The 100-Homer Hitter

A final consideration of this year's most significant moments.

One last thing from 2024: the commissioner briefly floated the possibility of a so-called Golden At-Bat rule, which would let teams choose one moment per game to send up anyone in the lineup, regardless of which hitter is actually due up.

Implementation wasn’t imminent, public reaction ranged from tepid to hostile, and commissioner Manfred subsequently distanced himself from it, clarifying that he wasn’t in favor of it, just passing along an idea that some owners had buzzed about. To put myself on the record: I thought it was corny. I love rules changes, even gimmicky ones in theory, but as presented this one clunks. The phrase “Golden At-Bat” is embarrassing to say.

But I can also make a case that it would serve a purpose, and it’s not the case I saw anybody else making.

The stated purpose of the—I won’t say that phrase again; I’m going to call it a wild card batter—the stated purpose of a wild card batter is to set up dramatic moments involving star hitters in high-pressure situations. I think the idea, with that purpose in mind, would fail on two levels:

1. These dramatic moments already happen all the time. One-ninth of the biggest moments already involve the best hitter on the team; and, really “best hitter on the team” is subjective and could easily be applied to two, three, four stars per club. Further, “biggest moment in a game” often more or less repeats immediately. (First-and-third, one out, down by one in the ninth inning is a huge moment in a game. And if the batter walks, singles, strikes out, pops out, doubles—the subsequent moment is essentially just as big.) So situations where somebody like Juan Soto is batting with something like a 3.00 leverage index are already pretty common. You’re not actually creating anything special, you’re not saving the game.

2. To the degree that there are truly special moments in baseball—Trout vs. Ohtani, two outs in the bottom of the ninth in a close championship game—it’s almost impossible to imagine the wild card hitter still being available for the situation. As Russell Carleton wrote at Baseball Prospectus, the incentives would lead teams to use this batter in high-run-value situations whenever they occur, even if that’s the first or second inning. They would rarely save the batter for the ninth or extra innings, revisionist fan fiction aside.

So, as Joe Maddon asked, in an Athletic article, “Who are we trying to serve with this? And what is the purpose of the whole thing?”

Well, to me it’s obvious. We’re trying to serve stars, and the purpose (good or bad) would be to break some records.

Photo by Jeffrey Hayes, via Wiki Commons.

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In 2022 Aaron Judge hit 62 home runs. If he got a wild card at-bat almost every game (as he presumably would), and you pro-rate those home runs out for another, say, 130 plate appearances, it would put him at 74 home runs. A record.

In 2024, Judge drove in 144 runs. He was teammates with Juan Soto, and thus might not have been the wild card batter every game. But give him 81 extra plate appearances, and assume all of them come with multiple runners on base. Judge, on average, drives in .58 runs per plate appearance with multiple runners on base. That’s ~47 extra RBIs, or 191 total. The single-season record is currently 191.

The longest hitting streak in my lifetime is 39 games. By my math, giving a great hitter one extra plate appearance per game would make a 56-game hitting streak roughly as likely as a 39-game hitting streak is now. Fifty-six is the record.

The most home runs anybody has ever hit in a game is four. There have been only four plate appearances in history where a batter was swinging for his fifth home run. But if every great hitter got one extra plate appearance per game, I’d bet we see our first five-homer game within a half-century.

Now, it would be obvious what’s happening if these records were broken, these streaks were accomplished. The rules would have been changed in a way that gives modern players way more chances to break records than their predecessors. If we lived in a world where records were already being broken—or even challenged—I’d agree with you that this would be a distortion, even an abomination.

But records are already, er, broken. We live in the post-record era. I once wrote about the 20 highest-profile AL/NL records that can be set in one year (single-season records, single-game records, and long streaks), and I assessed their likelihoods of being broken. The best bet is probably that no active player will ever break any of these records.

