Authors: George Vecsey
No change has divided people more openly than the designated hitter rule, which was installed in 1973 in the American League, and where it festers still. The DH, as it is called, authorizes a hitter to bat in place of the pitcher, who has almost always been the weakest batter in any lineup. The rule was designed to make American League lineups more potent from top to bottom, to appeal to fans who like to see runners crossing the plate and are less charmed by good pitching and good defense.
The rule has also guaranteed that the two major leagues play different versions of the game. National League teams stock up on specialists who can pinch-hit, pinch-run, or play defense in the late innings while the American League tends to send out nine sluggers and let them swing away. Trying to be fair and neutral about it, I
can only say that the designated hitter rule is a travesty, and ought to be tossed out.
Here are more than 125 years of innovations, major and minor:
1876: A Harvard student, Fred Thayer, adapted a fencing mask for Alexander Tyng, a catcher with the Harvard team. (Earlier, Harry Wright of the Cincinnati Red Stockings had devised a rubber mouthguard to protect the catcher's teeth, but a mask was at first decried as not exactly masculine.)
1876: Albert G. Spalding designated caps of different colors to every field position. His White Stockings were described by a sportswriter as “a Dutch bed of tulips.”
1882: Brother Jasper of Manhattan College urged fans to stand up and cheer in the bottom half of the seventh inning, before the home team's turn at bat. The “seventh-inning stretch” soon spread to the majors, where it is today embellished with versions of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” blasted over modern sound systems and animated message boards.
1885: Art Irwin of Providence used the first fielder's glove, cutting holes in the fingertips of work gloves to allow fielders to get a grip.
1888: The Washington Capitols were the first team to take spring training in the Deep South, spending three weeks in Florida. “When we arrived in Jacksonville,'' recalled Connie Mack, a young catcher on that team, “four of our 14 players were reasonably sober. The rest were totally drunk. There was a fight every night, and the boys broke up a lot of furniture. We played exhibition games by day and drank much of the night.''
By the turn of the century, John McGraw took his Giants to end-of-the-world Texas and made them trudge a mile or two from their rustic hotel to their dusty training site, as if to clean out the toxins of the winter by sheer torture. Later in the twentieth century, Florida and Arizona grew more hospitable, and so did spring training.
1889: Four balls constituted a walk, after counting as a hit for many years.
1890s: The Brooklyn Bridegrooms invented the cutoff play, in which infielders lined up to handle throws from the outfield. In an ironic turn of events, their descendants, the Dodgers of the 1920s, would be known
for their clumsiness and poor tactics, once having three runners wind up on third base.
1901: The National League made the first two fouls count as strikes, a new advantage for the pitcher.
1907: The Giants' catcher, Roger Bresnahan, wore fiber shin guards over his pants, much as cricket players did. Previously, catchers had stuffed newspapers under their slacks to protect against the ball, as visible shin guards were first seen as a character flaw.
1907: Later that season, Bresnahan was hit by a pitch and after a month in the hospital he returned, wearing a rudimentary inflatable batting helmet designed by Frank Pierce Mogridge. In baseball's slow fashion, batting helmets would be resisted, even after Cleveland shortstop Ray Chapman was killed by a pitch from Carl Mays of the Yankees in 1920. In the early 1920s, some players would experiment with leather headgear similar to football helmets, but they were met with sarcasm from other players.
1908: A tarpaulin was introduced in Pittsburgh, to protect the field during rain.
1910: President William Howard Taft became the first president to throw out a ball on opening day.
1920: Batters were credited with a sacrifice fly (and no at-bat) when a runner scored from third on a fly ball.
1922: Bill Doak, a pitcher with Branch Rickey's Cardinals, sewed a leather strip between the thumb and index finger on his glove, thereby creating the earliest pocket.
1925: The first player known to use a personal trainer was none other than Babe Ruth, who lost forty-one pounds over the winter.
1929: The Yankees were the first team to use a pitching coach, Bob Shawkey. By the turn of the century, teams would have a pitching coach in the dugout and another in the bullpen.
1929: The first amplifier in a ballpark was at the Polo Grounds. So now you know whom to blame for the earsplitting racket in ballparks today.
