Criminal lineup
Indignity Vol. 4, No. 211
ANDY ROONEY 2.0 DEP'T.
No One Needs Baseball's "Golden At-Bat" Scheme
THE MAJOR LEAGUE Baseball team owners have a new idea to sell baseball to people who don't like baseball. Just an idea! The commissioner, Rob Manfred, is calling it the Golden At-Bat. What if, the commissioner reportedly said, at one point in each game, a team could send up whichever player it wants to hit? Forget the batting order—just stick the best hitter in there, to make the game more exciting.
Baseball has been on a spree of tinkering with the rules in the name of making the game more entertaining, which in most cases means speeding up or abridging the game—adding a pitch clock, limiting pickoff throws to first, requiring relief pitchers to face at least three hitters, and, most notoriously, giving each team an automatic runner on second base in extra innings. That last one, by turning an open-ended struggle to score into a sort of penalty shootout, did what penalty-shootout systems tend to do, which was to generate a warp in the natural flow of the game, with new synthetic statistics. The player who had made the last out of the previous inning was, instead of sitting on the bench, awarded a two-base head start on scoring a run. A relief pitcher who gave up a groundout to the right side to advance that runner and then a medium-deep sacrifice fly ball would get charged with a loss.
And now it's time to consider something even phonier. In the Athletic, Jayson Stark laid out the sort of thinking that apparently raised a "little buzz" among the owners in their annual meeting:
How heart-pounding was that [Juan] Soto at-bat in the [2024] ALCS that ended with a homer? How unforgettable was the final at-bat of the 2023 World Baseball Classic, Mike Trout versus Shohei Ohtani?
They made for mesmerizing baseball theater, right? So if you were designing the sport from scratch, would you want more of those moments or fewer? I won’t even answer for you. Just think about it.
Why stop there? What if you could guarantee that Juan Soto would hit the series-winning home run in advance? What if baseball took a page from pro wrestling and scripted those big moments ahead of time?
Instead of WWE, Stark invoked the NFL:
But while you’re thinking, let’s go beyond baseball. If it’s the Super Bowl, Patrick Mahomes is going to have the ball in his hands with 47 seconds to play. Is that a problem? Ho, ho, ho. It’s a reason—THE reason—to watch.
Where to begin? Patrick Mahomes is an extraordinary football player. But the reason he gets the ball in the endgame of the Super Bowl is not because special players deserve special moments, but because he always gets the ball, because he is the quarterback. That is how the sport of football works. No one else on the Kansas City Chiefs can do, or would be asked to do, the things Patrick Mahomes does, but eight other hitters in the Yankees lineup besides Juan Soto may, and do, get hits and score runs. In baseball, everyone takes turns.
Trashing a principle like "everyone takes turns" for the sake of some supposed or imagined boost in entertainment value is so obvious a commentary on contemporary America it's wearying to even say so. Batting has to be a shared effort because failure is built into the game. If you were to give the Golden At-Bat to the most special player on the team, at the expense of all their teammates, the most common result would be that the player would make an out. Fewer than 20 different hitters have ever had a season in which they were more likely to reach base safely than to make an out.
By chance, this year, the Baltimore Orioles got the equivalent of a Golden At-Bat. With the team's entire postseason on the line—bottom of the ninth, two out, trailing the Kansas City Royals 2–1 in the game and 1–0 in the best-of-three wild-card series—the lineup happened to turn so that their best player, Gunnar Henderson, came up. He struck out. I'd already nearly forgotten about it. But I'll go to my grave remembering that Tito Landrum hit the go-ahead home run in extra innings to beat the Chicago White Sox in the 1983 American League Championship Series.
Baseball is interesting as a sport because, the way the odds are stacked, no one knows when the important moment is going to be, or who is going to get it. Stark focused on the time Mike Trout faced Shohei Ohtani with the World Baseball Classic championship on the line because Mike Trout and Shohi Ohtani are two of the maybe four baseball players the general public has ever heard of, and possibly not even really Mike Trout, if you ask.
It was not Ohtani who won the World Series MVP when his Los Angeles Dodgers beat the New York Yankees this fall. It was Freddie Freeman, the third-best player on the team, who demolished the Yankees from start to finish, starting with a game-ending grand slam in the series opener. And that homer was so sensational, it sent everyone back to the most dramatic home run in L.A. Dodgers history, by Kirk Gibson in the 1988 World Series—when Gibson hit the game-winner off the untouchable Dennis Eckersley in Game One, sending the Oakland A's spiraling to a five-game loss.
It was Gibson's only plate appearance in that World Series, because he was so hurt he could barely walk. His legs almost went out from under him with the effort of swinging earlier in the at-bat. The only reason he dragged himself to the batter's box in the first place was that the Dodgers were out of options. If the Golden At-Bat had been available, the Dodgers would have left Kirk Gibson on the bench, and, with the righty Eckersley on the mound, most likely would have gone with John "T-Bone" Shelby instead.
WEATHER REVIEWS
New York City, December 1, 2024
★★★★ The first person in view out on the street wore a long deep-red padded coat and earmuffs, and was holding a hot beverage cup. A cyclist labored up the slight grade in a heavy gray plaid cloth coat. The ginkgo on the corner had done its leaf-drop at last, leaving a gold carpet on the sidewalk and the top of the sidewalk shed and the roof of a grubby white van. A block away, a rubber tree was losing its still-green leaves. The sky was a soft blue. The sun skimmed the sidewalk, silvering the path toward downtown and showing off paw prints in the concrete. The new parka didn't have a real handkerchief in the pocket yet, so a packet of packets of tissues went into the shopping basket with the groceries.
EASY LISTENING DEP'T.
HERE IS TODAY'S Indignity Morning Podcast.
Tom Scocca
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TOM SCOCCA
ADVICE DEP'T.
GOT SOMETHING YOU need to justify to yourself, or to the world at large? Other columnists are here to judge you, but The Sophist is here to tell you why you’re right. Direct your questions to The Sophist, at indignity@indignity.net, and get the answers you want.
SANDWICH RECIPES DEP'T.
WE PRESENT INSTRUCTIONS in aid of the assembly of a sandwich selected from Entertainment Cook Book: Recipes by Students of Central College for Women, Lexington, Missouri, compiled by Lexington Central College Club, Mo. Central College for Women, published in 1919 and available at archive.org for the delectation of all.
RIBBON SANDWICHES
To get the ribbon effect, cut the bread lengthwise. Spread a slice of bread with a filling made of mayonnaise mixed with cheese and chopped pimentoes. Then another slice, using chopped green peppers instead of pimentoes, with the above filling. Place the white next to the red, then the green next to the white. Cut in strips a finger length long and an inch wide. Has a very pretty effect. — Mrs. Sallie Duling Russell, Lexington, Mo.
If you decide to prepare and attempt to enjoy a sandwich inspired by this offering, be sure to send a picture to indignity@indignity.net.
