In 1973, the American League decided that one of its nine players did not have to play baseball. The pitcher would hit, they ruled, only until he wouldn’t. The designated hitter rule was sold as modernization. It was actually an admission of failure, institutionalized and made permanent.
The failure was this: MLB had spent decades developing pitchers who couldn’t hit, and rather than fix that, the league built a rule to accommodate it. The DH did not solve a problem. It preserved one.
The Self-Fulfilling Prophecy
The argument for the DH has always rested on the same premise: pitchers can’t hit, so why make them try. What the argument never acknowledges is that pitchers can’t hit because nobody made them try. Once the American League removed the requirement, it removed the development pathway. Minor league pitchers stopped taking batting practice seriously. Coaches stopped evaluating them at the plate. Front offices stopped caring. Fifty years later, the same people point at the results and say: see, pitchers can’t hit.
This is not an iron law of nature. It is a policy outcome dressed up as a natural fact.
The National League understood this, at least implicitly, which is why it resisted the designated hitter for nearly fifty years. The holdout ended in 2022, the universal DH arriving via collective bargaining as a permanent feature of a game that had briefly adopted it during the COVID-shortened 2020 season.1 The last normal full season of pitchers hitting in the National League was 2019. Make a note of it.
What the DH Costs
The designated hitter does not merely replace an automatic out with a better hitter. It removes an entire decision layer from the game.
When the pitcher bats, the manager has to think. In the sixth inning, with runners on and the pitcher due up third, do you let him hit and keep him in the game, or do you pinch hit and go to the bullpen? That decision cascades: who comes in, when, in what order. The double switch exists because of the pitcher’s spot in the lineup. Pull the pitcher’s spot and you pull the geometry of late-game strategy with it.
The DH game is not a faster, more exciting version of baseball. It is a shallower one. More offense, less chess. The tradeoff is real and the people who made it chose wrong.
Shohei Ohtani
Ohtani came up through Nippon Professional Baseball, but not through a no-DH environment.2 He played for the Hokkaido Nippon-Ham Fighters in the Pacific League, which adopted the designated hitter in 1975. That matters. Ohtani was not simply produced by a rule that forced pitchers to bat. He was produced by an organization willing to let an extraordinary player remain whole.
By the time Ohtani arrived with the Angels in 2018, he was already both things: a hitter with legitimate power and a starting pitcher with elite strikeout ability. He did not become a two-way player in MLB. He arrived as one.
The response from American baseball commentators was, predictably, that he was exceptional. One in a million. A once-in-a-generation talent. All of that may be true at his level of performance. But the argument proves too much. What it actually shows is that MLB’s development infrastructure, shaped around the DH assumption for half a century in the American League and now universally, had largely stopped producing serious two-way major leaguers. Ohtani looks miraculous because the context that would have made him merely excellent was systematically dismantled.
Ohtani is not proof the Japanese make everything better, faster, and cheaper. He is simply the proof that the rule was wrong.3
The Deeper Problem
Baseball sold the DH as progress. More scoring, more excitement, fewer automatic outs. This is the same logic that would improve chess by removing pawns. Technically, the pieces that remain are more powerful. The game that results is not better. It is smaller.
The pitcher’s spot in the lineup was not dead weight. It was constraint, and constraint is where strategy lives. Remove the weak point and you remove the decisions that the weak point forces. The manager of a DH lineup has one fewer lever to pull and one fewer thing to think about. Over the course of a season, across thousands of at-bats and hundreds of late-game decisions, that adds up to a meaningfully less interesting sport.
The universal DH is here. It is not going away. But that does not mean it was right, and it does not mean that Ohtani’s career should be read as a vindication of the modern game. It should be read as a rebuke of it.
He showed up to play baseball. All of it. The league spent fifty years building a rule so its players wouldn’t have to.
Footnotes
-
The universal DH was first adopted in the abbreviated 2020 season and then became permanent through the 2022 collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the Players Association. The owners pushed for it; the players accepted it as part of a broader deal. Neither side was thinking about what it cost the game. ↩
-
The Pacific League adopted the designated hitter in 1975, two years after the American League. The Central League resisted it for decades and has only recently voted to adopt it starting in 2027. Ohtani developed as a two-way player inside a DH league, which makes the Fighters’ willingness to keep him whole more significant, not less. ↩
-
Yes, this invokes a fifty-year-old stereotype about Japanese manufacturing culture that died roughly thirty-five years ago. Shohei Ohtani is thirty-one. Do the math. ↩