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I'm at least a little curious about the actual method used to determine the partisan leanings of those who support or oppose the DH. I can think of some theories as to why there might actually be a weak cause-effect relationship, but nothing that seems really convincing.

If the Republicans could be considered the more "conservative" party in the classic sense, it would make some sense given classic conservatism's reluctance to part with traditions or cast aside established institutions quickly or whimsically. ("Out of every hundred new ideas ninety-nine or more will probably be inferior to the traditional responses which they propose to replace. No one man, however brilliant or well-informed, can come in one lifetime to such fullness of understanding as to safely judge and dismiss the customs or institutions of his society, for those are the wisdom of generations after centuries of experiment in the laboratory of history.") Heck, if it hadn't been for those danged Progressives in the 19th Century, maybe we'd still be trying to decide if we should get rid of the fair-foul rule!

Or how about this: Unlike previous periods, today's Republicans are more likely than Democrats to live in rural and small town areas. By their nature, agrarian and small town economies are less specialized than urban industrial communities, and people in rural areas are more likely to interact with other people as "whole people" instead of as representatives of a given role. For example, the nurse at your doctor's office may also be your kids' Sunday School teacher, your employee's wife, the chair of the local Parks and Rec committee, and your wife's bridge partner. So the whole notion of defining people by narrow specialized roles may be easier for urban residents, or maybe rural and small town folks are more likely to think people should naturally have several roles even if they're better at some than at others. And since place of residents correlates with party ID...

Or maybe there is something to the researcher's whimsical explanation that it has something to do with attitudes toward the welfare state. Maybe fondness for the DH that allows ballplayers to stick around and earn more money even though they are aging or have poorly developed glove skills comes from the same impulse that led Democrats to be the first party to support Social Security and the minimum wage.

But we don't know the details of the research, so we can't really tell if all important variables were controlled. And I can think of a big variable that would have to be controlled--age. I'm pretty sure that opposition to the DH is strongly correlated to age. Real old-timers, the ones least likely to have come to terms with earrings and low stirrups, are probably the ones most likely to hate the DH. Those of us who are a little younger but can still remember a world without the DH in almost every league are maybe less likely to hate it, but still would have a healthy share of our group who prefer the way it used to be. And then there's the folks in their 20's and 30's, who don't know a world without the DH. The DH was used on their high school team (and maybe, horror of horrors, on their Little League team). Almost every baseball game they ever saw had a DH, except the NL games. So they would be least likely to oppose it, and probably most of them don't even know why anybody even talks about it. Back when the DH was adopted, older voters were more likely to be Democrats. But now, older people are more likely to be Republicans and younger people more likely to be Democrats. (Not because of any philosophical shifts; the New Deal Democrats died off and the "new" old people are the folks who used to be younger and middle aged Republicans.) So maybe, just maybe, the really important variable is age, but the researchers may have erroneously focused on the partisan identification that correlates with age, not age itself.