Time for Calvinball!

 

Rob Manfred is a wimp.

As the Estimable Doug K. explained just now, Manfred is hoping to further transform the game he has all but wrecked already, with yet another sure-fire innovation: the Golden At-Bat.

This is, as Doug noted, the idea that teams would have one at-bat, every game, when they could put their best hitter up, out of lineup order, and let him hit.

As noted, too, this has all sorts of existential implications. If a team decided to intentionally walk Aaron Judge in a late inning, could Aaron Boone still put him up next in a "Golden At-Bat"? Of course he would not, Boone would decide that Alex Verdugo should bat there.

But let's just say he did! What would happen if Judge drove himself in? What would happen if Judge passed himself on the bases? Would that create a rift in the time-space continuum that would hurtle Judge back in time to 1927, when he could hit in the same lineup with the Babe and Lou Gehrig?

Or would he just destroy the entire universe? "We are become meshuga, destroyer of worlds."

                                             Robert Magritte Manfred: "This is not a baseball."

Ah, the agile mind of Rob Manfred, the same genius who gave us the Manfred Man. The same, caring individual who quite willfully wrecked an investigation into people peddling steroids to Florida high-school students, because it gave him the chance to nail A-Rod. Yet another fantastic leader for 21st-century America!

Again, I think he's a wimp.

One measly, golden at-bat? Why not gold, silver, and bronze at-bats? Why not have entirely different teams for offense and defense, the way football does?  And designated runners who will line up next to the batter's box and sprint toward first when the ball is hit?

As Doug astutely points out, this is mainly a treat for gamblers. So why not have a "gamblers' inning," in which they get to vote online as to who should be up?

Or why not just go straight to Calvinball, the brilliant, ever-changing, incomprehensible mash up of rules that Bill Watterson invented for the comic strip, Calvin & Hobbes?

Orrr...

Why not go with an idea I came up with a couple years ago: "Homeball"?

Under Homeball, the home team would get to choose, with no more than an hour's notice, to play the game under the rules of any version of baseball known to have previously existed in this country.

The varieties would be almost endless!

You could play under the rules of the Massachusetts Game, where there was no foul or fair territory and no baselines, hitters could hit the ball behind them, and batters were retired only by hitting them with a thrown, rubber ball. 

You could play the Philadelphia Game, where there were four stakes set around a circle, twenty feet apart, batters hit the ball with a one-handed "delill," and teams played either 11 innings with one out an inning, or a two-inning game in which the entire side of 11 men had to be retired before the inning was over.

Oh, think of the possibilities!

Think something like this won't come about?  

As Bill Watterson said, "Sooner or later, all our games become Calvinball."