts, I change the order around a bit.
-Al Gallagher

I see great things in baseball. It's our game - the American game. It will take our people out-of-doors, fill them with oxygen, give them a larger physical stoicism. Tend to relieve us from being a nervous, dyspeptic set. Repair these losses, and be a blessing to us.
-Walt Whitman

What is both surprising and delightful is that spectators are allowed, and even expected, to join in the vocal part of the game.... There is no reason why the field should not try to put the batsman off his stroke at the critical moment by neatly timed disparagements of his wife's fidelity and his mother's respectability.
-George Bernard Shaw

The regular season is upon us - and it came in with a bang, with Ryan Zimmerman christening the new Nationals Park with a walk-off homer after a blown save. Today, the rest of the league starts. I'd originally meant to make this a practical post about the Cubs' prospects this year, but as you'll see, it turned into something a bit more... unorthodox.

There's something great about Opening Day, and it's not just the tired old yarns about every team having the same record, or the glories of spring, or the Orioles having another week before being mathematically eliminated from the playoffs. It's that we know that this is the beginning of a long, drawn out, frustrating, exhilarating, breathtaking process, the season that was and is and will be.

Baseball is curiously like the liturgy in many ways. There's a lot of standing up and sitting down; there are hymns ("The Star-Spangled Banner" at the beginning of the game, "Take Me Out To The Ballgame" in orthodox parks during the seventh-inning stretch) and responses (everyone knows what to do when the bugle call plays... "Charge!"). For those who can afford the unfathomable expense, there is the Hot Dog of Life and the Beer (or Coke) of Salvation, along with the ubiquitous peanuts and cracker jacks.

But the most significant way baseball is like the liturgy is in the communion of the saints. When we in the Christian tradition celebrate the full liturgy by partaking in the Eucharist, we believe we are connected not only with Christ but with the saints throughout the history of Christianity. In a similar way, even at the newest of new ballparks or the sandiest of sandlots, when we watch or play baseball, we're connected in what I think is a mysterious and cosmic way not only with the great players of the past - Willie Mays, Three-Finger Brown, Satchel Paige, Joe DiMaggio - but with everyone who's ever sat in the grandstands, with our fathers and our fathers' fathers who would take them to games, tell them what a balk is, cheer at the home runs, marvel at a pitchers' duel.

Maybe this is a guy thing, I don't know. But there's something real, something spiritual about the game of baseball that quite simply doesn't exist for other sports as far as I know. There's something contemplative and deep and profound about the symmetry of the infield and the unpredictability of the outfield, about the men who go to work playing a child's game, about the moment well-savored, the situation well-appreciated, the bases-loaded jam, the ninth-inning rally, the walk-off home run.

But many that are first shall be last; and the last shall be first. -Matthew 19:30

Baseball is a game of contrasts. Someone goes down with a career-ending injury, and a rookie steps up in his place in a big way. A team everyone expected to win chokes in the final weeks, and a team everyone expected to be in the gutter is in contention. One rookie brought in as roster filling will come up and spark his team, and another one who everyone expected to be the next Willie Mays will struggle to make the Mendoza Line. The first do become last, and the last do become first, unless they're the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, who pretty dependably become last every year.

So this is it. Year 100. I say this every year, but I think this year is next year. I dare to dream, because I have no other choice in the matter; it's been 100 years, and it's about time. The last will become first.

Go Cubbies.

Quotations shamelessly yoinked from the Quote Garden, which is like the Olive Garden but with better food.

Labels: Baseball, Chicago Cubs, Religion

With the exception of that little dalliance in Japan, baseball starts in 3-1/2 hours or so, right here in Washington at the Nationals' new ballpark. I really wish I was able to go to the game tonight, despite the worst president of my lifetime throwing out the first pitch, because it would be cool to be at a historic baseball event. Hopefully I'll make it out there when the Nats return home next Wednesday. Regardless, from what I've seen and heard, they've done Nationals Park right; it's not a concrete ugliness like the Cell in Chicago or RFK here in DC, but one of those places like Petco in San Diego or the Great American Launchpad in the 'Natti - built not to be a great place for three different sports, but to be a great ballpark.

I'm going to give a little more preview of the season tomorrow, when the Cubs might be able to dodge the raindrops and open the season at Wrigley, but for now, my yearly dragging-out of an old quote from the late, great Bartlett Giamatti:

It [baseball] breaks your heart. It is designed to break your heart. The game begins in the spring when everything else begins again, and it blossoms in the summer, filling the afternoons and evenings, and then as soon as the chill rains come, it stops and leaves you to face the fall alone.

Play ball! Go Cubbies!

Labels: Baseball, Chicago Cubs

Labels: Baseball, Fun