The Golden At-Bat

I find this general topic fascinating:

Here’s a scene that may be coming to an MLB stadium near you in the not-too-distant future.

It’s the bottom of the ninth at Yankee Stadium. The Yankees are down by a run. There are two outs and the bases are empty. The next hitter is Trent Grisham.

But then, suddenly…Bah gawd! It’s Aaron Judge’s music!

This situation could only play out now if Judge came off the bench to pinch-hit. But there’s a potential new rule in the ether right now, and MLB commissioner Rob Manfred calls it the “Golden At-Bat.”

Under this rule, a team would have one opportunity per game to send any hitter up in any situation. Basically, it’s a pinch-hitter version of a Get Out of Jail Free card. . . .

As one team official told Jayson Stark of The Athletic:

“The world is changing. Look at the way entertainment is consumed now. Look who you’re competing with. Today’s fans have grown up on their phones…They’re used to getting exactly what they want, what they like, what they find engaging and compelling—and they want it now. And they want to watch it for a few minutes and move on. So the Golden At-Bat accomplishes all those things.”

It’s one thing for MLB to want capital-C Content and hope it happens organically. But it seems what MLB really wants is mass production for mass consumption: Bite-sized morsels for social media addicts who subsist on whatever their scrolls provide.

This end simply can’t be achieved without introducing an inorganic ingredient. As such, the Golden At-Bat would be for baseball what Yellow Dye No. 5 is for Twinkies.

From one perspective, sports like major league baseball are simply entertainment, so what objection could there be to attempts to make it more entertaining? Does anybody object, for example, to the new pitch clock? (Answer: No).

But from another perspective, the relentless pursuit of more entertainment conflicts with some other aspects of what I’ve called deep engagement with sports, as opposed to more straightforward consumption of entertainment. I wrote about this in A Fan’s Life:

That entertainment and genuine fandom have almost nothing to do with each other is captured perfectly in a vignette from Fever Pitch, Nick Hornby’s classic memoir of life as a supporter of the Arsenal soccer club.  After a particularly dull match, in which the manager of an opposing club was criticized by journalists for his negative tactics — in soccer talk, “negative tactics” mean those adopted with no consideration whatever for the aesthetic value of producing a match that neutrals might enjoy watching — the manager snarled “if you want entertainment, go and watch clowns.”

The high-brow sporting press naturally had a field day with this comment.  Imagine the director of a big-budget Hollywood extravaganza responding to critics who claimed the movie was boring, not by denying the charge, but by asserting that whether or not a movie was boring was irrelevant to evaluating it! Yet Hornby concludes that the manager was right:  “Complaining about boring football is a little like complaining about the sad ending of King Lear: It misses the point somehow.”  The deeply engaged fan, Hornby notes, goes to games for lots of reasons, but entertainment isn’t one of them.

Put another way, to fail to appreciate that baseball is supposed to be boring most of the time is to miss something fundamental about the game. That boredom is the background frame that makes the rare moments of supreme pitch by pitch tension during, say, the late innings of a close World Series games what they are.

This is, in the end, a question of aesthetic preferences, which aren’t very amenable to the ruthless logic of the Market, which demands always more . . . more stimulation, more excitement, more immediate gratification, more happenings, and less waiting for something to happen.

This is on my mind at the moment because I went to a Denver Nuggets NBA game last night, and was more than mildly annoyed by the horrible-looking speciality court that the teams played on, in order that the audience in person and on TV be aware that the game counted as part of the NBA Cup (ETA: sorry, that’s the Emirates NBA Cup; LGM regrets the failure to note the petro-state sponsorship branding) — a brand-new in-season tournament that the league’s powers that be have just invented, as part of that relentless pursuit of More Entertainment. It turned out to be a tremendously entertaining game, featuring a furious comeback in the final minutes by the home team, with Denver’s superstar center playing the key role, just as Hollywood would draw it up. But the very fact that Hollywood didn’t draw it up made it so much compelling than it would have been otherwise. (I noticed that the scores from other games that night around the league featured a bunch of one-sided. games that must have been radically less entertaining. But again the fact that our game could have been one of those games was a key aspect of our enjoyment of it).

And this goes far beyond sports of course. The imperatives of what has been called limbic capitalism are invading all aspects of economic relations, culture, and even politics. It’s in that context that something as apparently trivial as the Golden At-bat is disturbingly symptomatic.