Embracing Inefficiency: When We Like Pitchers Hitting

We are talking about the designated hitter again, because it’s the offseason—and because we’re never that far from talking about the DH anyway. This time, the impetus was a discussion between Major League Baseball and the players’ union, in which the players suggested MLB bring the DH to the National League at last. And while this isn’t happening in 2019, the shift is beginning to feel more and more imminent.

Pitchers hitting in 2019 makes sense only in a theoretical way and an emotional way—that is to say, in none of the modes of thinking that now dominate major league baseball. I am not here to argue against statistical analysis and fact-based evaluation; far from it. I believe deeply in seeking all the information available before making a decision, especially one as a result of which somebody will be paid millions of dollars. But I am—call it human error—attached to the sight, and the meaning of the sight, of Francisco Liriano at bat. In a major professional sport, one increasingly specialized and streamlined, there is still this sight of a strong, talented, world-class athlete attempting to do this thing he often doesn’t do much better than the average college baseball player might.

The improbability is what makes it great when a pitcher does succeed at bat, of course; I’ve derived more entertainment from the scattering of pitcher home runs and RBI doubles over the last decade than I have from any DH’s exploits. Everyone loves a good Bartolo Colon dinger, and if DH proponents had their way a decade ago, we would never have known the joys of the Santiago Casilla Instructional Hitting Video. But the failure itself also matters. The failure is a reminder of the limits of what we can know, of what we can optimize.

In the era when quantitative analysis is no longer a disruption but the norm, it can feel at times that baseball has become a sleek, ruthless machine, for both better and worse (and many have read the fates of this year’s free-agent class in this light, as teams with a more rational handle on player value hesitate to go for broke, even for young superstars like Bryce Harper). As the results and limits of this approach reveal themselves—in baseball and otherwise—there is an absurd comfort in a sport that maintains different sets of rules for its two leagues, mostly just because a lot of people like it that way.

Maybe I am generalizing from my own experience: Years ago, I wrote to Effectively Wild, then the Baseball Prospectus podcast, with my pet theory that there was much to gain for a team that focused on making its pitchers better hitters. It was 2013, and my home team, the Pirates, had just burst forth from two decades of losing thanks in part to low-cost rehab projects like Liriano and A.J. Burnett. They also were focusing on things like catcher framing before much of the rest of the league caught on.

It seemed, in this moment, there was nothing a team couldn’t solve, or at least improve, through careful, rational analysis—and in my view, pitcher batting was just one more inefficiency to tackle. (I had, admittedly, overlooked the fact that minor-league pitchers don’t hit at all below Double-A, and that some don’t hit in the upper minors, either. Even if a team wanted to do this, the fix would not be as simple as more time in the cages for big-league starters.)

Of course, not only has this idea not caught on, but the Pirates’ run of data-driven success proved short-lived (for many reasons, including the fact that once every team gets smarter, the balance of power shifts once again to the teams with money). But they were heady times, the days when it seemed (at least to me) that one should be able to innovate one’s way to permanent stability and success. Baseball could feel—perhaps more in talking about it than in watching or playing it—like a series of predictable, almost inevitable outcomes.

This has never been true, of course, but it feels true in many situations: an overperforming first-half All-Star would come back to earth by the end of the season; a superstar struggling through April would look like himself again by July. Even innovations, as they spread, could come to feel like foregone conclusions: a pitcher following the advice of a lauded pitching coach would transform from a fringe guy into an efficient groundball machine.

While you understood, as a fan, these transformations took work, that work and its success seemed like a given once the team had the right information and the right tools. This idea certainly isn’t limited to baseball. Think of the notion of “life hacks,” small changes that promise you a neater house, easier meal prep, better nights of sleep. Life hacks operate on the same basic principle as, say, valuing on-base percentage correctly; they are obviously good, useful ideas that address flaws or faulty thinking.

In the aggregate, this approach to life seems so reasonable. It can lull you into a sense that if you check enough of these boxes, you will Fix Your Life; you will free yourself from stress, or you’ll feel more like a real adult, or whatever it is you want. (As I scrolled through this list of 100 “life hacks”—some of which do seem quite useful—I received first an ad in the sidebar, then a full-screen pop-up ad, urging me to check out LifeHack’s free “worksheet”: “Too Late to Change Your Life’s Path? FREE Worksheet to help you start a new Golden Age.” The options below read, “YES, send me my FREE worksheet,” and “No thanks, I’m good with my life.” The latter option is smaller and shaded in gray. You can almost feel LifeHack smirking at you, rolling its eyes at the tragic site visitor who would choose not to start a worksheet-driven Golden Age.)

