Quote:
Originally Posted by Cinnamon J. Scudworth
What the actual Chicago Tribune article reports is that two out of 14 members of Bud Selig's then brand-new Competition Committee (Tony La Russa and John Schuerholz) said when asked in a press conference that the DH rule should be on the table, along with other matters such as "scheduling, postseason format, umpiring, pace of play and instant replay."
It hardly sounds from that article like there was a groundswell against the DH. And the factors that your blog post cites as being things that would cause MLB owners to hate the DH (DH's are high paid, one dimensional players... juiced players scoring plenty of runs, the need for the DH as a augmentation to the offense has been basically removed) are mostly now irrelevant in 2015. Hulking, one-dimensional DHs are relatively few and far between, and offenses are at historic lows. |
It's not "my" blog post. I had nothing to do with it. I Google searched when I was challenged by others who seemed to imply that I'd made up the occurrence, one that I remembered clearly, in which the owners did, in fact, propose to eliminate the DH from all of MLB in return for a 26 man roster, and the MLBPA turned them down.
I clicked from inside the Ivy Chat article to find the Tribune article it referenced, and when I clicked it came up that the article was not available. I'm glad you found one about it, because the Tribune is certainly a bigger source. Since I was simply trying to prove I wasn't making the thing up, this seemed like a good enough source to prove that, however.
I also recall the "competition committee" actually coming back with the remove-the-DH recommendation in return for 26 man rosters and the MLBPA calling it a non-starter. At that point, I remember it was the owners backing down rather than fight over the issue. The fact still remains that if the MLBPA had said, "That sounds like a great idea!" the DH would be gone. I also never vilified the MLBPA for rejecting the proposal, given its job was to represent its players and it would have traded off high paying jobs for lower paying ones.
Then I was challenged to quote the article I'd linked to, to find anything that said the owners wanted to get rid of the DH in 2009 (note it did not have to apply today). "The league wants the DH to go away" is as direct a statement of that as can be made, but Chuck had implied
the article itself said nothing of the sort, when it clearly did.
It's true that the amount of offense in MLB has changed a lot between 2009 and now, and I think more offense is needed, when I wouldn't have said so then. Somewhere in this thread I said, however, that there are many far better ways get more offense, such as lowering the mound and squeezing the strike zone.