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Sadly, not everyone is Shohei Ohtani: Pitcher hitting has never been worse, and it’s time to evolve beyond MLB’s vestigial limb and bring the DH to the National League
Complaints about pitcher hitting are not new to the game. The origins of organized DH advocacy extend to the 19th century, and media moaning surfaced more than a century before Bartolo Colon first carried his bat up the baseline and failed to touch first base. “In the press box at Forbes Field the other day several of the baseball writers became involved in a discussion of the prevailing batting weakness among pitchers,” sportswriter Harry Keck wrote in the Pittsburgh Daily Post on August 9, 1917. “The topic was brought up by the spectacle of a pitcher taking three feeble strikes at the ball and walking back to the bench. It is an ordinary happening.”
The Daily Post banner died in 1927. Keck died in 1965. Forbes Field died in 1971. Pitcher hitting is somehow still alive, at least in the NL and in interleague play.
If that citation isn’t archaic enough for you, try the Buffalo Enquirer from October 6, 1896. One subhed in the “Sporting” section of that day’s edition—which, with a nod to the sporting tastes of the time, led with baseball, boxing, bowling, horse racing, sailing, and cycling—proclaimed, “WHY A PITCHER CAN’T HIT.” Within the text, an unnamed pitcher opined of his kind, “He is the least fitted of any man in the game to face another pitcher.” And on April 13, 1905, former big leaguer Bill Friel, then of the minor-league American Association, told the Racine Daily Journal, “Take most of the pitchers of the A.A. today. Put them anywhere else than in the [pitcher’s] box and they are lost. That’s why I argue that they are not ball players, but just pitchers.” Even then, people understood that pitchers needn’t be all-around players, and that was so long ago that an ad on the same newspaper page for a misleadingly named medication called “Herpicide” promised to help “the bald men of today” by encouraging new hair growth in cases where the hair “has not been completely destroyed by parasites that infest it.”
Pitchers have always been bad hitters relative to every other position, but every generation laments the lack of pitcher offense anew because collectively, they keep getting worse. The graph below depicts the decline of pitchers’ offensive production via multiple metrics.
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What’s more, teams are already gradually reducing the part that pitchers play in the batter’s box. Compared to pitchers from previous eras, today’s pitchers have fewer opportunities to hit, even in the non-DH league. The following graph shows the percentage of National League plate appearances that pitchers have made in every season in MLB’s expansion era, which started in 1961.
https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2018/6/7/17437016/national-league-pitcher-hitting-dh
Complaints about pitcher hitting are not new to the game. The origins of organized DH advocacy extend to the 19th century, and media moaning surfaced more than a century before Bartolo Colon first carried his bat up the baseline and failed to touch first base. “In the press box at Forbes Field the other day several of the baseball writers became involved in a discussion of the prevailing batting weakness among pitchers,” sportswriter Harry Keck wrote in the Pittsburgh Daily Post on August 9, 1917. “The topic was brought up by the spectacle of a pitcher taking three feeble strikes at the ball and walking back to the bench. It is an ordinary happening.”
The Daily Post banner died in 1927. Keck died in 1965. Forbes Field died in 1971. Pitcher hitting is somehow still alive, at least in the NL and in interleague play.
If that citation isn’t archaic enough for you, try the Buffalo Enquirer from October 6, 1896. One subhed in the “Sporting” section of that day’s edition—which, with a nod to the sporting tastes of the time, led with baseball, boxing, bowling, horse racing, sailing, and cycling—proclaimed, “WHY A PITCHER CAN’T HIT.” Within the text, an unnamed pitcher opined of his kind, “He is the least fitted of any man in the game to face another pitcher.” And on April 13, 1905, former big leaguer Bill Friel, then of the minor-league American Association, told the Racine Daily Journal, “Take most of the pitchers of the A.A. today. Put them anywhere else than in the [pitcher’s] box and they are lost. That’s why I argue that they are not ball players, but just pitchers.” Even then, people understood that pitchers needn’t be all-around players, and that was so long ago that an ad on the same newspaper page for a misleadingly named medication called “Herpicide” promised to help “the bald men of today” by encouraging new hair growth in cases where the hair “has not been completely destroyed by parasites that infest it.”
Pitchers have always been bad hitters relative to every other position, but every generation laments the lack of pitcher offense anew because collectively, they keep getting worse. The graph below depicts the decline of pitchers’ offensive production via multiple metrics.
You must be registered for see images
[...]
What’s more, teams are already gradually reducing the part that pitchers play in the batter’s box. Compared to pitchers from previous eras, today’s pitchers have fewer opportunities to hit, even in the non-DH league. The following graph shows the percentage of National League plate appearances that pitchers have made in every season in MLB’s expansion era, which started in 1961.
You must be registered for see images
https://www.theringer.com/mlb/2018/6/7/17437016/national-league-pitcher-hitting-dh
