The Golden At-Bat Is a Dreadful Idea

The Golden At-Bat Is a Dreadful Idea

by Lincoln Mitchell

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NOTE - This article comes from Lincoln Mitchell's Substack page, Kibitzing with Lincoln . Please click HERE to follow Lincoln on Substack.

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The, latest shiny new object MLB commissioner Rob Manfred seems to be interested in is the Golden At-Bat, but it is a terrible idea. Essentially, the way this proposed new rule would work is that once a game each team could, regardless of the situation, send a pinch-hitter, even if that player was already in the line-up to the plate. The pinch-hitter would then go back to his spot in the lineup and the player for whom he had pinch hit would reamin in the game. The idea, I think, is so that in clutch situations in the late innings, with the game on the line, a team’s best hitter would have a shot at winning the game.

This is, at best, a solution in search of a problem-the kind of thing that might be proposed in an APBA or Strat-O-Matic league if the players were sufficiently high or unserious. Manfred has distanced himself from this idea-for now, but it will likely come back at some point.

The primary reason the Golden At-Bat is such an absurd idea, and one that feels so offensive, and frankly stupid, to so many fans, is because it goes against one of the primal dynamics that makes baseball a wonderful game. Baseball, at its best, is both a team and an individual sport. The battle between batter and pitcher, which is the enduring center point of the game, is a deeply individual contest-although a good catcher can help the pitcher a lot. However, once the ball is put in play, baseball immediately becomes a team sport once again.

On the hitting side, what makes baseball a team sport is the batting order. Because the nine players in the lineup take turns hitting in a predetermined order, baseball is once again a team sport. The best teams hit from top to bottom with no easy outs in the lineup, and no single hitting star can carry a team. The introduction of the designated hitter rule, something I would still like to eliminate, changed that somewhat, but a batting order is still a batting order. And, now Rob Manfred is suggesting MLB might change that.

The word “order” is central to the idea of baseball. Determining the best batting order is important part of any manager’s job. However, even the best managers cannot ensure that with the game on the line the best hitter will come up to the plate. That is not a bug, as Manfred seems to think, but rather a feature of the game. Baseball is great because of sluggers from Ruth to Greenberg to Mantle to Reggie to Ortiz and Soto coming up in important moments and hitting big home runs, but it is sublime because guys like Bill Mazeroski, Travis Ishikawa and Bucky Dent sometimes find themselves with the bat in their hands at a key moment and deliver that memorable hit.

If that order is disrupted by allowing a manager to send a player, already in the lineup, to bat in a key moment, baseball begins to approach that place where it is no longer baseball. That it might be fun for some, for example, Royals fans, to see Bobby Witt Jr. batting in a key situation at the end of every game, despite it not being is turn in the batting order, is irrelevant if something so core to the meaning, appeal, history and yes, magic, of baseball is destroyed in the process.

Another way to think of this is that order is the English translation of the word Seder, which is the Passover meal. I love New York bagels and rye bread, a good San Francisco sourdough, Georgian puri and many of the other breads I have eaten all over the world, but if you serve any of them at your Passover Seder it is, in very real way, no longer a Seder.

The Golden At-Bat will not even accomplish what dilletantes like Manfred think it will. While we can fantasize about every game ending with Aaron Judge, Shohei Ohtani or Bryce Harper at the place against Emmanuel Clase, Mason Miller or Josh Hader, in practice that is not even how this dreadful idea will work.

Rather than hope for a dramatic ending to every game, managers will try to find the moments where upgrading from a weak hitter to the best hitter on the team will have the greatest impact. That could be in the 5th inning with two men on and a light hitting catcher coming up. It could be sending up a right-handed hitter to lead-off the seventh inning when the opposing team has brought in a tough lefty to face a left-handed batter. Those and countless other scenarios make more sense and add little of the fake excitement or drama the Golden At-Bat seeks to create.

To the extent records still matter, the Golden At-Bat would create statistical havoc. It is likely that on most teams only about two players would get almost all of these Golden At-Bats. That means that about 30-60 players on every team, every year, will get 50-120 extra plate appearances. Those players will have more opportunities for rack up RBIs, extra base hits and other accomplishments. Over the course of several years, that can impact career records as well.

The Golden At-Bat would accomplish almost nothing and do little to address the bigger picture causes for why baseball is not as popular, particularly among young people, as it once was, while seeming to be specifically designed to outrage older and more devoted fans. Manfred’s obsessive tinkering with the game has led to some decent ideas, such as the pitch clock, and some terrible ones like the runner on second to start every extra inning. This seeminlgy endless tinkering is the result of having a commissioner who in his almost decade in office has done little to suggest he deeply loves, or even understands, baseball.