1929: Picking up on a brief experiment by Cleveland in 1916, the Yankees began wearing uniform numbers on their backs, based on the regular
batting order: Earle Combs No. 1, Mark Koenig No. 2, Babe Ruth No. 3, Lou Gehrig No. 4, Bob Meusel No. 5, Tony Lazzeri No. 6, Leo Durocher No. 7. With three catchers, Johnny Grabowski was No. 8, Benny Bengough No. 9, and Bill Dickey No. 10, although Dickey later switched to No. 8.
1938: The Dodgers experimented with yellow baseballs, which theoretically made them easier to see, but the idea was dropped. This idea would be revived in the mid-1960s by Charles O. Finley of Kansas City, who preferred orange balls, but was never adapted, perhaps because it had been proposed by the cantankerous Mr. Finley.
1941: After Pee Wee Reese and Joe Medwick were hit by pitches in 1940, the Brooklyn owner, Larry MacPhail, with advice from doctors, created solid inserts for ball caps.
1952: The new Pittsburgh president, Branch Rickey, had plastic batting helmets built by the American Baseball Cap Company (which he happened to own). Players complained but both leagues made helmets mandatory later in the decade.
1953: Comme père, comme fils: Bill Veeck revived his father's talk of interleague play, but the owners turned it down, probably because of its source.
1954: Players were no longer allowed to leave their gloves on the lip of the outfield grass between innings, as had been the custom. Gloves were still relatively crude and stubby, but modern technology began to produce large, supple gloves with deep pockets.
1965: Indoor baseball began at the Astrodome in Houston, leading to the blight of artificial turf.
1970s: In the decade of disco, A. G. Spalding's animated tulips got a reprieve with some of the most ghastly uniforms ever seen: the brown-orange-and-yellow uniform of the San Diego Padres (Steve Garvey said he felt like a taco); the space-age disaster of red, yellow, and orange of the Houston Astros; Oakland's kelly green and gold uniforms (which dated back to 1963), with white shoes that made them look like cartoon characters; Cleveland's all-red uniforms and Pittsburgh's all-yellow outfits. In 1976, navy-blue Bermuda shorts and white nylon pullovers were briefly foisted upon the White Sox, but heckled into
history after three games. (At least owner Bill Veeck had an excuse: the shorts had been designed by his wife, Mary Frances.)
1973: The American League's first designated hitter, Ron Blomberg of the Yankees, asked the wise old coach, Elston Howard, how to approach his new role. “Go hit and then sit down,” Howard instructed. (For the record, Blomberg drew a bases-loaded walk.) Since then, the DH has kept older, slower stars like Edgar Martinez, Harold Baines, Hal McRae, Tommy Davis, and Paul Molitor in the game at relatively high salaries.
As a result of the DH, the American League is known for more runs and longer games while the National League is known for more interesting strategy along with the occasional pitcher who can help himself via hitting and base running. Then there is the annual botch-up in the World Series that began with the rule being used in alternating years, but now has all Series games played under the rules of the home team, meaning that both teams are disrupted from their normal strategy.
1995: The wild card. After a brutal labor dispute canceled the 1994 World Series, the playoffs were enlarged to a three-tiered system, with three division winners and the wild-card team with the fourth-best record in each league. At first it sounded like another crass gimmick, but a superb first round between Seattle and the Yanks guaranteed that the wild card was here to stay, despite evidence of wear and tear on the best pitchers' arms.
1997: Catcher Charlie O'Brien of Toronto began using a helmet merged into the now traditional mask, making him look halfway between a hockey goalie and a football player. The invention was soon adapted by many catchers to avoid concussions from the batter's backlash and foul tips. Two decades earlier, Bill Buhler, the trainer of the Dodgers, had invented a throat guard that hung down from the catcher's mask, after Steve Yeager had been seriously injured when a splintered bat hit him in the throat. The guard was said to resemble a goat's beard.
1997: Interleague play arrived, with heavy emphasis on regional rivalries like Yankees-Mets, Dodgers-Angels, Cubs–White Sox. The midseason gimmick also produced a glut of uninteresting matchups between teams with no connections, but officials finally introduced a more equitable
round-robin schedule, so that popular teams like the Yankees and Red Sox would ultimately visit every National League park.
