The Dictatorship
MLB’s ‘Golden At-Bat’ idea would alter baseball for the worse
Count me as one of those long-standing baseball fans who support every rule change of the past few years.
Baseball purists pooh-pooh these changes, but as far as I’m concerned, they’ve made the game exciting.
The pitch clock? Love it! It’s shortened games and ended the interminable at-bats that turned baseball into three- to four-hour marathons. Getting rid of the infield shift ended the ridiculous situation in which a second baseman was perched halfway in the outfield. The universal designated hitter (DH) is an unqualified improvement because no one really wants to watch a pitcher feebly try to make contact with a 98 mph fastball. Without the DH in the National League, we wouldn’t have gotten to see Shohei Ohtani’s epic MVP-winning season for the Los Angeles Dodgers.I even like the extra-innings ghost runner, because as much as baseball purists might love free baseball, nobody needs to sit through a meaningless regular season game as it stretches into the 14th inning.
Baseball purists pooh-pooh these changes, but as far as I’m concerned, they’ve made the game exciting.
There is, however, a limit, and Major League Baseball has reached it with the so-called Golden At-Bat.
What is the Golden At-Bat? It’s an idea that MLB commissioner Rob Manfred floated in a podcast interview last month, which would allow a team to choose one at-bat in every game and send its best hitter to the plate — even if he was already in the lineup and it wasn’t his turn to bat.There’s a word in Yiddish to describe an idea this bad — ferkakta. As in “this is the most ferkakta idea ever proposed for baseball, and it needs to die a quick and immediate death.”
The rule changes mentioned above worked because they are largely consistent with the history and traditions of baseball. Defensive shifts penalized pull hitters and fundamentally changed the game. Ending them returned the game to how it’s been played for much of its history.
Clock timers might be inconsistent with a game that has long differed from other sports in that it has no timer. (Though it has had a “pitch timer” rule on the books since 1901it was never truly enforced.) But it didn’t change the fundamental character of the sport — and in key respects, it reined in the excesses of the last few decades, when hitters dragged out at-bats forever to tire starting pitchers and pitchers, in turn, interminably fidgeted between pitches.
There’s a word in Yiddish to describe an idea this bad — ferkakta.
Baseball has also never been immune to rule changes that improved the quality of the game or created more offense. In the late 1960s, after years of dominant pitching, MLB lowered the mounds, shrank the strike zone and began cracking down on doctored pitches to increase offense and make the game more exciting for fans. In the near term, it worked (though expansion likely played a crucial role, too).Recent changes like clock timers, a limit on pitchers’ throwing to first base to keep potential base stealers close, the universal DH and increasing the size of the bases to encourage stolen bases were all efforts to help hitters and make the game more exciting for fans. After all, baseball isn’t just a sport — it’s a consumer product, and keeping the customer happy and engaged and returning to the ballpark is no small consideration.
But these changes — with arguably the exception of the DH — were also consistent with baseball traditions. None of them fundamentally changed the way the game is played.
A Golden At-Bat is different: It runs counter to the history and ethos of baseball. Allowing a player to leapfrog his teammates and come to the plate in a high-leverage situation has no precedent in baseball history. It’s a bastardization of lineup construction and the batting order, which are fundamental strategies that teams have honed for more than a century.
Imagine this scenario: It’s the bottom of the ninth inning, one out, the Dodgers are down by a run, and the scheduled batter, Ohtani, comes to the plate. He strikes out, but because there’s one out and the Dodgers haven’t used their Golden At-Bat, he gets to bat again! Or what if Ohtani makes the last out of the eighth inning but gets to come back in the ninth to bat again? There’s nothing in baseball history that presages a situation like that. If baseball allowed Golden At-Bats, it would fundamentally change the character of the sport.
Perhaps more than any of the four major sports, baseball is a team game. In football, the squad with the best quarterback usually prevails. The same goes for the team with the best player in basketball and the best goaltender in hockey. Obviously, these are team sports, too, but in all three, the best players have a disproportionate impact on the outcome. The same is sometimes true in baseball, but America’s pastime is more the sum of its parts than other sports — and the idea of a Golden At-Bat contradicts that fundamental notion.Former manager Joe Maddon noted in a piece at The Athletic by Jayson Stark, “There’s no way you can convince me that you’re going to take this (non-star) part of the team and kind of make them moot in tough situations. When a team succeeds in these circumstances (and the non-stars come through), it really builds a lot within the group.”
