The ‘Golden At Bat’ would not just screw with batter records, it would slow down games and lead to more ponderous managerial chess matches.

Major League Baseball is considering a “Golden At Bat” proposal to allow, once per game (perhaps limited to the trailing team or after the seventh inning) a team to randomly substitute its best hitter, out of turn, for whomever is scheduled to bat. Commissioner Rob Manfred, who is suspected of being behind this sort of thing, told a podcast that “There are a variety of [rule changes] that are being talked about out there. One of them — there was a little buzz around it at an owners’ meeting — was the idea of a ‘Golden at-bat.’  . . . That rule, and things like that, are in the conversation-only stage right now.”

If MLB is serious about addressing this at the source, it should send Manfred to an exorcist, or at a minimum, have him committed to a mental institution.

I gladly confess to being a baseball traditionalist. So, I think, are most people who actually like baseball, a qualification that appears to exclude Manfred. The man who pulled the All-Star Game out of Atlanta to curry favor with Joe Biden and Stacey Abrams personifies the modern business executive who can never decide which he loathes more: his product or his customers. That said, the game has always had rules changes, and I’ve been fine with those changes that seek to restore the game’s historic balance and pacing, such as the game clock or restricting one-batter relief pitchers. Those are things, unlike the loathsome ghost baserunner, that get you more baseball in your baseball game and less sitting around. As Rich notes, the game clock has been a success at reducing game times. But this break from tradition is too much even for him.

What exactly is the problem to be solved by this heresy? Dying interest in the game? 1.38 million people paid to attend Chicago White Sox games this year, featuring a team that lost a modern record 121 games. The game is fine. Too few late-inning comebacks? Did anybody watch the playoffs this year? Sure, relief pitchers have gotten tougher to hit, but most major league teams came from behind to win at least 30 times this season, led by the Dodgers at 43. The Mets alone had eight ninth-inning comeback wins in the regular season. The “Golden At Bat” would not just screw with batter records, it would slow down games and lead to more ponderous managerial chess matches. Roger Clemens makes a key point: “Hypothetical . . . You have bases loaded no outs and Ohtani is up. You strike him out. Then they can just use this rule to let him stay up and I have to face him again?” That drains the drama out of the showdown.

Baseball already changed the rules before to prevent lineup manipulation. In the early game in the 1870s through the mid-1880s, there was no rule requiring teams to announce their batting order in advance; they just had to use the lineup as it unfolded the first time. While teams would typically stick with something like a standard order, a manager who wanted to squeeze the most out of his biggest hitter could hold him back to see when men got on base. The Chicago White Stockings (now the Cubs) perfected this technique when their biggest slugger was also their manager, Cap Anson. As Bill James has written, “Early rules did not require the batting order to be announced prior to game time. Before this was changed in the early eighties, Anson would sometimes wait and see if the first two men got on. If they did not, he would bat; if not, he would wait and hit in the next inning.” While RBI were not an officially kept statistic for much of this period, this helped Anson lead the league in RBI six times in seven years between 1880 and 1886, and average more than one RBI per game in the final three years of that period. In 1886, he drove in 147 runs in 125 games, breaking the prior record by 35.

(Anson’s team generated its share of new rules by this sort of thing. Catcher Mike “King” Kelly once exploited the lack of a specific rule banning substitutions while the ball was in play by popping off the bench with the announcement “Kelly, now catching” in order to snag a popup.)

Baseball has done well by the stability of lineups ever since. As with so many things, traditions and habits have grown up around that practice in the ensuing 138 years and should not lightly be disturbed just because the game would rather try to recruit disinterested non-fans than cater to its actual, existing fan base, which Manfred apparently finds distasteful. He should not crucify baseball on a cross of golden at bats.