The Golden At-Bat rule could give MLB a new shine. But is it worth it?
I don’t remember where this theory came from and I’m too lazy to try looking it up, but for years I’ve heard people say that when a headline ends with a question, the answer is almost always no. This is definitely one of those times.
What if a team could choose one at-bat in every game to send its best hitter to the plate even if it wasn’t that guy’s turn to hit? That’s the Golden At-Bat concept in a nutshell.
Say there are two outs in the 10th inning in October. The Yankees and Guardians are tied. Does this ring a bell at all? But in this alternate October universe, it’s not Juan Soto who is due up. It’s, say, Oswaldo Cabrera. Except the Yankees say: No, no, no. We’re going to use our Golden AB here … and send up Soto. Then home run magic happens.“Wouldn’t that have been the (ultimate) Golden At-Bat homer?” one front-office executive mused, as we were talking about this concept. “Can we send Juan Soto up there to do that? He actually did hit that homer in that moment.”
He did. And that’s the goal. So should baseball change the rules to attempt to create more of those moments? That’s the question.
And the answer, as you can probably guess from the first thing I wrote, is a hard damn no from this guy.
I can see why the idea might be appealing. Put the fate of the team in the hands of its biggest star when it matters most. How exciting, right? But the problem is that for you to like this, you have to not like baseball very much as it is. And you also have to not understand why things are exciting in the first place. And you have to not care about the human beings who play and run the game and their relationships with one another.
Ok, so that’s more than one problem. There might even be more, but those are mine.
Baseball is already plenty exciting. A lot of that is because of the unpredictability of it. Remember when pitchers used to hit? That sucked most of the time because many of them didn’t really know how and the universal designated hitter is almost certainly for the best, but how fun was it when one of them took somebody deep? Or how cool is it when some guy fresh from the minors or a guy in a slump or a veteran who struggles to get much playing time comes off the bench and wins a game? Guys have built careers on moments like those. If you enjoy that stuff, this Golden At-Bat thing isn’t for you. If your team has anyone halfway good on it let alone a Juan Soto or a Shohei Ohtani, how many big swings do you suppose the minor leaguer or the veteran is going to get? That aspect of the game is all but dead under this system.
And let’s talk about that veteran. that guy looking to break out of a rut. The one trying to find his place on the team. Sports can often be as much about confidence as they are talent. What is constantly getting sat down when it’s supposed to be his turn doing for his confidence? You can only be told so many times that you suck too much to be relied on before you start believing it. How are you going to learn how to handle a high pressure situation if you never get to handle a high pressure situation?
Even if you’re playing ok, what message does it send to you about your value to the organization if you’re repeatedly being swapped out for someone the manager thinks is better? How many guys are going to quit on the team, ask to be traded away or walk in free agency because they feel disrespected?
This isn’t so great if you’re a star, either. The season is long, and it puts a lot of wear and tear on your body. Should we be asking even more of someone who might already be just barely able to play as it is? Or what if you turn out not to be very good in the Golden spot for some reason? How many times can you swing through an 0-2 fastball and let the team down before it starts messing with you and your play suffers?
You’re going to have a hard time convincing me that none of this will mess with team dynamics. Not just between player and coach, but between the players themselves. You’ll have those who want the others to step up, and then the others who will quite rightly point out that they can’t step up if no one lets them.
But let’s pretend that none of that is going to happen and we can just focus on the positives it would create. How long are those going to last?
A lot of this seems to be about creating big moments to keep modern fans engaged. Maybe I’m the crazy one here, but if you’re at the point of considering fundamentally changing your well established sport for no reason, those aren’t fans you’re chasing. You’re alienating the millions who already watch your offering and enjoy it for the sake of what, exactly? This is completely different from the pace of play stuff like the pitch clock. That made sense. The game has gotten far too slow, to the point that it’s irritating a lot of us who have been watching it for decades. Why not experiment with some rule changes to speed it up? I’ll say that even about the ghost runner on second base in extra innings. I hate that stupid thing, but at least I can understand what it’s trying to accomplish.
But this? It’s not trying to accomplish anything. It’s all about trying to manufacture that which cannot be manufactured in the hopes that somebody somewhere who has never cared will suddenly care and then keep on caring forever. A moment is only a moment because it’s momentary. It comes into being because of a set of twists, turns and circumstances that all line up just so. That’s why it’s exciting. Ohtani and Trout facing off in the WBC is something we don’t see. It was a thing that happened because a rare situation allowed it. If it happened every couple weeks, would we still be talking about it like we do? Or to put it another way, if we had an eclipse every day, would you still bother racing to get your spot at the point of totality each time? Of course not. Things like that are special because of their uniqueness. To force a moment, to whatever extent you can even do that, is to take all of that away. Hopefully, baseball will realize this before it goes too far.
