Among my other hobbies/issues/obsessions... my case and my vision for Unifying Baseball

[sturt]

Would love to have my Hawksquawk friends visit... read... react... and, optimally, if so inclined, sign-up with this and become one of the core who are promoting it...

http://www.facebook.com/UnifyBaseball

[macdaddy]

So Home Manager's Choice is the proposal?   Seems like that would pretty quickly go to full time DH but maybe not.    It would definitely be better and make things more interesting.  

I don't know if this is an option that anyone considers but i think the solution is to allow pinch-hitting for the pitcher but the pitcher doesn't have to come out of the game.    The pinch hitter would have to come out unless he was moved to a fielding position.   That way you'd have pitchers still batting some of the time but you could put a pinch hitter in there at key points without burning your pitcher.   It would actually add more strategy in my opinion and still abide by almost every pure rule of baseball. 

[sturt]

I've heard something like that proposed at some point. As said in the video, there's been about two dozen different options that have been brought up--I once sat down and listed them all.

Here's my thing, @macdaddy ... as a former Astros fan, the alarms have went off now that the Commissioner "innocently" said what he said recently. That's because, similarly, Astros fans were told, in essence and from time to time over the course of Summer 2011 when Slim-y Jim Crane was buying the club,  "there's never actually been a meeting yet where moving HOU to the American League has been proposed."

And we know how that ended up.

I wrote this to a friend who had e-mailed me personally after visiting the Unify Baseball page, and forgive me, but it seems appropriate to copy-and-paste as a response here, too...
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... AL fans are appeased on some regular basis, and NL fans are appeased on some regular basis. As you saw that I said in my public comment, I'm just utterly convinced at this point that the simplicity and familiarity aspects are fundamental to getting us to a place of some common ground. And we're clearly at a place right now where the new commish is floating that trial balloon--time is of the essence. Learning curves, implicit with almost every other compromise rule concept, are the enemy of achieving the desired goal. Having initiated and participated in so many of these discussions over the years (as you have as well), I'm also persuaded that once fans are exposed to some idea like a bodyguard, the conversation tends to go off in a variety of directions, and we never actually get to a consensus... and I've concluded that's because they're all seen as "unelectable" as the next one.

Which brings me back to HMC.

Can't claim that unelectable thing about something that has already been implemented in spring training... ie, just as the original DH rule itself was. And that means everything.

People... perhaps us baseball fans maybe especially... will drop the "that's just unrealistic" tag on anything and everything seemingly out of sheer discomfort with change in any form. No one can dismiss HMC that way, though. It is entirely "electable." Just as it is entirely understandable. Just as there are no unintended consequences--it's either/or, not something new that introduces a whole other element. And, the clincher for me, it is entirely fair... everyone's preferred form of the game remains intact as-is for some portion of games--a portion dictated by the natural strategic motivations and forces already embedded in the game, *not* anecdotally imposed from the top down.

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macdaddy, hope you'll give some serious thought to jumping in the pool with me and others.