The Designated Hitter is not baseball, it’s Capitalism
We’ve had the opportunity to argue about it for decades, but soon enough there will be no more debate over the virtues of the Designated Hitter (DH) rule in baseball. The Universal DH, like so many things in our society, will prevail because it is an expression of Capitalism and its unyielding pursuit of profit over harmony.
I consider myself fortunate to have grown up rooting for a baseball team from the National League; for people like me, there has never been a question as to the superior nature of baseball played without the DH. While this doesn’t necessarily equate to a preference for social and economic justice, it can at times seem that a person’s ability to see the value in a just world is as random as whether or not they were born in proximity to a stadium where pitchers bat ninth. These issues are posed as if there are choices, but there are objective truths in both: baseball is a game that involves two teams of baseball players, and basic material security in the form of food and shelter for every single human being on earth is a moral baseline. Baseball played any other way is, in fact, not baseball. A society which does not provide for every single human being when it has the ability to do so is immoral.
Baseball is a good sport through which to view Capitalism because baseball is built on numerical and aesthetic harmony. Three strikes; three outs; three groups of three innings; a field which theoretically goes on for eternity in a 90-degree angle (divisible by three); three bases away from home; and nine players on each team. Add in the lack of a clock, and baseball is harmonious, elegant, pleasing, and as eternally regenerative as human life. Like us, a baseball game can go on forever in one form or another. And like our imagined society of abundance, a baseball game can have competition, but without death or destruction or starvation. It can be a game played by all, enjoyed by all, and played again. But on a fundamental level, baseball is a game in which each team of nine players plays against another team of nine players, and each player is required to play both offense and defense. That is equality of competition that Capitalists often purport to desire but in fact do not.
The Designated Hitter destroys this harmony. It creates two players on the field who are no longer baseball players. The pitcher becomes only a pitcher, and the DH is only a hitter whose entire role is reduced to a handful of interactions at home plate. Gone are the tough choices and strategy that having a weak hitter (or fielder) imposes upon a team, replaced by a dumbed-down version of a player that promises less friction. Proponents of the DH rule say that there is no reason the DH has to go beyond a single player on each team, but this is not true at all. Once we have deemed any player in the game to not be a player but to be something other than a player, there is no reason any player should remain only a player. If the limit of equality and beauty can be broken, why impose an artificial limit of one DH per team? Nine Designated Hitters batting, against nine designated fielders (including a designated pitcher) is the logical endpoint of the DH rule. The DH, like Capitalism, imposes an acquisitive hunger upon the game that can never be satiated.
The Designated Hitter is a Capitalist mechanism to increase profits. Baseball owners admit as much: the goal, through their own logic, is to increase hits and home runs and scoring, thus increasing “excitement” in the game. That the game doesn’t need increased “excitement” is besides the point; the owners declare that it does, and the fans then believe that it does, with hardly anyone stopping to ask if baseball is fine the way that it is, or that if you are someone who likes the DH then perhaps you are someone who simply does not like baseball but instead likes something else that is like baseball. That the DH has not always been universal is, at this point, a function of owners battling an empowered players union. And that the players union must advocate for the DH is not proof that it is better baseball, but only that the union as a labor union must do everything it possibly can to advocate for more jobs and more compensation for its members (because every labor union, and especially athletic unions, should have more of the profits of its labor; there is no sports owner who does not profit more than every single player). If in fact society was more equitable, with basic humanity for every single citizen in the form of food, housing, healthcare, and education, the warped drive for personal profit at the expense of others would diminish; slowly the appetite of professional athletes to earn in excess would diminish; the profits of owners would diminish; and the desire for the DH would diminish, replaced by an appreciation of the beauty of balanced, pure baseball.
Capitalists search out the DH in every aspect of public and private life. The DH is a minuscule advantage that, extrapolated, yields increased profits; the DH is specialization to the furthest possible degree; the DH is a manufactured role on top of an existing system that needs no adjusting; the DH is the solution to a need that people don’t know they have because they in fact do not have it. This is what Capitalism does. It creates consumers and then feeds them. Why the need to constantly “improve”? Why always maximizing profit, rather than refining something in harmony?
Perhaps you think that it doesn’t matter, it is only baseball. But it is only life, isn’t it? It is only society and the game of Capitalism, with winners and losers. But we know that the losers of Capitalism, who never had a fair chance at the game to begin with, do in fact die. And there is no game in that.
