Boston Red Sox right-hander Luis Tiant pivoted until his body nearly faced center field at Fenway Park, then fired a pitch toward the plate. It was ball four, forcing in a run, and we may assume that Tiant muttered an epithet or two under his breath.
When the first inning of the day’s earliest game ended, the player was stranded on first base — his normal defensive position — and for a moment he waited for a teammate to bring his mitt out to him. Instead, Elston Howard, the New York Yankees’ first-base coach, tapped him on the shoulder and said, “Come on back to the bench — you aren’t supposed to stay out here.”
So Ron Blomberg jogged in with his coach, took a seat in the dugout and asked Howard, “What do I do now?”
“You just sit here with me,” Howard replied.
“Well,” Blomberg said. “What do you do?”
The date was April6, 1973, and Blomberg had just become the major leagues’ first designated hitter — or, as it was called then, the designated pinch hitter — and baseball would never be quite the same again.
Three decades later, love it or hate it, the DH appears here to stay. The American League, lagging in offense and attendance, introduced it on a temporary basis. Now nearly every professional and most amateur leagues use it to keep a ninth serious batter in the lineup rather than having most pitchers step up to bat, wave at three strikes and sit down.
True, purists hate the DH, and National Leaguers swear the Senior Circuit (as it used to be called) will never adopt it. Yet it is arguably one of the most important rule changes ever adopted in the sport, even more so perhaps than the banning of trick pitches in 1920 or interleague play.
And how’s this for irony? National League owners first proposed a designated hitter rule 45 years earlier, in 1928, but their American League counterparts rejected it.
Meanwhile, Blomberg — now retired and living in Georgia at age 55 — remains the living, breathing answer to a question often heard on quiz shows and a favorite of trivia buffs.
“I really screwed up the game of baseball very well,” Blomberg jokingly told an interviewer last year. “I had no idea that the DH would have this kind of impact, I thought it was just a gimmick. I never thought it would last this long.”
Blomberg, a strong left-handed hitter, batted sixth in the 1973 opener for a New York team that finished the season fourth in the American League East with an 80-82 record — one of many pinstriped pretenders that failed to win a pennant between 1964 and 1976. Ralph Houk was in the fifth season of his second tenure as manager. His first had produced pennants in 1961, 1962 and 1963, but now those glory days were an increasingly distant memory as the erstwhile Bronx Bombers bombed year after year.
The Yankees made Blomberg the first pick in the 1967 draft, eyeing him as both a future slugger and as a Jewish star who would be popular in New York. But frequently sidelined by injuries and even more frequently troubled by left-handed pitching, he remained a marginal player from 1969 through 1978 although finishing his major league career with a .293 batting average.
How did he become the first DH? As so often happens, strictly by accident.
“I pulled a hamstring three days before spring training ended,” Blomberg told the Sporting News several years ago. “We were heading up to Boston and Ralph said to me, ’It’s going to be 30 degrees, we’re facing Tiant and I’d like to get your bat in the lineup because you’ll be less susceptible to pulled muscles [by not playing in the field].’”
After batting .268 in 107 games the previous season, Blomberg was in no position to argue with his manager.
“I asked Ellie, ’How do I do this?’ and he said, ’You just go up and take batting practice and then just hit [during the game]. Blomberg did, and went 1-for-3. Boston’s DH, former National League star Orlando Cepeda, was 0-for-6, but it didn’t matter as the Red Sox pounded 20 hits in a 15-5 victory.
Most of the other American League DHs that day were veterans, such as Baltimore’s Terry Crowley, Chicago’s Tom McCraw, Detroit’s Gates Brown, Minnesota’s Tony Oliva and Texas’ Rico Carty. But Blomberg was taking on this strange new role at 24.
After the game, Yankees public relations director Marty Appel shipped his bat to the Baseball Hall of Fame. Said Blomberg years later: “I went into Cooperstown through the back door.”
Nowadays, of course, both veteran hitters and the players’ union embrace the DH like a brother. Perhaps the most appreciative player ever is Edgar Martinez, who won a batting title for Seattle in 1995 without ever sticking his hand into a glove. And perhaps the weirdest Gold Glove Award winner of all time was Rafael Palmeiro, who somehow achieved that feat in 1999 despite playing only 29 games at first base for the Rangers.
The oldest DH? Minnie Minoso, who went 1-for-8 in three games for the White Sox in 1976, when he was 53.
And the tallest? Who else but our old friend Frank Howard, who put his 6-foot-7 frame thusly to work for the Tigers in 1973 before retiring.
Obviously, the DH role suited Blomberg. Although playing in only 100 games, he raised his batting average 61 points to .329, with 12 home runs, 57 RBI and a career-high .495 slugging average.
“With Bobby Bonds playing right field and three guys at first base, I might as well have donated my glove to charity,” he said.
The following season, Blomberg batted .311 before injuries pretty much ruined his career. At 30, he was out of baseball after batting .231 in 61 games for the White Sox in 1978. Nonetheless, his place in history is secure.
“If I wasn’t the first DH, I would just be a normal guy who played with the Yankees for X number of years,” he said. “But I was the first at something, and they can never take it away, never. And it’s nice to have that.”
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