The double switch is not a brilliant strategic undertaking. It's actually the opposite: it's a pushbutton move. Have to take the pitcher out but his spot is due up in the order? Push button and double switch. Everybody in the park knows it's coming. The only question is whether it's going to be the guy who made the last out, or the guy in the order before him. It would be a lot more interesting if such a pitching change would occasionally NOT entail a double switch, even a third of the time. But it always does, so I guess
not double-switching during such a change isn't an arrow in the NL manager's strategy quiver.
I don't buy the idea that "specialization is bad for the game". The very core of the game entails nine specialized positions, nine guys who each do their own particular job in the field. If it's generalists we want to celebrate, we could rotate players around the positions every inning. But that would be a stupid slippery slope argument I'd be making, precisely along the lines of the "why not just have nine designated hitters" argument. After all, various high-level leagues have been playing with the designated hitter for almost 50 years, and its nearly universal adoption makes the DH the state of the game today. Yet, the number of people inside the game who have ever seriously lobbied for more designated hitter positions in the batting order is exactly zero.
The DH is not about "creating more offense", despite what guys like Harold Reynolds and Sean Casey tell us on MLB Tonight. The DH is about getting the pitcher out of the lineup because he is a total dead spot.
2014: .122/.152/.152, -19 wRC+. And how are pitchers doing in 2015 so far? How does
.107/.127/.129, -31 wRC+ grab ya? And it's only going to get worse. How can I possibly know that? Because
it has been getting steadily worse year after year. And why is that? Because
pitchers simply do not work on their hitting. So why bother sending a guy to the plate who trains at hitting major league pitchers to exactly the same degree that you and I do? It just strikes me as asinine.
Some people might say that the pitcher does have an offensive role by moving runners along via the sacrifice bunt. To which I would reply, I don't understand why any serious baseball fan would want to root for a hitter to make an out. To me, going to the plate to try to make an out feels like an inherently dishonest plate appearance. Sacrifice bunts are not cool, even in the
less than 70 percent of the time they succeed. Sacrifice bunts suck.