Should Major League Baseball owners and players agree that the National League would use a designated hitter if there is a shortened baseball season this year, it would make all sorts of sense. For decades, it’s felt inevitable that the NL would adopt the DH because players want another starting job, owners don’t want weak-hitting pitchers to get at-bats, and apparently the parties felt that coronavirus negotiations would be the right time to finally go through with it.
In recent years, I’ve come to to accept the NL’s inevitable capitulation on the DH, even though the DH, as a concept, still feels incorrect. Yes, every league I’ve ever played in — youth through high school through adult rec leagues — had some version of one or multiple DHs allowed in the lineup, but there’s something smoothly satisfying about a lineup that has nine players, all of whom hit and field.
But as long as there’s a DH in MLB, and we’re completely dispensing with symmetry and the principle that each player who hits is assigned a position in the field, it’s worth thinking about whether even greater specialization would make baseball better. What if the manager were allowed to use as many DHs as they wished in the lineup?
At one point in The Last Dance, North Carolina basketball coach Roy Williams claimed he witnessed Michael Jordan running a 4.38-second 40-yard dash, which would be amazing today for a guy who’s at least 6-foot-5, let alone in the early ’80s. The New York Times reported a similar story back in 1983, so let’s say Jordan likely ran a hand-timed 4.3 or 4.4.
I don't believe he was that fast.
There has to be a better way to measure Jordan’s speed than anecdotes about hand-timed 40-yard dash times recounted in the service of fluffing up a great athlete’s legend. With a little digging, I think I’ve found a way to tell if Jordan was legendarily fast or if he was merely fast for an early ’80s college basketball player. (Spoiler alert: He was not legendarily fast.)