goguen@cheers.DEC (Don Goguen 381-2565) (11/11/85)
> Having the DH may marginally increase the challenge to a pitcher, but > it significantly DECREASES the challenge to a manager. One of the beauties > of baseball is the tradeoffs that a Manager must in balancing players > strengths against their weaknesses. Do I put in a poor fielder at > the expense of weakening my defense? Do I make a defensive substitution > in the late innings? Do I pinch-run for a slow player in a close game or > do I leave his bat in the lineup in case the game goes into extra innings? Funny how all of the strategy questions you mentioned have little to do with the DH... The only diminished strategy is whether or not to pinch-hit for the pitcher late in the game. For that trade off, you end up with a game whose early innings aren't full of rallies that can't excite you, because you know the pitcher is due up, and you get more realistic strikeout totals for pitchers (instead of the near automatic 2 to 4 strikeouts that NL pitchers get per game). Most teams have other weaknesses in the lineup. The manager should still be pinch-hitting and maneuvering for those... Also, if Billy Martin hadn't "ruined" a young staff at Oakland, nobody would have noticed the supposed "AL pitcher burn-out." Fact is, many pitchers go 200+ innings in a season without getting hurt. Quite a few pitch 15 or so complete games in a season. It just so happened that 5 of his all did that in one year, and then came up with various injuries. How come nobody blames a manager when his best pitcher comes up lame when working a similar number of innings/complete games (Vukovich, Flanagan, ...). > It seems an american, playing in the Japanese league, one Randy something, > came within one home run of tieing the most home runs in a season record, > currently held by S. Oh, the great japanese baseball player. In the final > game of the season, this player, Randy starts with a B, came to the plate > four times, and each time was walked, intentionally. Manager of the It was Randy Bass. He won the triple crown this year, with 54 homers, one short of Oh's record, around 135 RBIs, and an average of around .350, I think. We was intentionally walked the first 4 times up, then swung at a pitch way outside his last trip and singled... BTW, another American won the triple crown last year - Greg (Boomer) Wells... Must say something about the pitching over there... - Don Goguen DEC/Nashua, NH