So much of baseball's charm springs from its traditions and shifting dimensions.
When you attend a basketball game, you get a 90-foot court with rims ten feet high, matching backboards, and a sterile 70 degrees in every arena. In football, the gridiron is the same length and width in every stadium, with the weather being the biggest variable.
But baseball, with its quirky characters and characteristics, is our pastime not just because it's our oldest team sport, but also because it reflects our nation and its different faces and philosophies. Like our nation, baseball wasn't some wholesome product spun from Walt Disney's pen. Teams were originally owned by barkeepers and saloon syndicates and the occasional crook.
Yet despite all of baseball's obvious charms - the mutating sizes of each ballpark, games played largely during lazy summer nights, and the fact that games have no clock - there are folks who are hell-bent on changing the game every year. And we're not talking about the universally supported alterations like chopping an hour off every game – this year one of the legal ropes being tugged on by the union and the owners is the designated hitter.
We know the company lines. The players' union loves the DH because it means more payroll. The owners like the idea of protecting their pitchers with a DH, but think there's plenty of payroll and are tired of getting their butts kicked by the union at the bargaining table.
As fans, we know there's been a DH in the AL since 1973, and there hasn't been one in the NL since...well, ever, outside of last year when it was used to accommodate the 60-game season and protect delicate pitchers that didn't have spring training. And while it's dumbed down the lineup card in AL games, it's kept the main vein of strategy pumping different lineups through the Senior Circuit.
Sure, it stinks when a National League pitcher gets dinged with a fastball, or tweaks a tendon while busting it down to first base. Fans don't really go to Citi Field to watch Jacob deGrom swing a bat. But many fans admit that they like the fact that baseball doesn't offer the same cookie-cutter sport every night in every game. Remember how absurdly giddy we got when Bartolo Colon whacked his first homer when he was a Met? Just his jog - if you'd care to call it that - around the bases was worthy of a month-long loop.
Maybe the best thing for baseball is to make the DH homogenous, or universal, or some polysyllabic thing. Maybe the need to protect those $100 million arms from swinging a bat and huffing around the bases outweighs the ancestral charm of different rules for different leagues. But if we're being totally candid, did we ever hate a game, series, or season because the DH was missing from the NL? Did it keep the NL from winning its share of World Series? The AL has won 66 Fall Classics and the NL has won 50. That disparity can be explained by one word: Yankees, the name of the team with 27 World Series titles, 20 of them won before Ron Blomberg strolled up to the plate in pinstripes in '73 as the sport's first designated hitter.
A number of baseball rituals have come and gone, like sliding hard into second and blocking home plate – but does it really make us savages if we wouldn't mind seeing the DH sometimes, but not all the time?
Follow Jason Keidel on Twitter: @JasonKeidel
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