On the Arcade League and the Designated Hitter

In the aftermath of Halladay's no-hitter last night (and yes, we're dead if we manage to make it past the Barves), somebody posted a thread that asked why the NL was such shit, if Halladay was able to pitch a perfect game and a no-hitter in the same season in the National League-- never having done so in the Arcade League.

OP may have been trolling, yes.  But for the sake of conversation I myself think the DH is retarded.  Nine men field, nine men bat.  How hard is that?

I'm pretty sure I read a while back that the AL's batting average only improved negligibly. And now, with the help of baseball-almanac.com, we can prove it here in 2010.

Let's look at 1973, when this abortion of an idea became the law of the (Arcade League) land.

Arcade League batting average:  .25941 (from League by League Totals for Batting Average)
Arcade League total At-Bats:  62,276 (from League by League Totals for At-Bats")

This gives us a total number of hits in AL games:  62,276 * .25941 = 16,155

Here's where the guess work comes in.  In 1972, the AL batting average was .239.  For simplicity's sake, let's say that the DH rule translated into an improvement in BA of .020

We can skip over some steps here, but let's take the somewhat longer route.  If the Arcade League hit .239 in 1973, then on 62,276 ABs, that translates to 14,884 hits (presumably w/o the DH).

Subtract that from the 16,155 from above, and we see that the DH produced an extra 1271 hits.  Divided by the 12 teams in the 1973 Arcade League, each team got an extra 100 hits that year.

Spread out over a 162-game season, that's an extra hit every 1.62 games.  That sucks.

Now that we've proven it with math, here are some comments from various posters in the imageboard/forum i like to frequent...

AL = Checkers
NL = Chess

Everyone knows this.

This reminded me of the line from Training Day.

why do they force people like catchers and other infielders to bat? They should just have a DH for the whole infield


or maybe make it like the NFL, where you have 2 complete teams, one to field and one to bat, then a roster with 27 pitchers, the starters go 3 innings, a separate middle reliever for innings 4-8 and then 3 closers to each get an out in the ninth


baseball would be way better

hint:  he's being sarcastic...

AL should just switch to two entirely different teams, like NFL football.


One set bats, the other set fields.

hint:  he too is being sarcastic

Neither the DH and the AL Pitcher are baseball players. They're hitters and pitchers.


AL shouldn't be called baseball.

OK, this guy isn't kidding.  I'm inclined to agree.

Watching the Giants take on the Barves tonight.  I might even open a chat room for some potentially entertaining 16thP posts, if there's interest in that sort of thing... (UPDATE:  I'm following along in an in-game thread on a certain /sp/orts forum with a bunch of Barves fans.  Come on in and troll.)

Katie Greene
Vice President of Public Relations, Expresso Parking
Commissioner, 16th Parallel Department of Recreational Athletics (Semi-nude)