Pitchers hitting is an oxymoron. Designated FIELDER is the answer, along with re-entry and roster of 30.

Oxymoron: a figure of speech by which a locution produces an incongruous,seemingly self-contradictory effect, as in “cruel kindness” or “to make haste slowly.”. 

By Edward Simpson from London, England via Wikimedia Commons

Don't ask why but last night I was watching some of the Mets game against the Marlins.  I guess I wanted to see Giancarlo Stanton.  I actually had the sound on when the announcers were reading twitter messages, presumably from Met fans, expressing their anguish over the possibility of the designated hitter (DH) rule coming to their National League.  That's been a hot topic for some reason because a National pitcher, Cardinal Adam Wainwright, injured himself badly a couple of days ago when he started to run out of the batter's box.  The Met announcers amused themselves mocking the inept batting of Met pitcher Bartolo Colon.

Oxymoron certainly contains the two syllables to describe DH advocates.

Merger: AL and NL merged years ago. How come no one noticed? Wednesday, October 19, 2011

Read all about it!  It's NOT a league!  Wake the heck up!

From the original 2006 Radical Baseball document posted here in 2008:

http://radicalbaseball.blogspot.com/2008/02/radical-baseball.html

5. Designated Fielders and the Six-Player Batting Order.

There should be designated fielders, not a designated hitter. Everybody fields but a team has the option to have up to three players only play the field and not bat. Six batters in a lineup. That’s the minimum there could be without a batter coming up with himself on base. They’d get 1,000 plate appearances a season, comparable to the number of batters faced by a starting pitcher. This would improve both offense and defense. It addresses those sappy complaints of National League fans without having to watch the dreaded bottom of the order. Who wants to watch the bottom of the order? No one, except people who are actually interested in sacrifice bunting and all the brain power involved in making that decision. Oh, and the double switch. Take me out to the ball game so I can see a double switch in person. Complaining about batters not knowing how to bunt is like complaining about American soldiers not knowing how to load a musket. Who cares? Bombs away. Batter up, not bunter up.
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There, that was easy.  I'm guessing baseball fans won't embrace the six batter thing all at once, so I'd settle for eight batters and one DF as a start.  Combine that with re-entry within the confines of the batting order and now you've got the possibility of real decisions to be made during a game, not the kiddie stuff that's passed for thinking all this time.

Allow players to re-enter games. Sunday, March 23, 2014

The basic reasons to oppose are based on people being too dumb and lazy to consider any change.  Generally, the initial impulses are:

1. Invoke accusations of blasphemy.

2. State that there is no practical way that it could work.

3. Insist that it will slow down the game...

Somebody is reading this and having conniptions imagining perpetual changing of batter and pitcher into eternity with no resolution.  Back and forth with no pitch being thrown.  Enough already.  We'll devise implementation rules.  The main point is to allow players to return, not dwell on how and/or why this should not be done.

Baseball fans delude themselves into imagining that baseball is special because it is so primitive that the extreme limitations cause the very few moves to be so much more compelling.  Grow the heck up.  It's just dumb.

Baseball managers make almost no significant decisions in the first half of a game.  The only one possible is to remove the starting pitcher and the manager does that only under extreme duress.  He might as well send the starting lineup to the plate umpire by e-mail and show up in the fifth inning.

About half the players do not play in most baseball games...

Allow players to re-enter games.  Once that concept is accepted, then we can work on how to implement.
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Oh, and a thirty player roster with 25 active for a game would make all this even better and smooth over any concerns of the players. It is probably also cost effective because the marginal extra five players might help prevent injury due to overuse of the better and higher paid players.