Golden bats, tiny balls, and everything else you need to know before the Twins sign nobody in free agency.
Because Rob Manfred hates baseball, he’s proposing a “Golden At-Bat” rule. Basically, one time per game, a team could use any hitter on the roster. If the bases are loaded with two outs and your worst hitter is due up, you could use your best hitter instead, even if it’s not his turn in the lineup. The idea is to guarantee more chances for the Aaron Judges and Shohei Ohtanis to shine.
Jayson Stark of The Athletic thinks this is cool. Although managing legend Joe Maddon doesn’t: “The more we see things, the less impact they have … You don’t see Halley’s Comet every night.” Our friend Al Yellon at BCB describes the many ways this proposal is stupid as hell, except maybe in extra-extra innings. McCovey‘s Steven Kennedy makes the philosophical case against it.
Personally, I agree with Joseph Zucker: “At a certain point, adding too many gimmicks to a sport risks alienating diehard followers and you wind up in a cycle where you have to create more ways to court casual observers.”
Exactly. Driving away dedicated fans to attract casual ones is a bad long-term strategy. People only attracted to the newest gimmick will quickly find something else to grab their attention.
Anyways, on to the rest of the Links!
The Twins installed a new home plate recently. Nothing fancy, just a replacement for the old one, they only last so long. Check out this fascinating video about how home plates are prepared for installation. So much dirt-pounding!
Jake Cave, of the Cave For Jakes, will be playing in Korea next season. One of his teammates will be Cole Irvin, of the Many Coles who pitched for the Twins last season. No, really, he did.
The latest in your Shohei Ohtani interpreter story: it seems the guy used part of the money he stole to buy baseball cards. Like, $325,000 worth of baseball cards. That’s it, that’s the story, no real need to click on the link. It’s just amusingly odd. Maybe he was listening to this The Baseball Project song.
This is a thing about how the Dodgers’ deferred salaries actually work, if you’re into that sort of stuff.
It’s hard out there for us sportswriters, few people are making any money. Since the evil parent corporation eviscerated Sports Illustrated, its website is largely staffed by freelancers who don’t make much.
One is local writer Joe Nelson, who hustles like mad to churn out lots of quickie stuff for various sites. (I respect this so much, I hate the writing game, not the player.)
Here’s his quickie take on a atrocious Dwayne Wade NBA statue in Miami; Nelson hopes the Joe Mauer statue at Target Field will be better. The Mauer one is being done by Bloomington artist Bill Mack.
I wrote about Bill Mack back in 2022. He lives in a former medieval-themed restaurant space, has a very stylish mustache, and loves to make artistic nudes. Lots and lots of nudes. Hey, why not?
Andrew Schenker at The Baffler has a good article about how stadiums went from boring, yet extremely inclusive facilities in the post-WWII period to intricate, extremely exclusive facilities today. This is well worth a read. It draws heavily on an interesting book I’m also looking at, The Stadium, by Frank Andre Guridy. Frankly, the division of modern facilities into ever-more-exclusive seating areas makes them really unpleasant, for me. I suppose all y’all are rich and like your premium seats, though, so f**k you.
Schenker’s Substack blog is worth poking around, too. Here’s a solid post about showman/owner Bill Veeck, whose son Mike ran the Saint Paul Saints. Back when they played at an inclusive ballpark I enjoyed, not the premiuim-seat-rich CHS Field. Schenker compares Bill Veeck to P.T. Barnum – and while I personally think Veeck actually liked fans more than Barnum liked his customers, I also think it’s quite fair to call out Veeck for how he sometimes turned truth into tall tales.
Remember those two Yankees fans who grabbed an outfield fly outta Mookie Betts’s glove in the World Series? Well, they had a plan to do this if they got the chance – this wasn’t just a natural “fan tries to catch souvenir” thing like Steve Bartman got unfairly pilloried for. What’s more, the Yankees didn’t ban them from going to the next game.
This is a law professor arguing that baseball should eliminate all seating that puts fans within arm’s reach of plays being made by fielders. Yes, it’s kinda bananas, and makes no sense from a baseball perspective. But he’s a bright guy, so it’s a well-thought-out argument.
The Twins and Rays will be switching around some home dates next season, because the score is Momma Nature 1, Tropicana Field Roof 0. The Rays will be playing outdoors at a minor-league ballpark next year, and reliever Pete Fairbanks said “I’ll be excited to set a record for rain delays in a season.”
