A Terrible Idea, for a Good Reason

America emerged from its tryptophanic slumber this week to find that the world was in danger of changing. Six weeks ago, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred went on The Varsity podcast, hosted by veteran reporter John Ourand, and as an oh-by-the-way mentioned an idea that had been mooted at a recent owners’ meeting: the Golden At-Bat.

I don’t know how married Manfred and the MLB bigwigs are to that branding, because to me it sounds like a fast food giveaway. Whatever you call it, the idea is simple enough: Once a game, a manager would be able to override the established lineup and bat a player out of order. Presumably a star in a key moment. Bottom of the ninth, runner on second, down by one run, bottom of the order coming up — sit down, Shay Whitcomb, we’re bringing Yordan Alvarez back for another spin.

This idea floated out there for more than a month, until this past Monday, when Jayson Stark published an article on the idea at The Athletic. Like it or hate it, the Golden At-Bat became the biggest story of the week, even as the free agent market kept ticking over.

You know what? It’s fairly early in the offseason, well into the part of the year where nobody with a white-collar job does anything at work between Thanksgiving and New Year’s. (Except me, obviously, in case my bosses read this. Rest assured that I’m at the coalface, giving my all.) So why not mull over this potentially revolutionary idea? Just about everyone is weighing in on the issue.

And just about everyone hates it. I’ve seen multiple references to Manfred’s comments as a “trial balloon.” I’m not sure a throwaway comment about a brainstorming session is even that serious. Someone with a dark sense of humor might say that this was the Hindenburg disaster of trial balloons. Actually, that’s not fair, because dozens of people made it off the Hindenburg alive.

In the latest edition of The Pulse, 91% of voters said MLB’s hypothetical “Golden At-Bat” rule change is not a good idea.Agree?Sign up for The Pulse newsletter for more polls like this from @chrisbranch.bsky.social ??www.nytimes.com/athletic/new…

— The Athletic (@theathletic.bsky.social) 2024-12-04T15:01:04.146Z

A survey of Athletic readers came back with 90.7% of respondents in opposition to the Golden At-Bat. It’s an internet survey, not a genuine public opinion poll. Nevertheless, in order to impress on you how hard it is to get 91% of people to agree that something is bad, I found a Gallup poll from 2018 in which only 84% of respondents disapproved of Kim Jong Un.

This is a weird thing to say about an idea that’s less popular among baseball fans than the Marburg Virus, but I see the appeal of the Golden At-Bat.

Apparently this idea goes back a long way — in the Stark article, ex-Marlins president-turned podcaster David Samson claims that he brought the idea to MLB’s competition committee more than a decade ago. (Incidentally, “If it’s coming from David Samson, it’s probably a bad idea,” is a pretty trustworthy heuristic, so there’s another mark against the Golden At-Bat.) But the modern genesis stems from the final out of the most recent World Baseball Classic.

You remember: Shohei Ohtani comes in to save a 3-2 game with 9-1-2 due up for the United States in the top of the ninth. A wildly compelling premise to start, made all the more so by the fact that the top two hitters in the American lineup were Mookie Betts and Ohtani’s then-club teammate, Mike Trout.

Ohtani vs. Betts and especially Trout with a championship on the line… I mean it was exactly as exciting as you’d think. From the moment it was reported that Ohtani would be available out of the bullpen, everyone was hoping for this scenario. After Kyle Schwarber homered to cut the Japanese lead to one run in the eighth inning, I realized that we were on track to get the dream matchup, and I almost didn’t believe it. The coolest possible outcome never happens.

Yeah what the heck, let’s watch it again.

The two biggest stars in the world, two of the best players ever, facing off with a de facto world championship on the line. Me? I would’ve preferred to see Trout not swing through that 1-0 fastball and hit a game-tying home run, but that’s my jingoism talking. Ohtani’s combination of triple-digit heat and a sweeper that would’ve gotten him burned as a witch 15 years ago — plus Trout’s ability to battle against such obscene stuff — was nothing short of spectacular.

The World Baseball Classic produced no shortage of great drama in 2023, but a lot of it went unnoticed outside of diehard baseball circles. Trout vs. Ohtani was a genuine breakthrough moment. My Twitter timeline was full of people who didn’t care a lick about baseball, but tuned in to see this because it was spectacular and important, like how you’d tune in for the 100 meter final at the Olympics or the Super Bowl or the Best Picture announcement at the Oscars.

