Ban the designated hitter.

• Author: Nocera, Joseph
• Position: Proposal for changing baseball rules

Sports, as any cliche-spouting coach will happily tell you, are like life. How true, how true. Today, though, I'm pleased to introduce my own corollary to this most overused of truths. Sometimes, sports are like a particular slice of life: the public sector slice. Nocera's Law says that at those moments when sports resembles government, sports lose.

I offer, as Exhibit A, baseball's designated hitter. Like so many government programs, the designated hitter, which the American League instituted 20 years ago (the National League never succumbed), was born of good intentions that were never fulfilled. Like the government, it provides gainful employment for workers who either have lost most of their skills (Greg Luzinski! Jack Clark!) or don't have many skills to begin with (Sam Horn! Steve Balboni!) It robs the game of some of its most interesting strategy; managers in a non-designated hitter world choose their teams weighing both the offensive and defensive talents of each player. The DH rule eliminates that strategic consideration for one player, affecting both line-up decisions and game tactics for the whole team. The designated hitter also distorts records, screws up young ballplayers, and makes a complete mess of the World Series. Just as presidents occasionally try--and usually fail--to get rid of a government department whose time has passed, so have baseball commissioners tried and failed to get rid of the designated hitter. Fay Vincent used to regularly label it "an abomination"--and look where that got him. That this travesty lives on today is a testament to the power of inertia and entrenched unions. But then, can't the same be said for the Agricultural Extension Service?

I loathe the designated hitter, but what I particularly loathe about it is its sheer pointlessness. Twenty years ago, the designated hitter came into being because the game was in the doldrums and needed an infusion of offensive excitement--or so the numbskull owners believed. Their diagnosis, in fact, was correct--the game was in the doldrums--but what brought it back were the decisions, in the late 1960s, to lower the pitcher's mound while shrinking the strike zone (which, as they say, helped level the playing field between pitchers and hitters), and the return to baseball by nostalgic baby boomers.

In fact, it's not too much to say that the DH has done absolutely nothing to make the game more interesting or exciting. The players who fill this position are almost...