Quote:
Originally Posted by Matt Arnold
I doubt the DH has any noticeable impact on attendance. AL vs NL attendance more likely has to do with which teams are in which league. It's not like you have people who think, "Well, I want to go out to a game this weekend. Let's go to the Mets game because there's no DH there instead of the Yankees game."
There might be a small impact on the popularity of the sport as a whole, but whatever way they go, people will adapt. Whenever they do end up adopting the DH everywhere will be more about the fact that pitchers are terrible hitters, and "protecting" pitchers, than it will be about popularity. And people may not like the DH, but they like offense, so those 2 forces would likely cancel each other out.
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Notwithstanding the increase in attendance the AL saw when the DH was first implemented, plenty of articles show that attendance is better at NL parks and has been for some time. Yeah, people probably aren't asking themselves, "should we go see the Dodgers or the Angels today?", but I wouldn't say it's out of the question that people who go to a NL game are more likely to go back more often. I know that if I have the choice of watching an AL game on tv or an NL game, I'll often pick the NL game and that's even with the closest team I follow being the Jays.
The DH in itself actually doesn't result in that much more offense, at least not enough that you'd likely really notice. Quick, ask yourself how many games it takes, on average, an AL team to score one more run than the NL? I bet most would guess 2 games, maybe 3. Well, run the numbers (1/(AL RPG-NL RPG) and you'll see that AL teams last year only scored an extra run every 4.33 games. Now yeah, it fluctuates from year to year and I've always thought that a run environment of 4.5 RPG was ideal (mostly because it would mean a total of 9 runs per game and the number 9 and baseball go so well together), but how much do you really notice 1 run every 4+ games? Not much, I'd say.
And say the DH was added to the NL, you wouldn't be able to clone another Ortiz and Encarnacion and whomever else and add them to the NL. You'd be giving those extra DH positions to lesser players so the increase in offense would be even less. I agree, there are reasons to add the DH, or some form of it, to the NL, but if anyone thinks it's going to have a noticeable increase in offense, it most likely wouldn't. And if you think about it, while it would likely increase offense a bit in the NL, it would also likely decrease offense in the AL because some of the best DHs would go to the NL and more of the better pitchers would be more likely to go the AL. And do ALers really want that?