Jayson Stark reporting for The Athletic —
So we were listening a few weeks ago when Rob Manfred stopped by the podcast of Puck’s John Ourand and dropped this giant breadcrumb about a rule change that seems like it might be coming someday to a ballpark near you — and a mobile device even closer to you:
“There are a variety of (rule change ideas) that are being talked about out there,” Manfred said. “One of them — there was a little buzz around it at an owners’ meeting — was the idea of a Golden At-Bat.”
What.
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.
No.
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.
Who is running this league, Barry Goldberg?
“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.
I’m out, guys. If we’re contemplating adding rules like this then the game has truly passed me by. The only thing it accomplishes is it frees up six months of my time from trying to watch a semblance of the game I grew up with.