DH or no DH?

[Honorable_Pawn]

Originally Posted by Westheim

Now I would be tempted to jump onto a game where animals play ball. Imagine a fearsome middle of the order made up of cats Muffin, Fluffy, and Sir Eats-A-Lot.

Problem is, being cats, they sleep through the middle innings.....

Everybody knows that raccoons are overpowered. It would disrupt parity in OOTP. I say keep animals out.

[Honorable_Pawn]

Originally Posted by chucksabr

I'm not sure I understand this reaction.

You're the one who said as-pursh-a-hamey-homey.

[Westheim]

Originally Posted by Honorable_Pawn

Everybody knows that raccoons are overpowered. It would disrupt parity in OOTP. I say keep animals out.

You seen the Raccoons play recently?

[Orcin]

I did it. I stayed out of this thread. Lord knows, I wanted to jump in and argue. But I resisted. And I feel better for it.

[David Watts]

Originally Posted by Orcin

I did it. I stayed out of this thread. Lord knows, I wanted to jump in and argue. But I resisted. And I feel better for it.

Well you're wrong and you know it plus......

[Honorable_Pawn]

Originally Posted by Westheim

You seen the Raccoons play recently?

No, I haven't. How are they doing this year?

[Westheim]

Originally Posted by Honorable_Pawn

No, I haven't. How are they doing this year?

I really don't want to bring the mood down in this thread with my DB's.

That's the official abbreviation for Designated Bystander, by the way.

[Honorable_Pawn]

I understand.

Don't feel bad, though, the thread was hi-jacked several pages ago...again.

[Le Grande Orange]

Originally Posted by Habsfan18

Can't we all just get along?

Dude, this is the internet. The internet! Getting along isn't in its vocabulary.

[Honorable_Pawn]

50-44.

Very close.

[The Wolf]

Originally Posted by Honorable_Pawn

50-44.

Very close.

50-21. Well over 2 to 1. You can't count the split for either side.

And since I actually don't care anybody plays as long as they're honest about it, I find a lot of these comments to be really amusing.

[Matt Arnold]

The best part of the game - love or hate the DH, you can decide how you want your universe to go. For me, playing with a DH team vs a non-DH team, it's a lot easier in roster construction to play with the DH. And while I do agree that there's more strategy in the non-DH game, sometimes I don't want that strategy. I mean, when I have the hotshot young 1B coming up behind my All-Star current veteran, I hate to be in an NL-league where now I have to trade one of them.

MLB within the next 5-10 years will switch to both leagues having a DH. At some point they'll bring up the debate, and the vast majority of NL teams will vote in favour. Just to be able to hide a guy whose defense has fallen is a big, big edge for them. And having that roster spot for flexibility - don't you think the Dodgers would love to have been able to throw Kemp or Ethier at DH last season?

It's the future of the game, and we'll have to accept it. Doesn't mean you have to like it, but it will be the reality of all of baseball sometime in the next few years.

[chucksabr]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

The best part of the game - love or hate the DH, you can decide how you want your universe to go. For me, playing with a DH team vs a non-DH team, it's a lot easier in roster construction to play with the DH. And while I do agree that there's more strategy in the non-DH game, sometimes I don't want that strategy. I mean, when I have the hotshot young 1B coming up behind my All-Star current veteran, I hate to be in an NL-league where now I have to trade one of them.

MLB within the next 5-10 years will switch to both leagues having a DH. At some point they'll bring up the debate, and the vast majority of NL teams will vote in favour. Just to be able to hide a guy whose defense has fallen is a big, big edge for them. And having that roster spot for flexibility - don't you think the Dodgers would love to have been able to throw Kemp or Ethier at DH last season?

It's the future of the game, and we'll have to accept it. Doesn't mean you have to like it, but it will be the reality of all of baseball sometime in the next few years.

I agree with this, with the minor exception that I do not believe the DH is the future of the game. The DH is the current state of the game, since just about every college and professional league in the world, certainly way over 95% of them, use the DH.

In one key way, the DH is like sabermetrics. A lot of people still yell and kick and scream against the idea of "eggheaded math nerds who live in their mother's basement and never played the game" ruining baseball with all their stupid statistics s***. But the fact is, 30 out of 30 major league organizations have embraced advanced performance metrics to at least some degree of significance, and it will never go backwards. There is no more war over the use of advanced statistics in baseball, because sabermetrics has already won it.

So has the DH. The DH has won the war practically everywhere around the world. And at some point, the only two consequential leagues left that are still in denial will get the clue.

[RchW]

Originally Posted by Westheim

You seen the Raccoons play recently?

Only at night with no lights.

[frangipard]

Originally Posted by Matt Arnold

MLB within the next 5-10 years will switch to both leagues having a DH. At some point they'll bring up the debate, and the vast majority of NL teams will vote in favour. Just to be able to hide a guy whose defense has fallen is a big, big edge for them. And having that roster spot for flexibility - don't you think the Dodgers would love to have been able to throw Kemp or Ethier at DH last season?

I highly, highly doubt this.

First off, nobody is going to fall for the logic that it will make everyone better off. What does it mean to say it would be an "edge" for them when they other team would have the same "edge?" You're just changing from a swordfight to a gunfight ... just because you have a more lethal weapon doesn't mean you're more likely to win.