The best question about the Golden At-Bat, however, is what problem is this proposal solving? Proponents argue that it will create viral moments in which the best hitter faces the other team’s best pitcher — like the conclusion of the 2023 World Baseball Classic when Ohtani, as a pitcher, faced off against his then-Los Angeles Angels teammate Mike Trout.
But baseball has plenty of these viral moments, with future Hall of Famers and no-name stars.
Think about some of the greatest moments in baseball playoff history — and the unsung and unexpected heroes who saved the day.
The best question about the Golden At-Bat is what problem is this proposal solving?
In 2016, it was light-hitting Cleveland outfielder Rajai Davis cracking a game-tying home run off of the Chicago Cubs’ closer extraordinaire, Aroldis Chapman, in Game 7 of the World Series. In 2020, seldom-used Tampa Bay Rays outfielder Brett Phillips knocked in the game-winning run against the Dodgers in Game 4 of the World Series. St. Louis Cardinals fans will never forget David Freese, who hit the game-winning home run in the bottom of the 11th inning to send them to Game 7 and a World Series victory.In 1992, third-string catcher Francisco Cabrera hit the game-winning single to send the Atlanta Braves to the World Series — in what to this day is one of the most exciting moments I’ve ever seen in a baseball game. Does anyone remember Steven Pearce? Boston Red Sox fans do. He was the hero of the 2018 World Series, with three home runs, and he was named series MVP.
Then there is former New York Yankees infielder Bucky f—ing Dentthough the less said about him and the 1978 American League East one-game playoff, the better.
What about the 2024 playoffs? Sure, future Hall of Famer Dodgers first baseman Freddie Freeman hit an epic grand slam in Game 1 of the World Series, but who can forget Cleveland Guardians Jhonkensy Noel’s towering game-tying home run in the American League Championship Series? The fact that he was a relatively unknown player, stepping up in the most crucial of playoff situations, made the moment that much greater.
I’m not some crusty purist who thinks baseball should be played like it was when Ty Cobb or Joe DiMaggio were running the bases. Like any sport, baseball must evolve and shouldn’t get stuck in its hidebound traditions. But it also shouldn’t descend into gimmickry, and that’s what the Golden At-Bat would represent. Change baseball for the better, but don’t turn it into something it’s never been.
Michael A. Cohen is a columnist for BLN and a senior fellow and co-director of the Afghanistan Assumptions Project at the Center for Strategic Studies at the Fletcher School, Tufts University. He writes the political newsletter Truth and Consequences. He has been a columnist at The Boston Globe, The Guardian and Foreign Policy, and he is the author of three books, the most recent being“Clear and Present Safety: The World Has Never Been Better and Why That Matters to Americans.”
President Donald Trump is giving fragile U.S.-Iran diplomacy “some space” before deciding whether to resume strikes, United Nations Ambassador Mike Waltz said Sunday.
Hours later, however, Trump posted images to social media depicting the U.S. attacking Iran.
Waltz also dismissed concerns over the United States’ diminished munitions stockpiles, even as he conceded that “a lot” of weapons have been depleted, which he said was because of the Russia-Ukraine war and fighting with the Houthis.
“I want to be crystal clear: The U.S. military — and I’ve verified this every which way — has everything that it needs to conduct this campaign as effectively as it needs to be,” Waltz told NBC’s “Meet the Press.”
Waltz’s comments came on the second consecutive day of paused fighting between the United Sates and Iran amid reports of a dwindled U.S. stockpile of Patriot antimissile interceptors, among other munitions.
The New York Times reported Sunday that the depletion of interceptor stockpiles is among the reasons why the administration is wary of resuming major combat operations in a war launched without congressional authorization and which has grown exceedingly unpopular.
But Waltz underscored that the pause in fighting is to allow for an opportunity for peace — not because of an insufficient weapons supply, and warned that those leaking information to the press about the U.S. not having sufficient weaponry “deserve to be in jail.”
“What the president is doing right now, as we’ve seen all along, is giving some talks some space. Talks are ongoing,” Waltz told NBC. “They’re happening at every level, from the more technical aspect of it all the way to the highest levels, of course, within both the Iranian government and the U.S. government.”
He reiterated in an appearance on CBS News’ “Face the Nation” that Trump “is giving diplomacy a chance.”
But even after Waltz publicly touted giving peace a chance, Trump posted several AI-generated images on Truth Social Sunday afternoon depicting the U.S. striking Kharg Island. In one imageTrump is standing on the deck of an Iranian oil tanker with an American flag in hand.
Trump met with top aides on Friday to weigh escalating military action against Iran, according to a senior White House official. On Saturday, the president told a French journalist that he is “absolutely” considering resuming full-scale war with Iran if the U.S. doesn’t “get 100% of what we want.”
Waltz declined to give a timeline for when the war would end.
Meanwhile, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu said Sunday that if Iran plays any role in attacking Israel, it would be making a “terrible mistake” and that the response would be “very forceful.”
“If Iran attacks Israel – either directly or through proxies, either with ballistic missiles or UAV [Unmanned Aerial Vehicles]’s or killer drones — it will make a terrible mistake,” he said on Fox News’s “Sunday Morning Futures.”“Because our response, Israel’s response, will be very, very forceful.”
Netanyahu, who launched the war with Iran jointly with Trump on Feb. 28, is set to meet with his U.S. counterpart at the White House on Tuesday, the same day he’s scheduled to attend the funeral of the late Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C.
Jake Traylor and Emily Hung contributed to this report.
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
BERLIN (AP) — The suspect in the deadly Berlin Pride attackthat left one person dead and 29 injured was shot and killed by police during a confrontation on Sunday in a suburb of the city, authorities said.
Abdul Ballout, a German citizen with Lebanese roots, was killed following a search that lasted nearly 24 hours after the attack in downtown Berlin. Prosecutors said he had previously sought to join the militant Islamic State group.
Ballout was suspected of driving a van into a crowd near Berlin’s Pride festival Saturday night before apparently stabbing others with a machete in what authorities believe was an Islamic extremist terror attack.
“Everything we see here points to us dealing with an Islamic terror attack,” Interior Minister Alexander Dobrindt said.
Dobrindt put the total number of wounded at 29. The attack occurred a few hundred meters (yards) from a party near the Brandenburg Gate that was supposed to close out the city’s Pride festival.
Ballout was born in Germany, the minister said. His mother was naturalized in 2002, three years before he was born.
Ashley Jump, a 26-year-old U.K. resident, had traveled to Berlin for Saturday’s Pride parade but had left the celebrations before the attack. They returned Sunday to leave flowers at a memorial near the crime scene in support of the LGBTQ+ community.
“They’ll never erase us, we’ll never be gone,” they said. “As long as humanity has existed, we’ve existed. And as long as humanity exists, we will exist. We will not be removed.”
Suspect convicted of ties to Islamic extremism
Ballout traveled to Lebanon in 2025 with the goal of going to Syria to join the Islamic State group, Berlin prosecutors said Sunday.
There, he made contact with several people who were presumed members of the militant group — or at least he believed them to be, prosecutors said. He was arrested in Lebanon last year and sentenced by a military court to three months’ imprisonment for offenses including incitement to religious and sectarian conflict.
He returned to Germany after completing his sentence, where he was arrested at the Berlin airport.
In May, a juvenile court in Berlin convicted Ballout of preparing a serious act of violence endangering the state, as well as publishing Islamic State propaganda on his Instagram account and other charges, prosecutors said.
The court handed down a suspended sentence of 1 year and 10 months in youth custody, which Berlin prosecutors have appealed.
The court said it took Ballout’s months of pre-trial detention in Germany and Lebanon into account. It also said it considered that Ballout had confessed to the crimes, appeared to distance himself from the militant group and no actual threat had ever materialized.
He was released from detention pending the appeal.
