When baseball historian Bill Humber first heard about the golden at-bat idea that Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred floated on a recent podcast, he was a little taken aback.
"I kind of laughed, actually," Humber said Wednesday. "I thought it was one of the stupidest ideas I'd ever heard."
MLB has seen its share of change of late, but the thought of a team using one at-bat each game to send any hitter it wants to the plate — even if it's not their turn in the batting order — was quite a curveball.
"This can’t be real," former Blue Jays pitcher and seven-time Cy Young Award winner Roger Clemens posted on social media.
Wild-card playoff tinkering, pitch clocks, shift rules and automatic runners are some of the more significant changes to the game in recent years.
All had varying levels of detractors and the golden at-bat discussion is no different. Critics are eyeing it like a meatball thrown across the middle of the plate.
"It doesn't really fit within the logic of the game in my mind," said Humber, a Canadian Baseball Hall of Famer. "I look upon it quite askance to be honest with you. I don't see the point of it in a way.
"I mean to some extent, the magic of baseball is those unheralded batters who arrive at a situation that one wouldn't have thought that they would ever have been in, and allowing them to bat in place."
Humber cited a number of grand baseball moments that might not have happened if a golden at-bat rule were in effect.
"One can imagine when Bobby Thomson hit his famous home run against the (Brooklyn) Dodgers in 1951, Willie Mays was on deck," he said of the 'Shot Heard 'Round the World' that gave the New York Giants the National League pennant.
"What if they had a golden at-bat and put Mays at bat, maybe he would have struck out or popped up or hit into a double-play or who knows what. There's lots of situations like that."
What about the two famous World Series-winning walkoffs? Would the skippers have used a golden at-bat to get their best pure hitter to the plate?
Bill Mazeroski went deep to give Pittsburgh the Fall Classic in 1960 and Joe Carter's walkoff blast in 1993 gave the Blue Jays their second straight World Series title.
Mazeroski's power numbers were middling while Carter, who led the Blue Jays in homers and RBIs that year, had a mediocre batting average.
"I think the magic of the game are those moments that are unpredictable and yet kind of create some of the joy of the game in our memories," Humber said. " I think this kind of runs afoul of that tradition.
"I'm not a fan, let me say that. But that's not to say it won't happen."
Manfred first mentioned the golden at-bat idea publicly in an interview with John Ourand on Puck's "The Varsity" podcast. The commissioner said the subject came up at a recent owners' meeting.
Retired sportswriter Dave Perkins, who covered the Blue Jays for years over his long career at the Toronto Star, said use of a golden at-bat would be "a travesty."
"On the surface I say it's absolutely stupid and ridiculous," he said. "But a lot of other things I thought were stupid and ridiculous worked their way into the games and they're even OK with me now."
The subject of potential rule changes like the golden at-bat came up when Blue Jays general manager Ross Atkins met with the Toronto chapter of the Baseball Writers' Association of America earlier this week.
"It's interesting to me because we went through so much change over the last couple of years," he said. "Getting to that change was a scratch and a claw and a climb. And then once the change happened, everyone — for the most part — thought, 'OK, that went OK and it seems like there's a better product on the field.'
"So now the dialogue around change is with a much more open mind whether it be players, staff, the exchanges, the ideas, even if they seem very difficult to wrap your head around. They're not getting stiff-armed as much as they were the first go-round."
Scott Crawford, operations director of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, said he prefers a traditional setup where any player can be a hero at any time.
"I like the team aspect of the game where you get your shot," he said. "You can be a No. 8 hitter and you can come up with a big hit and win a World Series and (a superstar like Shohei) Ohtani can strike out."
This report by The Canadian Press was first published Dec. 4, 2024.
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Gregory Strong, The Canadian Press
