The first time I saw a mention of a baseball “golden at-bat” came on Monday. A few entries flashed on X, my spam detector dismissed them immediately and I moved on in search of my next distraction. A day later, I was back wasting life away on social media and there it was again: the “golden-at bat”. The internet had won: I did a little research.
Multiple entries described a potential rule change in Major League Baseball that would allow a team to send their preferred player to the plate, at any time, even if it wasn’t his turn to hit, once a game. I resisted asking the universe the myriad questions which sprung to mind, such as, what happens if that “golden” player is already on base? This was obviously a gag. Such a rule change wouldn’t be a slight adjustment to how the sport is played: we’re not talking about ads on uniforms or even ghost runners helping to decide extra inning slogs. A golden at-bat? That instantly transforms the game into a different code entirely, at least for me. I’m still not buying it.
But then I began to see real articles showing up on news feeds, pieces that weren’t from The Onion, a Russian bot farm or my own personal state of delirium. Such musings came complete with photos of MLB commissioner Rob Manfred and real quotes from the man himself.
Even real, live, former baseball players wondered if such an idea was legitimate, or if it was instead a random backhanded stab at satire by baseball’s brass.
“This can’t be real,” wrote Roger Clemens on X. Oh, it’s real Roger, and I get the sense that this proposal may be the only thing you and I ever agree on. But could it happen? Anything is possible with Manfred, who has tinkered with the game on a level we haven’t seen since the designated hitter finally wormed its way into big league baseball in 1973. To a grumpy National League guy like myself, the DH was always sacrilegious, but at least it didn’t come straight out of left field: that rule had been bandied about as far back as 1891. As far as I know, the only golden thing baseball ever had or has is the piece of metal the commissioner hands to the World Series winner every season.
With Manfred and Co floating nonsensical ideas such as the golden at bat, which apparently caused quite the buzz at an owners’ meeting, you could be forgiven for wondering if the commissioner is actually a fan of the game he oversees. That’s not to say there’s anything wrong with lightly freshening up a dusty old sport like baseball, and to be fair, MLB has been on something of a rule-change winning streak.
The pitch clock, which ended most of the endless crotch grabbing, batting glove fiddling and pitcher lollygagging, sped up games by an average of 28 minutes, and has been a welcome improvement. As has the jumpstarting of the speed game by beefing up the bases and limiting throws over to first base. Rewarding hitters for perfect, up the middle contact by adjusting the soul destroying shifts has also worked well.
But the golden at-bat is a much larger change, if it turns out to be genuine. After all, is this floating of a radical, sport-altering change a genuine attempt to gauge public perception, or a mere publicity stunt to get baseball some attention on cold December days while the NFL is eating everyone’s lunch and Juan Soto is holding up most of the free-agency market. If the proposal is a sham, created for a bit of cold-weather publicity pop, consider the job done and move on.
I suspect Manfred won’t, but if I were him, I’d be focusing on the real work that baseball has to do. That includes finding permanent homes for two teams stranded in scorching locales in open air, minor league ballparks for the foreseeable future.
The cost of the formerly Oakland A’s new Las Vegas dome has skyrocketed from $1.5bn to $1.75bn, meaning owner John Fisher needs to start checking his mattresses for change. There’s 250m reasons to believe that move is in doubt, and that the Athletics could be stranded in a AAA Sacramento ballpark for some time.
The Tampa Bay Rays’ stadium plans are also in jeopardy after the St Petersburg City Council showed buyers’ remorse on using public funds for an MLB stadium after the region was rocked by back-to-back hurricanes, one of which ripped the roof off their home field. So the team’s long-term future in the area is in play, while the Yankees spring training home in Tampa will host the 2025 Rays.
Meanwhile, Manfred is bidding to overhaul MLB’s entire local and national television and media rights structure, which would involve getting owners to agree to sweeping revenue sharing plans and complex negotiations with the players’ union in the next collective bargaining agreement, all by 2028, when the US national television deals expire.
On the field, baseball needs to find real solutions the crisis of endless arm injuries to its pitchers, and a way to quell at least some of the over 10,000 additional strikeouts a season hurlers have racked up against helpless hitters since the year 2000.
Instead we get the golden at-bat, the equivalent of being bored at 2am on the Fourth of July and stuffing M-80’s inside cinder blocks, just to see what happens. That never ends well and such a move would most definitely blow the lid off baseball, forever.