Even to my cold and jaded sensibilities, having gorged on what is simply too much baseball over the past 30 years, this moment was electrifying. It made me physically itch for more. So MLB would naturally want to explore ways to give fans — especially new fans and casual fans — what they so obviously hungered for.

But the Golden At-Bat received such a leaden reception because the people who run MLB are like the people who run most mass-market entertainment companies these days. They view saleability as the measure of great creative achievement. On its face, why not? Is it not good to make something that’s enjoyed by the most people possible?

But while these people tend to be good at identifying what their audience likes, they’re bad at understanding why, or how to trip those emotional circuit-breakers with new material. It’s why, after Game of Thrones redefined the TV landscape, Amazon spent multiple MLB payrolls’ worth of millions making its own swords-and-sorcery epic. It’s why we keep getting reboots, and new superhero movies, and also why those imitators often leave eager audiences cold.

The Golden At-Bat promises to give us Trout vs. Ohtani every day, but doing so would devalue what made that matchup so exciting in the first place.

By March 2023, we’d watched the two greatest players of their generation play on the same team for five seasons and not make the playoffs once. Going back to the start of Trout’s career, he’d played in three total postseason games, all losses. Having both of these stars play in a meaningful game — even in a relatively new semi-exhibition tournament that took place during spring training — was groundbreaking stuff.

It’s rare that a baseball tournament comes down to a one-run lead in the ninth inning of a winner-take-all game. Rarer still that each team has its best players in place to decide the contest. I was going to say that this is a once-a-decade event, but that’s probably underselling things.

According to Stathead’s Event Finder, the Trout vs. Ohtani scenario — winner-take-all game, tying run at the plate or on base for the final plate appearance — has happened 57 times in postseason history. So not every year, but fairly frequently. Especially when you consider that had Trout homered, it would not have been the last play of the game, so there are other instances that don’t show up on my search.

But it doesn’t happen that often to players on that level. The most recent such scenario came in Game 3 of the NL Wild Card Series, when Brice Turang grounded into a game-ending double play against David Peterson. Mmmmm, yes, that’s star power.

Eighteen of these matchups have taken place in the decisive game of the World Series, most recently Michael Martinez vs. Mike Montgomery in 2016. Again, hardly Trout vs. Ohtani. I think it’s pretty obvious that both of those players are going to the Hall of Fame, and we’ve never had a playoff series come down to a confrontation between two Hall of Famers before. Though, given that the WBC is less prestigious than the World Series, I picked out a collection of matchups that came close: A future Hall of Famer (or expected future Hall of Famer) against another star.

The closest we’ve come to the WBC-ending scenario in the MLB playoffs is probably either Rivera vs. Gonzalez in the 2001 World Series — this was the year Gonzo borrowed Mark McGwire’s forearms and hit 57 home runs — or Fingers vs. Rose to end the 1972 World Series.

So yeah, this is a once-in-a-generation thing we got to see. And if you shoehorn it into every game, it stops being once-in-a-generation special.

More than that, it goes against everything baseball stands for. Here I’ll quote Stark quoting Samson:

“The view was, you are basically ruining the sanctity of the game,” Samson told The Athletic. “The brilliance of the history of the game is that, hey, if the right guy’s up, the right guy’s up — and if not, he’s not. And many times, there are heroes that are made by people who otherwise are not heroes, because they had an opportunity, as a big-league player, to have a big at-bat.”

Couldn’t have put it better myself. (For the record, the rule of thumb I introduced earlier stands, because Samson’s brilliantly succinct summary of baseball’s fatalistically egalitarian ethos comes from him explaining how people told him he was wrong.)

The marketing muckety-mucks up at MLB HQ would give a kidney to have a regular supply of star highlights on the level of Vince Young ripping up the Rose Bowl or Damian Lillard walking off the Rockets and staring down the camera. But baseball is built around the premise that everyone gets their turn to hit. You win and lose not just by how the stars fare, but by whether the guys at the bottom of the lineup can hold their own too. As Samson said, heroes are made not only by skill, but by circumstance.

