The universal DH ended a real strategic debate in baseball, and the game is worse for the uniformity
MLB adopted the universal DH in 2022 and ended fifty years of the two leagues playing genuinely different versions of baseball. I understand why it happened, pitchers hitting was mostly automatic outs and injury risk for basically zero entertainment value in return. But something real got lost along with the bad at-bats. National League baseball forced actual strategic decisions that American League baseball never had to make. Do you pinch hit for your starter in the sixth inning of a close game and burn your bullpen an inning early, or let him hit and hope he can give you one more inning. Does your lineup construction change because you're carrying a bench built around double-switches instead of a designated hitter slot. All of that is gone now, every team plays the identical roster-construction puzzle, and a genuinely distinct tactical dimension of the sport got flattened into uniformity because keeping two different rule sets was administratively inconvenient, not because the strategic layer itself had no value.