Nine Plus One? Odd Number

For more than 100 years, baseball has been a function of the number nine. “The outlook wasn’t good for the Mudville nine that day,” starts the definitive poem about the game, “Casey at the Bat.”

The home nine, or the visiting nine are part of the literature of the game.

Mighty Casey wasn’t a designated hitter when he stepped to the plate, he was batting cleanup. The designated hitter made the grand old game a multiple of 10.

Also gave it a split personality. One league’s a game of 10, the other still nine.

It prompts the question, are designated hitters part of the team? Are they really a part of the game? Should they dress with the regulars? Should they even bring gloves to the ballpark? Or are they like field-goal kickers in the NFL? They don’t bring shoulder pads or need their arms taped. They touch the ball only with their feet. Designated hitters touch it only with their bats. The National League pretends they don’t exist. Even the American League seems only to tolerate them. And to the game’s purists, they are pariahs, outcasts, despoilers of the purity of the game, gremlins who tamper with its continuity.

The game barely acknowledges them. There is no most valuable DH, no rookie DH of the year, and, naturally, no DH Gold Glove awards. They are one-dimensional individuals, ultimate platoonists in a game that only recently accommodated itself to the specialization of relief pitching. Baseball until the ‘30s expected a starting pitcher to be the finishing pitcher too. And it provided only for a “mop-up” pitcher for games hopelessly lost.

For Charles Theodore (Chili) Davis, No. 44 of the California Angels, holding designated hitters to be second-class citizens is a galling piece of snobbery that calls for redressing. Davis is more than a DH, he is, in some ways, the DH. Paul Molitor has a point or two higher average, but Chili has more home runs and several more runs batted in. Jose Canseco has more home runs, but Davis has a 40-point average bulge.

Chili gets apoplectic at the designated haters of the designated hitters.

“I suppose they would rather see the pitcher come to the plate and pop up!” he explodes.

Well, er, ah, yes, Chili, they would. The traditionalists cover their eyes and shudder when the DH, which they consider an abomination, comes to the plate. They regard it as an unconscionable soiling of the national pastime.

Even the pitchers are ambivalent abut it. It’s not that they object to having somebody bat for them. Pitchers know they can’t hit and regard a time at bat as an interval that can only be a danger to them. But they also would rather pitch to otherwise futile pitchers, a la the National League, than have a canny slugger like the DH to get out. Of course, if there had been the DH in his league in his day, Sandy Koufax would never have been taken out of a game.

Still, nobody loves a designated hitter. Even those who don’t see it as a blot on the game’s sacred statistics resent the DH’s never having to crash into a fence, track down a line drive, face the waist-high spikes of a sliding, stealing baserunner or risk rotator-cuff damage firing to the cut-off man.

The DH is accounted for in Regulation 6:10 of the Official Game Rules, but it makes him sound like a complicated butler: “It is not mandatory that a club designate a hitter for the pitcher but failure to do so prior to the game precludes the use of a designated hitter for that game.” They make him sound as if he is faintly unwholesome, a poor relation of sorts.

Davis resents it. He sees traditionalism as nothing more than a plot to interfere with his right to a livelihood.

“Some people, when they see a person doing a certain thing and being a success, they try to bring that person down,” he hints darkly.

Chili is not sure how he became a DH. The usual progression is to find someone who can manipulate the bat but is apt to need a helmet in the outfield. Davis thinks he was a more than adequate outfielder.

“I played center field for the Giants,” he points out.

That is hardly a position for a guy pigeons perch on. A predecessor there was the right honorable Willie Mays.

It is true some players in antiquity could have used DH Rule 6:10. There was an American League player in the early ‘30s named Dale Alexander. He batted--get this!--.343, .326, .325 and finally a league-leading .367 in consecutive seasons. And he was out of baseball within a year because he couldn’t field!

Designated hitters need a union. Chili is well paid--$3 million a year--but whereas the league keeps DH stats, it doesn’t emphasize them any more than it does other fine-print achievements, such as sacrifice bunts or intentional bases on balls.

Chili is not only a premier DH, he is one of the few switch-hitters to practice the trade. He batted .280 as DH in 1992 with 11 home runs and 61 RBIs--he batted .288 with 12 homers and 66 RBIs altogether. He batted .277 as DH in 1991 with 29 homers and 93 RBIs. Last year, he batted .243 as DH but had 27 homers and 112 RBIs.

It’s an honorable profession so far as Chili, whose figures at the All-Star break were not only high for a DH but in the hunt for titles in the league as a whole, is concerned.

“They talk of preserving the integrity of the game, then they split it up into three divisions and a wild card,” he snorts. “It’s still baseball. They still curve ‘em when you’re at the plate. They haven’t interfered with the great game.”

But, of course, they have. Concessionaires could tell you. When the pitcher came to bat in the old days, it was a good time to slip out for a hot dog. Chili at the bat is high drama. Casey would probably be a DH today. But not if he kept striking out.