I'd argue that for small-market teams especially, it's a bad idea; veteran sluggers are expensive,and to the extent the DH helps keep veteran sluggers in the game, it will hurt teams like SD/Pitt/Miami more often than not. Since everyone's pitching staff pretty much sucks at hitting equally, I'd argue it's about 300 AB worth of built-in competitive balance (Hmmm ... it would be interesting to study and see if the NL has been more competitively balanced in the last 40 years ... my top of the head thought is yes). Sure a DH would have helped the Dodgers ... and for precisely that reason, anyone who plays the Dodgers is that much less inclined to vote for it.

The only way it would be happen is if

1) Revenue/attendance stagnates/drops
AND
2) Scoring continues to stay down
AND
3) You could convince fans that the DH was the best way to get it up

#1 Shows no sign of happening, so it's dead right there. The owners aren't going to fix what ain't broke.

Even if we assume that #1 and #2 do happen, I don't think #3 is persuasive. There are lots of other things that could also be fiddled with -- the strike zone for the obvious one.

Simply from a marketing standpoint, it's awful -- NL fans (I am one) have spent 40 years comparing and contrasting and preferring our way, and not occasionally telling AL people how much better our way is. This is a core part of the NL's "brand" ... now you're going to ask your own fans to eat crow and admit the AL people were right all along? That sounds like Coca-Cola reformulating to be more like Pepsi in the 80s. Not a good idea.

[Cinnamon J. Scudworth]

Originally Posted by frangipard

I'd argue that for small-market teams especially, it's a bad idea; veteran sluggers are expensive,and to the extent the DH helps keep veteran sluggers in the game, it will hurt teams like SD/Pitt/Miami more often than not.

I think you have it backwards. The economics of baseball say that the team tends to get more value out of a contract if they can sign a player to a long-term deal before he hits the last years of arbitration eligibility. "Veteran sluggers" are always a comparatively worse deal for the team no matter how rich the club is. Now, long-term deals are always a gamble, but the problem for NL teams is that locking down a player like Joey Votto means an extra gamble about the continuing viability of his fielding. So small market NL teams are disadvantaged precisely in an area where they should be looking for an advantage.

Simply from a marketing standpoint, it's awful -- NL fans (I am one) have spent 40 years comparing and contrasting and preferring our way, and not occasionally telling AL people how much better our way is. This is a core part of the NL's "brand" ... now you're going to ask your own fans to eat crow and admit the AL people were right all along? That sounds like Coca-Cola reformulating to be more like Pepsi in the 80s. Not a good idea.

I suspect that most people under the age of 25 couldn't care less about this, which is who the MLB would be thinking about in terms of the marketing aspects, if at all.

I'm resigned to the NL getting the DH at this point. If we're going all-in on interleague, it's got to happen sometime.

[Westheim]

Originally Posted by Cinnamon J. Scudworth

I suspect that most people under the age of 25 couldn't care less about this, which is who the MLB would be thinking about in terms of the marketing aspects, if at all.

I'm resigned to the NL getting the DH at this point. If we're going all-in on interleague, it's got to happen sometime.

While I am not quite under 25 anymore (28), I do care about this. Not because I have been around for that long, but because I'm standing put on my opinion that a game with the DH in place offers less strategical games than a game without the DH, and as thus makes - not always, but more often than not - for a less exciting contest.

And to come to OOTP, managing such contest is especially poor, spamming Enter 80 times in quick succession.

[Cinnamon J. Scudworth]

Originally Posted by Westheim

While I am not quite under 25 anymore (28), I do care about this. Not because I have been around for that long, but because I'm standing put on my opinion that a game with the DH in place offers less strategical games than a game without the DH, and as thus makes - not always, but more often than not - for a less exciting contest.

And to come to OOTP, managing such contest is especially poor, spamming Enter 80 times in quick succession.

Fair enough. I'm only a few years older than you and I, too, would prefer baseball entirely without the DH. But I was really addressing the idea of the NL as a "brand" as something that actually matters to most consumers of baseball. I became a fan of an NL team as a child because of where and when I happened to be born. I think that's basically how it happens for most casual sports fans in every sport. And moreover, the NL hasn't really existed as a brand for decades.

[Ty Cobb]

The game was better without this abomination...just like it was better when there were no lights at Wrigley, and Tiger Stadium was still at the corner of Michigan and Trumbull, and Ebbets and the Polo Grounds stood, and Three Rivers and the Vet had never been built...

Oh, excuse me. I was ranting.

[frangipard]

Originally Posted by Cinnamon J. Scudworth

I think you have it backwards. The economics of baseball say that the team tends to get more value out of a contract if they can sign a player to a long-term deal before he hits the last years of arbitration eligibility. "Veteran sluggers" are always a comparatively worse deal for the team no matter how rich the club is.

Sure. But if you're the Dodgers or the Phillies and looking to contend now, the goal isn't to get value in terms of production per-dollar, it's to get max production, period, efficiency be damned. They'd prefer to have cost-controlled players, but if they don't have them, they can look to buy what they need. Small-market teams are much less able to do so. If the DH had been implemented in the NL this offseason, Nelson Cruz and Delmon Young and a few others would have suddenly found themselves much more in demand, and the price would have been prohibitive for some teams. Those teams would mostly be the small-market clubs.

Now, long-term deals are always a gamble, but the problem for NL teams is that locking down a player like Joey Votto means an extra gamble about the continuing viability of his fielding. So small market NL teams are disadvantaged precisely in an area where they should be looking for an advantage.

Uh, so ... we agree?