Reply #41: Real baseball teams don't use the DH and real fans don't like it; it is for quiche eaters [View All]

[Jack Rabbit]

The DH is there to placate the kind of unsophisticated, quiche-eating fan who mistakes high scoring for excitement. There are such fans in every sport, and placating them has not only ruined American League baseball but the NBA, when the quiche eaters got the no-zone defense and completely destroyed the NFL with all kinds of goofy judgment calls about did the free safety interfere with the receiver more than five yards down field. Who cares? Let the secondary mug the receivers and give the officials a break.

Baseball is not a game for specialists. If you take the field, you will take your turn at bat or leave the game. Period. If we think pitchers are too specialized to hit, what about the other players? Why don't we just have offensive and defensive platoons like they do in football? Why should we let the shortstop hit? Isn't he a specialist, too? And, like a pitcher, the shortstop often can't bat his weight.

Why not just have nine specialized players who play the field and four rotating specialized batters? And specialized base runners. That is baseball as the quiche-eating reprobate Charley Finlay envisioned it. Of course, baseball is the only game where the defense controls the ball, and Finlay would have found a way change that, too, if he could.

But why talk about it like this? We'll give the quiche-eating fans more silly ideas. That we real fans don't need.

By taking strategy out of the game, it has made the game less cerebral, and by making the game less cerebral, it become less exciting. It is baseball for the kind of fan who best compares to tea bagger in politics.

It is time for the American League to get a clue and acquiesce to the rules of the game. It is time for us real fans to take the game back from the quiche eaters and end this unfortunate sally into the placation of the uneducated rabble.

DUMP THE DH!!