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As a kid, Steve Calandrillo dreamed his play as a shortstop would get him to baseball’s Hall of Fame. As it turns out, it was his legal scholarship that put him on the steps of the game’s hallowed halls.

A few years back, the lifelong New York Yankees fan — and UW Jeffrey & Susan Brotman Professor of Law — analyzing the impacts of Major League Baseball’s adoption of the designated hitter (DH) rule. The paper, which Calandrillo presented at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, uses empirical evidence to show how the DH rule led to more batters being hit with pitches — the manifestation of the economic theory of moral hazard.

“Anytime somebody is insured against risk, the fear is that they will no longer take steps to prevent that risk because they won’t bear the cost of it materializing,” Calandrillo says. “That's the definition of moral hazard: By insuring people against a loss, they no longer take as many steps to prevent the loss.”

Until 1973, MLB’s American and National leagues played by the same rules, under which the nine defensive positions on the field also constituted a team’s batting order. In this construction, pitchers — who are notoriously terrible hitters — must come to bat unless they are taken out of the game permanently.

When the American League (AL) adopted , it created a tenth position: the designated hitter. This player does not play defensively and exclusively bats, almost always in place of the pitcher.

This, Calandrillo outlines in the paper, led to a dramatic spike in hit batsmen in the AL. Because AL pitchers no longer had to come to bat and face the opposing team’s pitcher, they did not have to face direct retaliation for hitting opposing batters, thereby insuring them against risk.

Calandrillo knows about the risk firsthand. In Little League, he also was a pitcher who liked throwing “inside,” i.e., closer to the batter.

“Because I liked to pitch high and tight to push strong batters off the plate, my dad used to warn me, ‘Steve, if you hit them, you're going to face retaliation.’  As a parent, he was obviously more worried about my personal safety than I was,” Calandrillo says with a laugh.

“What this paper explores is whether eliminating the risk of facing direct retaliation makes the pitcher more willing to hit batters in the first place. And the research we did clearly shows yes.”

2B Warning

MLB brass didn’t need to be accomplished legal scholars to realize something was up.

In the National League (NL), hit batsmen rates remained the same; in the AL, plunkings soared. On average, American League pitchers were now 10-15% more likely to hit batters than their National League counterparts.

Wading into the murky waters of risk analysis, MLB tried to do something about it.

In 1993, the league instituted a universal “double warning” rule: After a pitcher intentionally hits a batter, both teams are warned if anyone else is subsequently hit, the offending pitcher and his manager, who bears vicarious liability, are immediately ejected.

What may be a cost for some fans is a benefit for others. So, we have two leagues with two different sets of rules, and in the end, both sides can be satisfied.

Since the double warning rule made the consequences of retaliation so severe, it effectively immunized the first pitcher to hit an opponent, providing for a “free shot” at the other team as long as they strike first.

“Any parent who's got little kids will tell you that you always wind up catching the person who retaliates, not the one who instigated the fight in the first place,” Calandrillo says.

The double warning rule created a classic example of a substitution risk.

“The idea here is that when you regulate to eliminate one risk, you have to be careful that you’re not inadvertently creating another risk,” Calandrillo says. “[The double warning rule] had this perverse effect of increasing hit-by-pitch rates in the National League so that now, hit-by-pitch rates are not that much different between the AL and NL”

The Long Ball

Baseball is a sport for nerds, Calandrillo says proudly. It was the first sport to track statistics closely, and today, statistical analysis in the game has reached a fever pitch.

As such, the game’s many evolutions within its two parallel leagues lend themselves to contentious cost-benefit analyses that tell us not only about the game itself, but what it means to the millions of people who watch it.

“I'm a believer in experimentation, and in fact, one of the great things about the DH rule is you have one league doing it and one league not,” Calandrillo says. “And so that creates a perfect data set for people who want to compare the effects of different legal rules on human behavior.”

So, all things considered, is the DH rule worth it? Using cost-benefit analysis, many students of the game say yes.

After all, the DH was created as a way to increase offense in the hope of bolstering poor AL attendance — and it succeeded. But still to this day, National League fans and other baseball purists deride what they see as a perversion of baseball’s sacred rules — a debate that will never be resolved.

That, Calandrillo says, is the beauty of baseball.

“It's just like the argument that individual U.S. states should be the laboratories of experimentation: We don’t always need one rule to apply everywhere in America,” Calandrillo says. “Often states are permitted to try new things and experiment. If people like it, you keep it, and it spreads elsewhere. If they don't, then you try something else.

“That’s the cost-benefit analysis of the DH rule: What may be a cost for some fans is a benefit for others. So, we have two leagues with two different sets of rules, and in the end, both sides can be satisfied.”

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