How about the next Tropicana Field? You’ll recall how rotten buttbag owner Stu Sternberg had come to an agreement with the local politicos to give him free stadium money and a whole lotta development land. Well, that’s all wacky now! There could be a stadium or maybe there won’t be and maybe Sternberg will move or maybe he won’t. Also, even bigger buttbag John Fisher of the A’s still hasn’t convinced anybody to put up his portion of Las Vegas stadium costs, so all we know for sure is that at least two teams will be playing in horribly weather-inappropriate AAA stadiums next year. Maybe longer!
Apparently some goombahs in Portland, OR, want to bring the Rays there. Since Portlanders are pretty damn opposed to spending taxpayer money on new stadiums (the one they have for soccer is 100 years old, smells like pee, and it sells out just fine), how are the locals supposed to approve of this? By being promised that the stadium will generate so much tax revenue it pays for itself! Which is the same promise always made for every new stadium and it never, ever comes true.
Grist for future baseball owners: Diamond Sports continues to die, and will switch its regional name from Bally Sports to FanDuel Sports, because gambling’s such a lucrative public health emergency! Marc Normandin, though, thinks that once Diamond is fully dead, MLB will get huge money from Netflix or Amazon or whatever.
Another view in sports TV watching: Sudarshan Venkatraman is a fan of the NBA’s Dallas Mavericks. Living in India, it wasn’t always easy for him to watch Mavs games. So he was excited when he began pursuing grad studies in America – surely watching the sports you like is easier in America? He found out this is not the case. I completely sympathize with his dilemma… except that, for baseball, IT’S WORSE.
In happier NBA news, Neil deMause shared a “deep dive into the toilets at the Los Angeles Clippers’ new arena,” a very funny read in The Ringer by Dan Tyler. So, so many toilets!
To poop, ya gotta eat first! Kaitlyn Tiffany at The Atlantic provides a look into all the strange things baseball players do with food. It’s a fun read. Although I wish I’d never clicked on her link showing how Max Scherzer eats sunflower seeds. Once you’ve seen it, you can’t unsee it.
Don’t say I didn’t warn you.
C.C. Sabathia is really into Halloween and spends lots of money on it. We don’t spend lots of money. We have a sad, raggedy old scarecrow we put outside the front door, and a string of Ghost Lights that somebody threw away. But we still get our share of cute kids costumes at the door. And it’s still our favorite holiday, for personal reasons.
Defector’s Lauren Theisen thinks MLB should stop having Pride Nights. Theisen argues that because MLB gladly took tons of money to run extremely transphobic political ads, holding Pride Nights is hypocritical. Wait, MLB being hypocritical? Rob Manfred being a giant soulless creep? Perish the thought!
I don’t give TWO S***S about HOF voting. But FanGraphs’ Jay Jaffe does, and is frustrated at how boring/unimaginative the selections are for old-time players. Jaffe makes a very interesting case for several players who have long been ignored and shouldn’t be. For baseball history buffs, you will absolutely LOVE this article. I don’t care about HOF voting and I liked this article.
Here’s the SABR page on one of the players Jaffe champions, Doc Adams. Who had WAY MORE to do with inventing modern baseball than Abner Doubleday did.
Also from FanGraphs, Davy Andrews asks, which catcher is best at scrunching himself into a tiny ball? Is it Ryan Jeffers? He’s pretty good at it! Lots of images here to help answer this Important Question.
There’s an softball team that uses the Chicago Rat Hole as its logo. If you don’t know of the Rat Hole, it was a piece of sidewalk that a rat (or squirrel) fell into after the concrete had been poured, but not completely dried. So, for decades, the sidewalk had a rat-shaped hole in it. And for one team, “Li’l Stucky” is their logo. If you think I’m not bringing this up every time the Twins play Chicago, you are wrong.
Have a gander at this photo collection of much larger, scarier holes. The top one is at a sports complex outside St. Louis. However, I believe the Twins are stuck in a different hole.
Finally, an Illinois senator is going to introduce a bill that would guarantee all MiLB players get at least whatever the local minimum-wage is. Federal minimum wage is shamefully low at $7.25 an hour; 35 states and several municipalities require employers to pay more. But MLB teams have used sleazy loopholes (like classifying minor-leaguers as “seasonal workers”) to get around minimum-wage laws.
So, a great idea for a good law! Think it has a chance of passing? Ha-ha-ha no. Just like there’s no chance the federal government cracks down on rich baseball owners who are breaking the law by underpaying construction workers. Those lawbreakers are gonna get a free ride for awhile! At least baseball minor-leaguers get fed at work… sometimes.
Is that a cheery note to end on? No. I don’t have anything cheerful for you! Go watch a movie if you want cheering up! And we’ll see you, maybe, later, next time my Baseball Notes page starts getting annoyingly long again.