This is the Rob Manfred era in Major League Baseball. And as such, you’re never totally sure whether to treat an oh-by-the-way comment on a forgotten podcast appearance as a throwaway line, a trial balloon or something the commissioner has already decided will be gospel and soon rubber-stamped by his competition committee.
So it is with the GAB.
That’s the “Golden At-Bat,” a colloquialism that seems to have taken hold even if the rule change bearing that label never does. In short, it would be the most extreme alteration to the game in an era that’s already seen a pitch clock, mandatory minimums for relief pitchers and extra-inning ghost runners.
An overstatement? Maybe. Degrees of change are subjective, of course. Yet the basics of the Golden At-Bat – that a team could, once a game or so, send its best player to the plate regardless of who was due to hit, guaranteeing the stars are up in a clutch situation – rip aggressively at the threads of the sport.
The commissioner: Just kinda tossing it out there
You’d think if Manfred wanted maximum exposure for this idea, he wouldn’t drop it on a podcast that first aired on an NFL Sunday and right as Game 6 of the NL Championship Series got underway. In fact, his Golden At-Bat references on Puck’s The Varsity podcast did not inspire any follow-up from a gaggle of reporters who cornered him a few days later at Game 2 of the World Series.
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The current discourse has been charged by a worthy follow-up from The Athletic, spotlighting Manfred’s assertion that “there was a little buzz around it” at a recent owners’ meeting.
Naturally, the 31 men who hold almost all the power in Major League Baseball are the owners and their designated cudgel in the commissioner’s office. That alone gives the concept at least a little credence, even though items like “contraction” and “St. Petersburg White Sox” generated a little to a lot of buzz in decades past, and didn’t come to fruition.
Yet Manfred chooses his words carefully, and wouldn’t have made reference to the GAB unless it was either a legitimate possibility or a “flood the zone” diversion to potentially pave the way for something else.
Get the guinea pigs ready?
If Manfred takes his cues from Silicon Valley’s most insufferable actors – to move fast and break things, if you will – he at least goes to great lengths to workshop major changes to the game.
The pitch clock, most notably, underwent rigorous testing in the independent Atlantic League, the Arizona Fall League and then the highest level of the minor leagues before it was rolled out at the big league level. The automated ball-strike system is undergoing similar scrutiny and will be deployed in major league spring training for the first time in 2025; the system still needs to vault some technical hurdles before potentially becoming reality.
Yet there’s no easy way to simulate the GAB at the lower levels.
It is a star-based system, one not easily simulated at Class AAA, where the No. 2 or 3 hitter could be a 30-year-old organizational player. Lower levels deemphasize strategy in favor of development even more extremely.
Certainly, the gameplay element of it can be stress tested – such as the weirdness of a Golden At-Bat guy stepping in for the No. 9 hitter, and then batting once again in their next, assigned spot in the order.
But this would be a massive leap with little logistical assurance from trial and error.
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‘And look who’s comin’ up!’
Meanwhile, the Golden At-Bat would lay waste to two of the game’s most endearing and serendipitous qualities:
The wonderful timing of your team’s greatest player (or one of them) coming up in the spot you need him most – not unlike pennant-winning or World Series walk-off turns from Juan Soto and Freddie Freeman just a few weeks ago. Let alone the Joe Carters and Bill Mazeroskis whose home runs literally won a championship. Those moments were meant to be rare – that there’s barely a 10% chance Your Guy will be up in the biggest spot. So much for fate when we can just force-feed the stars at will.
And then there’s the unlikely heroes, that last man on the bench or the virtually forgotten cog who end up folk heroes because their managers had no other choice than to throw them up there in a huge spot.
Francisco Cabrera. Travis Ishikawa. David Freese. Geoff Blum.
Sure, maybe those folks can still have their magical moments if the manager already burned his GAB before their turn at the plate. Yet the possibility that the manager would have kicked them to the curb if he still had the option leaves a gross aftertaste to the whole thing.
What do we tell the kids?
Seriously.
Thousands of players of all ages take their cues from how the game is played at the highest level. At its best, baseball teaches patience, selflessness, teamwork and, on a more basic level, the notion that you need to wait your turn.
Yet what would a 10-year-old think if they learned these virtues from the time they could swing the bat, yet suddenly they see Johan Rojas sent back to the dugout so Bryce Harper can take the most important at-bat of the game?
How many overzealous youth coaches would salivate at the notion of Timmy getting another AB in the bottom of the sixth instead of the proverbial kid picking dandelions in right field? And isn’t Timmy a little coddled, already?
(We digress).
Major League Baseball is not baseball, and baseball is not MLB, though the league and its “One Baseball” pursuits has aimed to seize control of the game at the minor league and developmental levels. The GAB would seem to put the game, as it’s played in the majors, at odds with how it’s played everywhere else in the world.
That doesn’t seem like a good thing.
When does it end?
In a sport desperate to position itself not too far behind the NFL’s exhaust fumes, the GAB feels like a panic move, at best.
Sure, baseball is not dying. Yet many of its 30 owners might make a few first team All-Capitalist squads, what with the manner in which they accumulate wealth and their inherent expectations for growth.
While a solid dozen-plus owners are sitting on billions of dollars in franchise equity, others got into the game a little later. The regional sports bubble did not burst so much as explode, leaving all but about a half-dozen clubs scrambling to reassemble their golden goose.
Manfred has in many ways been their effective change agent, making the game younger and faster while aiming to retain as much of the old media model – and its passive, guaranteed billions of dollars in revenue – while finessing MLB toward a direct-to-consumer playbook.
In October, the league bagged its white whale: A Dodgers-Yankees World Series. Ratings were great. Cultural currency was high, thanks to bicoastal buzz, Shohei Ohtani and Aaron Judge and some fan-interfering louts.
Yet one of these years, the playoff machine will spit out a less forgiving, Brewers-Guardians kind of Fall Classic. Ratings will sag and the station breaks will seemingly feature Patrick Mahomes or Matthew Stafford in every other commercial.
All this as baseball still searches for the clearest path to make its stars truly shine, to get them on the tip of folks’ tongues like Johnny Bench or Willie Mays once were. It’s a noble desire, and the frustration to reach that point understandable.
At some point, though, the game has to stand on its own merits. Everyone gets their turn at bat.
And sometimes the outcome produces somebody else’s new hero, even if they’re not named Shohei or Bryce.
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