Personally, I love that about baseball, but I understand it’s not a normatively superior way to build a sport. I also love sports like basketball, where one player can put the team on their back. (Though my love for basketball is waning rapidly at the moment, as the Sixers continually fail to pull their heads out of their asses.) But giving managers a joker to play, allowing stars to jump the line for big moments, would turn baseball into something other than what it is. And people who want a sport where the best players exert immense influence will probably just stick to basketball anyway.

So I find the Golden At-Bat concept to be sacrilegious. It disgusts me, viscerally, and upsets my soul. If it were to be implemented, I would find it difficult to take Major League Baseball seriously as a continuation of what it has been for more than 100 years.

But I’m not offended by the fact that Manfred mooted it. Far from it; I’m actually pleased that people at the highest level of baseball are running ideas like this up the flagpole.

Of all the commentary on the Golden At-Bat, I found myself agreeing most with J.J. Cooper’s take on the issue in Baseball America: “[W]hile he can in-artfully toss out trial balloons that generate tons of discussion, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has earned the trust that he won’t blow up the game in a way like this. Yes, I’m saying Manfred can be trusted not to screw this up.”

Believe it or not, I agree.

I’ve been an outspoke critic of Manfred throughout his tenure. I think his tenure has been defined by the enabling of ownership’s worst greedy impulses, needless antagonism toward players and fans, and an escalating series of clumsy public relations mistakes. He’s the next step in the evolution of the Selig Model of commissionership, in which the league office is unabashedly a front for the owners, rather than a custodian of the game. Generally speaking, I would not trust Manfred as far as I could throw him.

But in the arena of on-field rule changes, Manfred — and I imagine there’s some degree of metonymy here, because it’s not like he’s sitting in a room by himself and thinking up the three-batter minimum from scratch — has been both progressive and cautious in the exact right combination.

Baseball, in addition to being egalitarian in structure, is incredibly resistant to change. Where the NFL and NBA and NHL constantly tinker with their rules in order to dictate the evolution of the sport, MLB has too often acted as if the rulebook had been divinely ordained.

That’s changed under Manfred. His administration expanded and refined the use of instant replay (which was instituted in the waning days of Selig’s tenure, with Manfred as his top lieutenant), limited mound visits and pitching changes, installed a pitch clock, regulated the shift, universalized the DH — and in so doing rebuked decades of laissez-faire governance.

Baseball operations is run by lawyers and business school types now, and those guys make their bones looking for and leaning on loopholes until someone stops them. And sometimes they lean on those loopholes even more. To the detriment of… basically everything in our society. Manfred knows these people because he’s one of them, and the darker parts of his legacy have come from facilitating the loophole-finders’ most avaricious appetites.

But on the field, he’s been unafraid to step in and tell everyone to knock off the funny business and play the game the way it’s meant to be played. More importantly, he and his deputies have had a good feel for when not to push reforms.

For example: We’ve been about two years away from an automated strike zone for about a decade now. Even as griping about umpires has turned into a national pastime in its own right, and exploiting their weaknesses — i.e. catcher framing — has been quantified since the early 2010s, MLB is not rushing ABS to the major leagues if it’s not ready.

Every reform, especially radical ones, gets refined and tested before it’s brought to the majors, from the pitch clock to equipment changes. Knowing that, we can rest easy knowing that while MLB is open to changing the game when necessary, it’s not going to institute something as revolutionary as the Golden At-Bat without having thought the matter through.

And if that’s the case, what’s the harm in spitballing? Why wouldn’t Manfred have an army of nerds sitting around thinking up the most absurd, creative, outrageous ideas they can? Maybe the Golden At-Bat is too heavy-handed, and philosophically profane, but it’s the result of a creative process that puts 10,000 bad ideas on a whiteboard somewhere in order to find maybe 20 that are good enough to trial in the minors. Of those, maybe only two or three will ever make it to the big leagues.

There’s a weed-out process. You know, like the one we have for players.

The Golden At-Bat is a bad idea that would destroy the good thing it’s attempting to create. It runs counter to the values of the sport and would wreak havoc on the record book. The fans have rejected it as gimmickry, and the league should too.

But it was fun to talk about for a few days, and now we can throw it away and see if the next idea has more potential. Eventually they’ll come up with something good.