THE PEAVY FIASCO

Jake Peavy, the former Cy Young Award winner from the San Diego Padres, is out for one to three months with an injured ankle. Why is this news relevant to a New York Yankee blog?  Because of the way he was injured.  Peavy was hurt running the bases.

Flashback to 2008.  The Yankees were playing the Houston Astros during an interleague game.  Chien Ming Wang somehow got on base.  He was – get ready – RUNNING THE BASES when something snapped in his foot.  He tore a tendon, and his season was over.  So was the Yankee season.  Based upon what we have seen this year, Wang’s career may be over.

Despite playing abysmally most of the year, the Yankees won 89 games, finishing 6 behind the wild card winning Red Sox.  With Wang pitching every fifth day instead of Sidney Ponson and Darryl Rasner, the Yankees just might have won enough games to overtake the Sox.  But Wang’s injury foreclosed any chance of that happening.

The point of this diatribe is this:  the National League’s refusal to adopt the designated hitter is dangerous.  Pitchers do not belong in the batter’s box or on the base paths.  Aside from CC Sabathia, they can’t hit, and when they do reach base, they are not prepared to run.  All they can do is get injured.

So called “purists” will whine that the game is “supposed” to be played with the pitcher hitting.  The purist offer no basis for this contention, other than the fact that things were always done that way.  This is the sort of stone age thinking that has always infected sports.  For example, when Jacque Plante started wearing a goalie mask in the 1950s, he was derided as a sissy.   Can anyone today imagine playing goalie without a mask?  The same thing happened when Fred Thayer invented the catcher’s mask in 1876.  The purists have resisted every positive change.  For years they insisted that night baseball was an abomination.

National League apologists will tell you that allowing the pitcher to bat is exciting because it creates “strategy”.  “Strategy” like the double switch (which former Twins manager Tom Kelly once derided as “the rocket science stuff”).  This theory suggests that watching a manager move players around is more exciting than watching a batter hit.  Gee, if that’s true, why play the games at all?  We could just download a bunch of stats on our computers and spit out the results.

The truth is, watching a pitcher bat is boring.  Watching a batting pitcher ruin a rally is worse.  And watching a pitcher like Wang or Peavy get hurt is downright painful.  One of the main reasons American League baseball has been superior over the last twenty years is its use of the designated hitter.

So why do I care?  After all, the Yankees play in the American League, where the DH is used.  But in the middle of each season, we have interleague play, and when the games are played in a National League park, the pitchers have to bat.

Which is how Wang was injured last year.  And how Peavy was just hurt.  If the National League wants to cheapen its product by having the pitcher bat, so be it.  But I object to exposing American League pitchers to injury during interleague or World Series play.  When the National League plays the American League, it should be forced to join the 21st Century.

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