[Skipaway]

Originally Posted by attackemu

Well, pinch-hitting, even in the NL, is of pretty secondary strategic importance. The most important thing a manager does strategically is make pitching changes. In the National League, as skipaway pointed out, that's an obvious decision 99% of the time when the pitcher's coming up to bat. In the American League, the decision is much different because you only have to factor in match-ups and how well your pitchers are pitching on a given day.

For example, if your left-handed starter has thrown 110 pitches going into the 7th inning of a time game, has pitched a good game, but has three right-handed batters coming up to face him, do you leave him in? If you're a National League team, and he's due to bat in the 6th, its an easy decision. Not so much for an American League manager. Hell, if the American League didn't have the DH, Pedro Martinez would have pulled in Game 7 of the 2003 ALCS for sure. No-one would argue the importance of that strategic decision.

And if there isn't any meaningful pinch-hitting in the AL, anyway, that's bad managing. A good manager would exploit matchups in late innings of close games, and use pinch hitters lots of times.

Yeah, it's way easier to second-guess whatever move made by an AL manager. As an NL manager, you just play by the book and do the regular double switch.