Quote:
Originally Posted by MorseMoose
I assume you're asking why the home team is at a disadvantage? Here's a couple reasons:
Away team comes up in the first inning, they bat around knocking the starting pitcher out of the game in the first inning. The DH on the away team got up once or maybe even twice. The home team, with the starting pitcher out, now must take their starting DH out of the game without that DH even batting.
Another reason I don't think I like it (and where the home-team is at a disadvantage), the starting pitcher gets hurt in the first inning. Boom, the starting DH is gone without an at bat.
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How often does the SP for the home team, or either team for that matter, get knocked out in the first inning? Once or twice a year? Besides, what happens when that happens in the NL? You lose your batter there too. Finally, I think you missed the part where the DH can be subbed into the field if you want to keep him. I could go with or without that last rule, but I imagine most would want it.
Really, the only advantage goes to the team with the better SP and I have zero problem with that because, in addition to seeing more of the bench players getting into the game, I want to see the extra incentive of keeping your SPs in the game. As it is now, in the NL there's actually a disincentive to keeping your SP in the game, which is terribly unfortunate, and in the AL there's no incentive or disincentive, but the AL is still reliever crazy.
The biggest drawback to it, and I think it's a minor one, is probably that with the DH you're using an extra roster spot, which already happens in the AL, but with late inning NL rules it could become problematic with so few bench players. I'm convinced, however, that sooner or later MLB is going to up the roster size to 26 or 27 (there's just too many teams insisting on such a large bullpen to the detriment of their bench). And to balance that they could go to a scratch system like in hockey where you scratch a few players from being eligible to play in that game. In baseball you could easily have a 27 man roster, but scratch yesterday and tomorrow's starting pitchers and still really only have 25 eligible players for the game. That would have to be bargained of course, but I think they could justify it based on being good for the game. I miss the pinch hitter and stolen base specialists of yesteryear and this would help bring them back.