Trust Rob Manfred Won’t Screw Up MLB Golden At-Bat Rule
Image credit: Rob Manfred (Photo by Michael Owens/MLB Photos via Getty Images)
If you haven’t heard about the “Golden At-Bat” rule proposal taking the baseball world by storm, here’s a simple summary.
Under the proposed rule, each team would be allowed to choose any one time in a game to bring any player to the plate, even if it’s not his turn in the batting order. So, if Bobby Witt Jr. isn’t set to bat in the ninth inning of a one-run game, the Royals could use their Golden At-Bat to get him to the plate. The idea was first floated by commissioner Rob Manfred in a podcast interview with Puck’s John Ourand, and Jayson Stark has expanded on that suggestion at The Athletic.
While idea that a team could choose to bring up a batter out of the batting order once every game is something that may sound good in the abstract, it quickly falls apart when you look at it more closely.
It’s a complete reworking of the fabric of baseball. It would be a gimmick that would create a multitude of problems for the mechanics of the game. It would be a case where drama is artificially added in a way that tears at the fabric of baseball.
All of a sudden, the game would be massively different. Is an Aaron Judge 80-home run season significant if he gets an extra 160 plate appearances? Is a player hitting four home runs in a game or hitting for the cycle as significant when the artificiality of an extra ninth-inning at-bat is added in? Should the the reward for striking out Shohei Ohtani in a key moment be a second chance to face Ohtani?
It’s a bad idea.
There’s a reason that basketball doesn’t have a magic 20-point spot to make massive comebacks easier. Football doesn’t make onside kicks easy. Baseball has never allowed teams to artificially figure out a way to get the best hitter to the plate in the biggest situation of the game because the minute you do, you’ve made lineup construction and other strategic aspects of the game less important.
Now that we’ve gotten that out of the way, let me state the less popular point: it will never happen.
And while 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.
There are many criticisms that can be lobbed at Manfred. You may hate the way the minors were reorganized. You can bring up the “hunk of metal” comment or point out that he was working on his golf swing the day Opening Day games were cancelled during labor negotiations.
But when it comes to how the on-field MLB product has been handled during his time as commissioner, Manfred’s reign has marked a rather delicate dance of updating and improving the on-field product without damaging or destroying the game.
And that’s why we know that the Golden At-Bat isn’t anywhere near reality. This group at MLB doesn’t make any on-field changes without months or years of trial and error. With the Golden At-Bat, there have been no trials.
MLB has been looking at robo-umps since before the pandemic began. You could see computerized ball-strike calls in the Atlantic League in 2019. It was brought to the affiliated minors in 2021. It’s been tweaked a dozen ways, modified and then reworked again over the past six seasons, and it’s still not been deemed ready for the major leagues. By the time a challenge system reaches the majors, it will be done so in a way that quickly fades into the background, rather than upending the sport.
This is a group that tried bigger bases with an experimental A/B testing approach in the minors before bringing them to the majors. It was a change so barely noticeable that, if you asked the average fan at a Triple-A game whether they were using the standard or bigger bases, almost no one could give you an answer. But even that was trialed for months to make sure it didn’t create any unexpected issues.
Shift rules? MLB tried multiple combinations in the minors over multiple years before they were deemed ready for the majors.
The pitch clock started in the minors in the mid 2010s. All the loopholes, work-arounds and stumbling blocks were seen and tweaked at the MiLB level long before the clock came to the majors. Because of that, when it was rolled out at the MLB level, the introduction was almost seamless, and the clock quickly faded into the background.
Ok, I will acknowledge that the “Manfred Man” baserunner in extra-inning regular season games is a change that has been met with less agreement among fans. But even so, it was something that was first trialed in the minors before coming to the majors.
As we’ve noted before, baseball has more challenges with selling rules changes to its fanbase than almost any other sport. The NBA can add a new way of scoring (three-point line), completely change the way defense is played or add a new in-season tournament, and it’s accepted that the on-court product will always need tweaking. The NFL has effectively outlawed entire aspects of defense and special teams to try to bring needed improvements to player safety.
But in baseball, the decision to go from throwing four pitches wide of the plate to simply signaling a batter to jog to first on an intentional walk was viewed by many as a massive change, because 10 years before, one of those intentional balls got away from a catcher.
That’s not a bad thing. Baseball fans hold tightly to many aspects of the tradition of the game. In some cases, rules need to be added or tweaked to bring the game back into balance. And so far, the changes Manfred and co. have made at the major league level over the past decade can be viewed more as tweaks than massive alterations. Many of those changes actually forced the game back more to the way it was played before.
The pitch clock actually has returned baseball to the pace it lost in the 2000s and 2010s. The shift rules and the three-batters faced rule could also be viewed through those prisms. They brought back a focus on athleticism and reduced the impact of eight-pitcher bullpens. And the rule changes to encourage stolen bases have brought that exciting aspect back to the game after it had largely disappeared.
When it comes to major on-field changes, baseball has largely had a light touch. MLB has looked at bigger changes like moving the mound back. But when they have tried such massive changes—with an experiment in the Atlantic League—they have quickly junked those experiments upon finding the benefits were minimal and not worth utterly altering the game.
The Golden At-Bat would be a massive change to the game. I can hope that it will never come to baseball in any form.
But I can promise this: If such a change ever was to come to MLB, it would be telegraphed years in advance by experiments at other levels. And those experiments would likely find that it’s a change not worth considering any further.
