Banning the DH will curb melees, sportswriter says

[Brian]

http://www.signonsandiego.com/sports...3sullivan.html

BOSTON – There is a double standard in October, and that's probably as it ought to be.

You don't want discipline to be the deciding factor in playoff games. You don't want Pedro Martinez ejected in Fenway Park at the risk of a riot. You don't want the heat of the moment to overshadow a whole season's worth of striving.

But if you don't want the postseason to devolve into "The Jerry Springer Show," as it did Saturday afternoon during the New York Yankees' 4-3 smackdown of the Boston Red Sox, you had better consider some corrective measures.

For example: Eliminating the designated hitter.

Force Pedro Martinez to bat, and his punklike pitching stops dead in its testosterone-laden tracks. Make Roger Clemens more accountable for his head-hunting, and maybe Mike Piazza doesn't get hit in the helmet.

If you want to fix a problem, you should start with the root cause, not the current culprit.

Ban the DH and you restore the reciprocal relationship of intimidation and retribution. You give baseball back its sense of symmetry; neatly summarized by the saying, "What goes around, comes around."

"It's what I don't like about the American League," Yankees pitching coach Mel Stottlemyre said following Saturday's flare-ups at Fenway Park. "Things like that don't happen in the National League."

The American League introduced the DH in 1973 to rebalance the power between the pitcher's mound and the batter's box. League owners wanted more oomph in their sagging sport, and finally adopted a measure Connie Mack first proposed before World War I.

Inevitably, more runs resulted. Replacing puny-hitting pitchers with legitimate bats served to sustain rallies and rendered the sacrifice bunt almost as obsolete as the kerosene lamp.

But among the unintended consequences of eliminating pitchers' plate appearances was that it created a kind of diplomatic immunity. Power pitchers like Martinez and Clemens have been emboldened to back hitters off the plate without fear of facing retaliatory brushbacks. Their teammates might get plunked periodically, but it's one thing for a pitcher to feel another's pain and quite another for him to feel another's fear at a fastball being flung at ear level.

Ban the DH and bench-clearing brawls will become as rare as hitters who choke up with two strikes. Ban the DH and maybe the sport gets spared the sorry spectacle of yesterday's rainout spinfest.

Commissioner Bud Selig asked management of both the Red Sox and Yankees to confine their comments concerning Saturday's game to the game itself. Yankees manager Joe Torre tried to honor that request, but the Red Sox called an unscheduled press conference, essentially for the purpose of refuting some of the Yankees' more reckless allegations of the previous day.

Yankee reliever Jeff Nelson's claim that he was physically provoked by Fenway grounds crew member Paul Williams before their ninth-inning bullpen melee, and that Williams had taunted the Yankees during a 1999 fracas, has been contradicted and could lead to criminal charges.

Yankees President Randy Levine's mistaken premise that Williams had entered the bullpen uninvited – it was Williams' normal post – prompted his comment that it was a "shameful disgrace" and the overwrought objection that "there's an attitude of lawlessness that's permeating everything that's going on here."

"I asked (Levine) to retract his statements – statements that I thought were irresponsible," Red Sox owner John Henry said, " . . . and he declined to do so."

There's no way of knowing whether the bullpen episode was a direct result of the tensions Martinez escalated with his fourth-inning pitch behind the head of the Yankees' Karim Garcia. But that's probably the way to bet. Certainly, that pitch was responsible for Don Zimmer's ridiculous attempt at vigilante justice.

If nothing else, banning the DH might help keep Zimmer's mottled scalp off camera. Frankly, that ought to be reason enough.

[TJL]

Nice article. Makes some good arguments for eliminating the DH.

[Kitt]

I don't have a mountain of stats in front of me or even one sentence of stats, lol, in front of me But... I don't think that there is little if any truth in what the guy says. Bob Gibson, Don Drysdale are two examples of pitchers from days of old who would brush back or hit a batter at the drop of a hat. Lot's of pitchers over the years have been perfectly willing to do that even without a DH in their lineup.

When a pitcher does hit, brushback or intentionally throw at or near a batter the opposing pitcher will not waste his retaliation on that pitcher. He will throw at or brush back one of the opposing team's more threatening hitters.

I doubt that the stats over the years of baseball history, pre DH or in todays National league, will show that many pitchers have been hit or even thrown at. Brushing back the batter has been a part of the game since its infancy. Some pitchers have a reputation, earned or not, for being more wicked about it than others. None the less, they say in baseball that if a pitcher is not willing to claim the inside part of the plate by aggressively brushing back the batters then he's not long for the major leagues or will at least suffer a lack of success in the Bigs.