The Golden At-Bat

This one's about a new rule in baseball...

According to an article in last Friday’s Kansas City Star, Major League Baseball is considering a new rule called the “golden at-bat.”

The rule allows a team to put its best player at the plate in crucial situations even if he’s not due up and according to the article it “drew buzz” at the 2024 Owners Meetings, possibly because – in many if not most cases, by and large, hither and yon – Baseball’s Team Owners are a bunch of goddamned idiots. (Man, I am never getting another media pass.)

For example, at one time or another, Baseball’s Team Owners:

• Opposed putting games on radio.

• Opposed putting games on TV.

• Opposed putting lights in ballparks.

And…

• Opposed selling team merchandise.

  

Read Lords of the Realm by John Helyar and it’s clear Baseball’s Team Owners have a long and rich history of being wrong about a wide variety of topics and have yet to learn the lesson that being good at one thing (like selling pizza or being a personal injury attorney or a fruit and vegetable wholesaler…some of the ways MLB team Owners made their original fortunes…and let’s not forget inheriting their wealth) doesn’t automatically mean you’ll be good at running a baseball team.

An important thing you might want to remember:

Buying an airplane doesn’t make you a pilot.

The Ownership Impulse

It has been speculated (and I’m one of the speculators) that a certain type of billionaire is driven crazy by the fact that he can buy and sell pretty much everyone he meets, but everyone he meets doesn’t know that or treat him like the Big Deal he imagines himself to be.

How many people ever heard of George Steinbrenner before he bought the Yankees?

But assuming you have money to burn, buy a sports team and suddenly you’re signing autographs, posing for pictures, getting good seats in restaurants, giving interviews and banging inappropriately-aged women and now everybody knows you’re somebody.

But having billions of dollars and an insatiable need for attention doesn’t automatically mean you know how to run a baseball team and if you want an example we don’t have to look any further than my hometown.

A Highly Selective and Biased History of Team Owners

Google “bad decisions by baseball team owners” and you’ll be offered a cornucopia of articles and the most surprising thing about that is I spelled “cornucopia” right without looking it up.

In a 2011 Business Insider article, previous Kansas City Royal’s Owner David Glass was named the second-most despicable owner in baseball and the article called him “notoriously cheap” and said his first accomplishment after becoming team CEO was slashing the team payroll from $41 million to $19 million, “shamelessly benefitted from baseball’s revenue sharing system” and “focused primarily on profit like he did as CEO of Walmart.”

From all appearances David Glass thought he could run the Royals like Walmart: as cheaply as possible which is great plan if you don’t care about winning ballgames.

I started covering the Royals in 2010 and the late, great former Royals pitcher and TV announcer, Paul Splittorff, once told me he always pulled for Mike Aviles because Mike was one of the players the Royals fucked over by drafting him and then offering him a lousy signing bonus (according to Mike’s Wikipedia page, an “insulting $1,000) and if Mike didn’t want to sign for that, he had to sit out a year.

BTW: Team owners are always crying poverty, but they hide profits like illegitimate children and pretty much nobody – including me – believes them and if they wanted to prove everybody wrong they could open up their books which they refuse to do.

I was told a highly-plausible story about why Glass finally started spending money – the story wasn’t complimentary – but the guy who told it to me would probably rather have his name left out of it, so we’ll move on to…

George Argyros who owned the Seattle Mariners from 1981 to 1989 and, according to the Business Insider article, hated multi-year contracts and signing big-name free agents (which seems a lot like being a music producer, but hating musicians) and being a baseball genius, in 1987 George tried to convince his front office to draft Mike Harkey over Ken Griffey Jr.

The article also credits Bob Short owner/GM of the Senators/Rangers for drafting pitcher David Clyde and ruining his career by rushing him to the Big Leagues.

Jeffrey Loria (Expos/Marlins) hid profits to avoid contributing more money to build the Marlins’ new ballpark.

Peter Angelos, Baltimore Orioles owner, got sideways with manager Davey Johnson over a petty issue (Johnson fined Roberto Alomar for missing a team banquet and exhibition game and Angelos didn’t think Johnson was strict enough) even though the previous season Johnson had led the team to 98 wins and a division title.

This quote from Davey Johnson about his managing style might explain the difference of opinion:

"I treated my players like men. As long as they won for me on the field, I didn't give a flying fuck what they did otherwise."

The argument escalated and eventually Johnson offered his resignation, which Angelos accepted on the same day Johnson was named American League Manager of the Year.

And now a word about all that:

On multiple occasions I have seen team owners visit clubhouses and they always look out-of-place – like the Queen of England visiting a Liverpool slum to see how the peasants live – and whenever their team wins a championship and an Owner has to get up on a podium and accept a trophy, about 92% of them look like they’ve never worn a baseball cap before.

