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Reply to "The DH"

Well, with the exception of the free throw situation, basketball does have unrestricted substitutions ... a starter can come out and back in an unlimited number of times. Baseball has very restrictive substitution rules.

The only restrictions on basketball substitutions are you to wait for dead balls and timeouts, and you can't sub for the free throw shooter. Otherwise a basketball coach has pretty much an unrestricted ability to freely substitute throughout the game. At the end of many basketball games, you will see the coach switch a defensive specialist and an offensive specialist on each possession change.

A basketball coach has a lot of freedom in getting the bench involved in the game ... he has to or he'll have five guys collapsing on the floor. There's a JC basketball team here in SoCal that took this to the extreme: with a roster of 15 guys, they had three complete 'squads' that did a full 5-man substitution every 30-60 SECONDS. Run-gun-minimum defense. They had a team average of something like 135 points/game. They had an assistant coach do nothing but manage the substitution rotation and stopwatch.

In baseball, the substitution rules are far more strict with regards to taking a starter out and putting him back in ... once, a sub can only go in once, etc. You can only sub between innings (10-15 minutes) or in a pinch-hit or run situation. So it's a lot harder to get 25 guys involved in the game. As long as the DH rule is the same for every team, no one gets much of an advantage out of it, at least not at the HS level.

Also, basketball is an extremely aerobic sport, requiring frequent substitution of players to prevent exhaustion, so the bench has to get involved in every game. Generally 80% of the players will get some amount of game time in every basketball game. The biggest physical challenge facing some baseball players is simply staying alert, particularly if your ace is on the mound. The games just aren't equivalent on many levels.

Once you get beyond HS, I've got to agree with you ... it's all about what team can field the best players with the most tools. In HS, these are kids ... let them enjoy the experience. For many, it's their last. I see DH'ing for any position player as a small corruption, which probably isn't used that much anyway. I'd guess our HS coach did it in less than 25% of our games.
Last edited by pbonesteele
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