Along with changes in equipment and rules, teams also came up with more refined management procedures and strategies. By the twenty-first century, instead of having a drinking buddy or two tag along as coaches, managers were allowed five coaches in uniform during games, including a so-called bench coach, a sort of man-ager's manager. In addition, teams had medical staffs, trainers, nutritionists, weight experts, physical therapists, and psychologists. Latter-day sluggers demanded their personal trainers have entrée to the clubhouse, although this practice was slowed down in the wake of the steroid scandals.
Some of the biggest changes in the game involved pitching, evolving from the age of iron men like Jack Chesbro and Iron Joe McGinnity, who almost always finished their games. By the twenty-first century, starting pitchers were proudly called “inning-eaters” if they could last five or six innings without major damage, and they were practically nominated for the Hall of Fame if they staggered through seven innings.
The new age of pitching specialization is often credited to Bucky Harris, the playing manager and so-called Boy Wonder of Washington. In 1924, trying to combat the Yankees' version of “five o'clock lightning” (games started late to accommodate stockbrokers), Harris relied on the great Walter (Big Train) Johnson as his durable starting ace but he also used Firpo Marberry, a large Texan, in relief early and often—50 games, 15 starts, and 1951?innings.
“Harris also used Marberry as an intimidator,” wrote the venerable Shirley Povich in the
Washington Post
in 1996. Povich knew the subject; he had been a boy wonder himself as a reporter back in 1924. “In 1925, starting nary a game, he set a league record by appearing in 55 contests,” Povich continued, “and probably led the league in brush-backs, including a few that I remember that were aimed at Babe Ruth.”
According to Povich, Harris inspired the Yankees' Miller Huggins
to use Wilcy Moore, a thirty-year-old rookie, in 50 games in 1927, 38 of them in relief. Later the Yankees developed Johnny (Fireman) Murphy from 1932 to 1947, followed by Joe Page, a lefthander who helped win the 1947 World Series.
Specialization entered a new era in 1949 with the arrival of Casey Stengel, who was not afraid to match his left-handed hitters against right-handed pitchers, and vice versa. “McGraw platooned me,” Stengel reasoned, neglecting to note that he had detested being left on the bench.
Stengel was not averse to using pinch-runners, defensive replacements, or even placing a good-hitting pitcher, Tommy Byrne, in the seventh position in the batting order (which annoyed the infielder who had to bat ninth).
The game continued to evolve in the postwar era, with durable pitchers like Jim Konstanty, Joe Black, Hoyt Wilhelm, Larry Sherry, Mike Marshall, Rollie Fingers, and Dennis Eckersley. Then came the subspecies of “long men” and “short men” who specialized in “holds” in the seventh and eighth innings, before the arrival of “closers” like Mariano Rivera of the Yankees.
The very best relief pitchers had their agents insert clauses into their contracts that guaranteed bonuses for a certain number of “saves,” a new statistical category. These specialists normally were used only in “save” circumstances.
Defensive specialists, who sometimes answered to the nickname of “Leather,” were throwbacks to the days when Sammy Byrd and other Yankee outfielders were known as “Babe Ruth's legs.” Charles O. Finley once carried a pinch-runner, Herb Washington, who scored 33 runs in two seasons without ever batting or playing the field. Some catchers extended their careers by handling the erratic swerves of knuckleballers, while a veteran catcher like Tim McCarver remained valuable by having a rapport with a moody ace like Steve Carlton, who would pitch only to McCarver.
Sometimes officials tinkered with the height of the mound or the width of the strike zone, to produce more hits or fewer hits, depending on the impulse of the time. Some springs, umpires were given instructions to tighten up one rule or another, which meant
the umps would spend the first few weeks of the season officiously calling balks or some such legality, until it was safe to go back to normalcy again.
The gifts of tactics and resourcefulness from the Negro Leagues just kept on giving. In the 1959 World Series, the Los Angeles Dodgers were led by Maury Wills, a minor league escapee who had discovered the ancient skill of stealing bases, and wise old Jim Gilliam, a former Negro Leaguer who batted second, often slapping the ball on the ground to move Wills along. The White Sox, with their shortstop and second baseman, Luis Aparicio and Nellie Fox, pretty much did the same. The Dodgers won a throwback Series that Wee Willie Keeler and Ty Cobb would have appreciated.
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For all the changes, the game is held together by the rituals and records. No sport is so laced with statistics, many of them arcane, but some of them downright momentous—numbers with lives all their own. Baseball records are generally regarded as modern beginning with 1900 and the establishment of the two major leagues.