The best we can hope for are “records” of things that have only been measured for a few years (e.g. “barrel percentage,” “pitch velo in the Statcast era”), or “records” of era-adjusted index stats (e.g. Luis Arraez’ BA+) or else fun facts, the very very very VERY best of which can sometimes be elevated into records (e.g. probably not Acuña’s 40/70 but yes Ohtani’s 50/50).

These are the only records on my list of 20 that have been broken this century:

Ichiro broke the single-season hits record. Pure and unambiguous. Of course, he only did it because the season is eight games longer than it was when George Sisler had set the previous record; Ichiro took until his team’s 160th game to pass Sisler, and the 160th game previously didn’t exist. He got to bat 70 more times than Sisler did.

Francisco Rodriguez broke the single-season saves record. This is the most recent record on my list that has been broken. Unsurprisingly, it’s for the statistic that has the shortest existence. Furthermore, it’s for a statistic that almost perfectly correlates to opportunity. As I put it in that article: “The history of the save record is really the history of the save opportunity record.” At least the last four pitchers to set the single-season saves record¹, going back to 1983, all also simultaneously broke the single-season save opportunities record.

Barry Bonds broke the single-season home run record and the single-season OBP record. The league basically considers these a blight on history, so much so that Bonds—maybe the greatest hitter of all-time!—was eligible but rejected for the Hall of Fame, after being essentially blacklisted by teams unwilling to sign him. Bonds’ records represent an entire era that the average fan considers distorted and despicable.

So those are the high-profile records that have been broken in the past quarter century. One was made possible by a longer schedule (more opportunity). One was made possibly by a new stat (and role) being invented 100 years into the league’s history. One was set under the influence of illegal steroids, and the league would presumably love to see it erased.

Meanwhile, most records never get challenged at all, and it’s not because players were better in the old days. In many/most cases it’s because there were structural advantages those players had—the rules of the game², the way the game was played³, the shapes and sizes of ballparks⁴. Some records were set before gloves had webbing; some were set when relievers didn’t exist. More significantly, a lot of AL/NL records exist because for about 80 shameful years the leagues were rigged to benefit white players. We don’t cry for George Sisler.

When records are challenged, there is often a tendency to look for the advantages the challenger has—oh, he plays in Coors Field, oh, the season is longer, oh, he mighta done steroids. All reasonable things to cite. But every record breaker had advantages over future challengers, too. Records outside of an era are always suspect, none of them is precious, things have always changed, the game is already unrecognizable.

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But if we give Aaron Judge 150 extra plate appearances, nobody will respect his records.

Oh, sure. Seems logical. Except:

When I was working on the What’ll Be Remembered pieces, I consulted with four wise associates. Craig Goldstein and Patrick Dubuque, a 7-year-old named Miles who hosts the Little Slugger podcast⁵, and a valued reader named Alex who has given me good feedback on this topic over the years. There was lots of disagreement, except on one point:

Unanimously, the best answer was deemed to be Shohei Ohtani, with a special emphasis on his 50/50 season.

Which is an accomplishment made possible by substantial rules changes in 2023 that made basestealing way easier. There’s no way Ohtani—a somewhat fast guy—steals 50 bases without those rules changes. The year before the rules changes, the league leaders stole 41 and 35 bases. The year after the rules changes, the league leaders stole 73 and 67. The league changed the rules in a big, obvious way; players’ stats got way inflated; we all understood the mechanism at work; and we all still loved it. Everybody agrees Ohtani’s (rules-inflated) stolen bases will be remembered long after we’re all dead.

(And for that matter, his “greatest game of all-time” game on Sept. 19 included three homers and 10 RBIs—the last homer and three RBIs of which came against a position player pitching, which a) didn’t really exist as a practice before about 15 years ago and b) is clearly not real baseball. For the most part, nobody cares. I didn’t care, I don’t care. The homers and RBIs got real as soon as they were on the page.)

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My point in writing this is not actually to argue that Shohei Ohtani needs to break more records. It’s this: