By JOHN DELCOS
The (Westchester, N.Y.) Journal News

TAMPA, Fla. - The phone rings more often in the Blomberg home this time of year. Mostly the calls come from strangers, but their reason is the same: to discuss Ron Blomberg's legacy and the future of the designated hitter.

Thirty years ago on April 6, Blomberg, once a promising outfielder with the Yankees, started as the very first designated hitter against Luis Tiant in Fenway Park.

What was to be a three-year experiment to boost scoring - having an extra hitter bat in place of the pitcher - has remained an issue that has one major league manager asking a simple question that underscores Major League Baseball's rudderless leadership: "How can one league play with one set of rules and another play with another set?"

Blomberg didn't understand it then - and doesn't now.

"I screwed up the game of baseball," said Blomberg, who went 1-for-3 that day. "Baseball needed a jolt of offense for attendance, so they decided on the DH. I never thought it would last this long."

And it won't change. The reason is star power. Paul Molitor, Dave Winfield, George Brett, Carl Yastrzemski, Eddie Murray and Al Kaline benefited from the designated hitter to reach 3,000 hits; Murray and Reggie Jackson took advantage of it to hit 500 homers.

All are Hall of Famers.

Major League Baseball, currently in competition for the entertainment dollar with everything and everybody else and seeking to expand abroad, isn't about to legislate the designated hitter - and by extension, some of its stars - out of the game.

Should it try, there will be fierce opposition.

"The Players Association is too strong," Jackson said. "It won't let it happen. It's not going to let jobs get away."

The designated hitter is a position players stumble on by accident. Mostly, players become designated hitters because physical liabilities prevent them from playing in the field. Blomberg played that day because he had a sore hamstring.

Without it, Edgar Martinez would have been a footnote in Seattle Mariners' history years ago. A third baseman by trade, a string of injuries ranging from arthroscopic surgery on his knee to hamstring pulls to bone spurs in his shoulder that made throwing difficult gradually moved him to the bench.

What happened to Martinez' career is he went from being a good hitter to arguably the best designated hitter of all time, to be regarded as "a great hitter who has a chance to be in the Hall of Fame," Jackson said.

Martinez leads all designated hitters with a .323 average, and is third with 208 homers and second with 844 RBI.

"Edgar?" Bernie Williams said. "He's the best right-handed hitter I've ever seen."

Because of the extra bats provided by the DH, overall scoring has more than doubled since 1973, but last year the American League had just over a half-run a game more than the National League, 9.62 runs a game to 8.86.

"Baseball wanted more scoring," Blomberg said. "Did it work? Yeah, but the DH is only one part of it. It's too easy to say the scoring is just because of the DH. There are so many other factors involved."

Blomberg's list was the same as everybody else's.

The balls are juiced and so are the hitters; expansion diluted pitching to minor-league quality in many places; the parks have gotten smaller and the hitters bigger; there's Astroturf and the strike zone. Every major development favors hitters, so scoring can't help but go up.

Baseball got what it wanted, and more, including complaints that the game is too long and boring. It also has an unanswered question: If scoring is so good, and there's more of it in the American League, then how come average attendance is higher in the National League?

It was, last year, by more than 1,300 a game.