Which brings us back to pitchers at the plate. In short, their presence makes little to no sense. They constitute an obvious inferiority on the part of a National League lineup when compared to an American League one. A game that truly prioritized having the best player possible at every position, at every moment, would not have Ivan Nova hit. And in all the realms that really matter—medicine, for instance—I very much want the most qualified people possible for each job. But in baseball, somewhat to my own surprise, I find comfort in the pitcher at-bat: a regularly occurring, physical embodiment of our inability to optimize the world (whether through an organizational focus on pitchers hitting at every level—something I still would love to see a team try—or through eliminating the problem altogether with the universal DH). A grounding-out-to-short reminder that knowing better isn’t always enough.

Perhaps this does not seem to you like a good thing; perhaps you read the news, and are therefore reminded constantly of chaos and illogic. I empathize with this position. I submit that perhaps the pitcher at-bat can be an antidote, however small, when he succeeds: a reminder that sometimes, we do something that makes no sense at all—something the odds would advise us strongly against—and something beautiful, or at least entertaining, happens as a result.

…

Most proponents of the National League model tend to make one, or both, of two arguments: tradition and strategy. Those attached to tradition contend that baseball means nine players in the lineup, playing nine positions, each taking a turn at bat. They still regard the DH as a late-20th-century interloper, a graft onto a grand old game. Those who argue strategy enjoy watching NL managers decide whether it’s worth it to pull a starter throwing well in the late innings of a tight game, weighing the advantages of getting a real hitter in there instead.

I am not particularly attached to either of these arguments. While it’s nice to ponder the continuity between the game Mookie Betts is playing and that which the Brooklyn Dodgers once played, the sport has changed in so many other ways that this, on its own, seems an insufficient defense. And the strategic concerns have dwindled as conventions around starting-pitcher usage have changed, with starters lasting into the eighth or ninth the exception rather than the norm. Some fans may genuinely look forward to the moment of a double switch, but it doesn’t rank among the top 10 attractions of a ballgame for me. (That said, I enthusiastically support everyone’s right to enjoy whatever weird, picayune aspects of a ballgame they want.)

I am, improbably, here for the spectacle itself: the things we learn about each member of the rotation as he takes his turn at bat, and the things they show us about baseball and the limits of human achievement. I suspect if I were a national baseball writer, responsible for watching many teams play many games, I might feel differently. It is often easier to see from the 10,000-foot view what makes the most sense. For me, no longer a professional sportswriter, fandom is a balancing act between what makes the most sense and what one actually wants. These are often the same thing, but not always.

Baseball has come a long way toward being a more efficient operation. We—and the front offices of the teams we cheer for—are much, much better informed about so many things than we once were. We can project so much, from standings to prospects’ futures, and sometimes those projections are even right. And yet this weird anachronism remains at the bottom of the order, killing rallies, producing the odd Madison Bumgarner, and providing decades of reliable fodder for columnists.

In June 2018, Ben Lindbergh made a comprehensive, compelling case at The Ringer for the universal DH. It’s inarguable that—as supported thoroughly and delightfully by Lindbergh’s research into past commentary on the topic—pitchers have been relative disasters at the plate for at least a century, and it’s only getting worse. In fact, the overall soundness of this case—and the resistance to it, both my own and that of many of my fellow National League lifers—highlights the reality that we are not really having a debate over the facts when we talk about the DH.

If you weren’t already a “ban the DH” stalwart, I doubt I have changed your mind. That’s okay. Most fan polls show a roughly even split on the question, and anecdotally, the determining factor seems to be simply whether you spend more of your time watching the AL or NL (though there are some crowds—like those who would vote in a FanGraphs poll, for instance—who may be more inclined to prefer the DH on analytical grounds, regardless of their home team).

And so we continue to have this argument less to convince anyone and more to explain something about ourselves: I am a rational person who recognizes professional baseball is entertainment, and that pitchers popping out on sac bunt attempts is not entertaining. Or: I am the kind of person who believes in the virtue of baseball’s bygone days, who finds meaning in something like a double switch. Or: I am the kind of person who once balked at the DH, but now, presented with the overwhelming evidence of its superiority, I have seen the light.

I don’t know what kind of person my position makes me, besides a stubborn and mildly philosophical one. It hints that I was raised near Pittsburgh, rather than a few hours away near Cleveland or Baltimore. It suggests that, if MLB does implement the universal DH someday soon, I will have become one of those old-timers, yelling at clouds about the offensive feats of Zack Greinke. But whether sports are supposed to be a place where we can experience that which is inaccessible to us in real life or are meant instead to reflect something about life’s realities, the pitcher hitting is an honest, strange, occasionally transcendent part of both. I know its days are numbered, but I will miss it when it meets its logical end.