Golden battiness

 I am no strict baseball constructionist, that species of fan who thinks the designated hitter marked the dawn of civilization's fall. But neither am I a baseball agnostic.

In other words, I'm fine with the DH. I'm also fine with the pitch clock, and limiting pitching changes, and all other tweaks baseball has added recently to speed up its numbing stem-winder plod.

Those changes have shaved a considerable number of minutes from the average length of a game -- a good thing here in the go-go 2020s. We may pine occasionally for what we imagine was the more leisurely pace of the good old days, but that doesn't mean we want our baseball games to outlast entire epochs in the march of time.

Three-and-a-half, four hours to play nine innings is too much foot-dragging even for nostalgia buffs like me. Get on with it already.

However. 

However, some things are just too contrived even for the Blob's relatively enlightened stance.

Abolishing the shift, a legitimate defensive strategy since Moses was throwing his two-seamer, crosses a line that shouldn't be crossed, in my opinion. Ditto the "ghost runner" employed now in extra innings, because I think if a man is out there standing on second base, he should damn well have better done something to get there.

Even that, however, is not as egregious an affront to the game as the latest gimmick being tossed around in baseball's boardrooms: The Golden At-Bat.

In essence, the Golden At-Bat would be a one-time-only maneuver that would allow a team to insert a designated hitter into the batting order whenever it felt like it. In other words, if the Dodgers were trailing by a run or two in the bottom of the ninth, it could send Shohei Ohtani to the plate no matter who was next in the order.

Theoretically, this means Ohtani could get two at-bats in a row. Imagine the nightmares an opponent's closer would have about that.

And, sure, I get the appeal. The Golden At-Bat would add a whole new layer of strategy to a game whose strategy has always been one of its draws. When does manager "Biff"  Biffington use his Golden At-Bat? Does he save it for the later innings? Or, if his team jumps out to a lead, does he use it earlier in hopes of putting the game out of reach?

Inquiring minds would want to know. Well, not really, but we can pretend.

Now, I'm not going to go all cranky old guy here and wonder what some of the old timers would have thought of all this. The old timers thought moving on from the deadball era was too radical a move. So we already know they're turning the air blue somewhere in the Great Beyond.

(Although, honestly, Ty Cobb and the Babe maybe even Honus Wagner might have liked the idea of the Golden At-Bat. As long as they were the Golden At-Bat, of course)

No, what I'm going to do instead is say baseball wants to be very careful about gimmickry like the Golden At-Bat. They're treading perilously close to a place where baseball becomes not baseball but some loony mix of the WWE, Hollywood Squares and a carnival midway. 

Now batting as the Designated Celebrity, Charles Nelson Reilly! He'll be swinging a giant plastic bat at a beach ball thrown by ace closer Ace Closer, who'll simultaneously try to guess Charles Nelson's weight!

And you thought the '24 White Sox were a joke.