Ron Collins
Jul 23, 2017 · 2 min read

The Designated Hitter Rule.

Amen, brother. Baseball is a game played, by each player, with a ball, a glove, and god-dammit, A BAT.

Turning both pitchers who can’t hit and batters who can’t field into elite and overpaid specialists, ruined baseball.

What few misguided fans of the egregious DH rule ever stop and consider, is that it may have begun as an American League oddity, but rapidly spread around the planet throughout all organized baseball, to where within a single generation the National League was the only league left standing, playing what I recognize as BASEBALL.

This other thing, this roster-swapping, pinch-runnering nonsense that may look like baseball, isn’t. It is two managers playing chess, and their ballplayers little more than pawns.

What came to follow after the DH, just reflected the same greedy opportunism that lay behind it: bloated salaries, strikes, doping, players never staying with the same club more than a season or two if that long…

Once upon a time, Playing in The Big Leagues was the almost unimaginable honor accorded only to the very best, and the golden dream of every kid in a back lot who ever donned a glove and organized a game without an adult in sight. It didn’t take eighteen players to play that game: you could make right field become foul territory, or have a steady pitcher who pitched for both sides; hell, you could replay the World Series with no more than two boys and an overhead telephone wire and a length of 2" dowel.

It was all BASEBALL. This thing now, I don’t know what it is, other than in the sacred NL which still does play the genuine article. God help them stay that way for as long as the grass grows and the sun shines.

The sound of civilization, is the sound of boys in the street shouting “CAR!”, or in a vacant lot stopping a fight before it starts, with The Sacred Rule:

“do it over”.

I haven’t heard those sounds in a long, long time. Thank your DH rule, and soccer, that Euro-diseased foreign implant in the schools, for that.

And soccer, and soccer-moms, can kiss my ass.

    Ron Collins

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    Recognizing that women have no need of any special status granted them by men is as respectful of women’s abilities as it is protective of men’s