Don't bring the designated hitter to the National League

Universalizing the DH risks the traditions of the game itself

Big Papi.
(Image credit: (Jamie Squire/Getty Images))

A number of pitching injuries have cropped up in the National League this year, prompting baseball's commentariat class to engage in its semi-regular debate about whether to extend the designated hitter to the National League. The youngest, most forward-thinking baseball analysts are rapidly converging on a new conventional wisdom: a universal DH is good and inevitable. Opposition to the DH is characterized as, at best, an aesthetic preference, as if aesthetic preferences are necessarily irrational. At worst, the preference for the DH emanates from the same obscurantist impulses that bring about book-burning, witch-hunting, and other flaming idiocies.

Allow me to speak for the fire of a great tradition, which lights up not only my heart, but the Hall of Fame, and keeps baseball from devolving into a curiously pastoral imitation of the National Football League.

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Michael Brendan Dougherty

Michael Brendan Dougherty is senior correspondent at TheWeek.com. He is the founder and editor of The Slurve, a newsletter about baseball. His work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, ESPN Magazine, Slate and The American Conservative.