Let’s just say that an Owner that never played baseball, isn’t around the players that much and acts like a Stranger In A Strange Land whenever he visits the clubhouse or stands on a baseball field, would know more than his manager about how to handle the team’s players is highly unlikely.

And speaking of Davey Johnson and Bad Owners, Marge Schott (Number 10 on the list of Despicable Owners and I can’t believe she didn’t rate higher) hired Davey and Davey immediately made the Cincinnati Reds better, but Marge decided to fire him because Johnson was living in sin with his fiancée.

Marge was also the genius who let her St. Bernard run on the field during batting practice which meant Reds players had to shag flies while avoiding stepping in dog shit and let’s not forget Marge’s delightful habit of referring to her Black players as “million dollar (insert N-words)” and presenting herself as a Nazi sympathizer and her annoyance that the Reds swept the Athletics in the 1990 World Series because when they didn’t play games 5, 6 and 7, it cost her money.

Marge also didn’t want to pay for scouts because according to her: “All they do is sit around and watch ballgames.”

https://www.businessinsider.com/top-10-worst-mlb-owners-of-all-time-2011-7

OK, by now you’re thinking maybe some Owners aren’t the sharpest knives on the Christmas tree, but maybe we’re just talking about a few bad apples.

If you’re thinking that, let me remind you that as a group the Owners tried foisting replacement players off on the public during the 1994-’95 strike and got caught colluding (secretly and illegally agreeing to keep salaries down, which is an unfair labor practice) and just to prove they’re slow learners, the Owners got caught doing it three times.

But wait, there’s more.

Owners and Analytics

If you’re a regular reader (good for you and that reminds me that I ought to eat more fiber) you’re already aware that I have problems with some of the effects of analytics on baseball and here’s the Very Short Version:

Generally speaking, analytics promotes the “Three True Outcomes” – walks, home runs and strikeouts – and in a previous essay, I pointed out the Fourth True Outcome; the first three are really boring and fewer and fewer people want to watch them.

Think about it: walks produce a guy jogging down to first base, home runs (while initially exciting for the amount of time it takes the ball to leave the yard) produce a guy jogging around the bases and strikeouts produce a guy walking back to the dugout.

Not exactly scintillating sports viewing and if you think about it (again) baseball highlights are mostly great defensive plays which analytics undervalues.

Nevertheless…

Owners bought in to analytics and a very smart ballplayer once told me why: if you don’t understand what you’re seeing you need a number to explain it and Owners are much more comfortable dealing with college graduates wearing suits and ties, presenting charts and graphs than some old ballplayer who has tobacco juice dribbling down his chin and says “fuck” every third sentence. (Actually, I think I’m underestimating the “fuck/sentence” ratio.)

Unfortunately, the type of baseball analytics promotes is slow and boring and games were getting longer and longer and attendance was going down year after year, but instead of admitting they’d screwed up baseball and maybe they ought to go back to stealing bases and getting balls in play – y’know, actually doing interesting things – they’ve come up with a bunch of new rules (pitch clocks, bigger bases, starting a runner on second base in extra innings) to try to wallpaper over the damage they’ve done to the game they theoretically love.

So Let’s Imitate the Savannah Bananas

The Star article was a little fuzzy around the details, but sounds like MLB may have gotten the “Golden At-Bat” idea from an exhibition team called the Savannah Bananas that does all kinds of goofy stuff to keep fans entertained and if that’s a good source for new sports rules, the NBA should take a close look at the Harlem Globetrotters.

The NBA could start featuring dribbling exhibitions at half court, allowing multiple basketballs on the court at the same time, double dribbles and traveling (wait…they already adopted that last one) and Sweet Georgia Brown should be their theme song and maybe they should start throwing buckets of confetti on fans and actually, this is starting to sound pretty entertaining, but so are all the Fast & Furious movies and those aren’t basketball either.

One Final Low Blow Before I Go

A Big League coach once bitterly observed that the people fucking up baseball don’t actually like watching it all that much; they’re more interested in the numbers (the analytics guys) or the money (the owners) that baseball generates.

A former player who wound up in a front office confirmed that the guys from his team’s analytics office would ignore the game on the field and stare at their laptops instead.

So we’ve managed to develop a system in which people that may not be all that interested in the aesthetic qualities of baseball or understand the game all that well, get to make up the rules it’s played by.

And if the people who have already damaged the game adopt the Golden At-Bat rule, all I can say is you can’t polish a turd, but apparently you can try gold-plating one.