Berlin’s Pride festival is one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+ celebrations
According to police, a white van drove into the Tiergarten park around 10 p.m. and hit several people before colliding with a tree. The closing party at the Pride festivalknown as Christopher Street Daywas ongoing at the time next to the Brandenburg Gate, a short distance away. The party followed a parade with some 80 trucks that had made its way through downtown Berlin earlier in the day.
The attack did not occur at the festival, along its route or at the closing party. Rather, the violence took place a few hundred meters (yards) away on a track in the Tiergarten park. The van drove into a crowd that was likely a mix of festivalgoers and other locals or visitors.
Police said a woman was killed.
On Sunday afternoon, hundreds of mourners gathered at a memorial at the iconic gate. They hugged each other and laid down flowers, candles, rainbow flags and homemade signs, including a cardboard one that said: “the only thing more powerful than hate is love.”
Hundreds of thousands had come to Berlin to celebrate on Saturday, though it’s unclear how many were still at the festival by late evening. It’s one of Europe’s largest LGBTQ+celebrations.
“We are simply stunned by what happened,” said Andre Lehmann, a top official with the main national LGBTQ+ association, LSVD+. “This suspected attack hits the heart of the queer community.”
Amsterdam says it will celebrate freedom in the wake of Berlin attack
Chancellor Friedrich Merz vowed that law enforcement would find the suspect.
“I would like to say this to Christopher Street Day participants here in Berlin but also across Germany: Don’t let yourselves, let us not let ourselves, be intimidated,” he said. “These acts have only one purpose: They aim to divide our society. They want to take away from us the most important thing we have: Namely our openness and our freedom.”
Dobrindt said he expected security measures at other major events in Germany, including Pride events elsewhere, to be reviewed and if necessary significantly strengthened.
Berlin has seen Islamic extremist attacks before. In December, 2016, a rejected asylum seeker from Tunisia plowed a hijacked truck into a Christmas marketkilling 13 people and injuring dozens. He was killed days later in a shootout in Italy.
In February last year, a Spanish tourist was stabbed and seriously wounded at Berlin’s Holocaust Memorial, an attack that saw a Syrian man convicted in March and sentencedto 13 years.
This week, Amsterdam will be hosting World Pride alongside its own annual Pride celebrations. Mayor Femke Halsema said authorities and organizers “are closely monitoring the security situation” after the Berlin attack but aim to prevent any extra measures getting in the way of celebrating freedom and love.
Katy Perry lambasted the Trump administration over the weekend for using her song “Firework” in one of its social media videos about U.S airstrikes on Iran.
The pop star said she was “deeply appalled and angry” over the use of her song in a White House TikTok video featuring bombs exploding set to Perry’s 2010 hit — specifically featuring her lyrics “boom, boom, boom.” A caption on the video, which has more than 6 million views, reads: “Iran has been warned.”
“I did not approve this, I was not asked, and I absolutely do not condone it. I wrote this song to be an anthem of hope, healing, and inner strength for people going through their darkest personal moments,” Perry wrote in an X post on Saturday. “To see a message of self-worth and upliftment weaponized to soundtrack destruction and violence is a complete violation of everything my song stands for. My music is for bringing people together, not celebrating warfare.”
White House aide Kaelan Dorr responded to Perry, saying“This you?” He posted Perry’s own military-themed music video of her song “Part of Me,” in which she’s dressed in combat uniform.
Perry, who is in a romantic relationship with former Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, is among many other prominent artists who have rebuked the Trump administration for using their music in videos on official accounts.
Kesha publicly admonished President Donald Trump’s administration in March after the official White House TikTok account used her song “Blow” in another video about military action. “Stop using my music, perverts,” she said on X.
The Filipino American pop star Olivia Rodrigo expressed outrage at the Trump administration after it used her song “All-American Bitch” last fall in a video threatening deportations. She responded to the Department of Homeland Security at the time, saying, “Don’t ever use my songs to promote your racist, hateful propaganda.”
While the video is still visible, Rodrigo’s music has been removed.
And last December, Sabrina Carpenter condemned the administration for using her song “Juno” in a video about immigration arrests, which she called “evil and disgusting.”
“Do not ever involve me or my music to benefit your inhumane agenda,” the singer wrote at the time.
Ariana Grandealso posted on her Instagram story last September criticizing the administration over its immigration policyanti-LGBTQ+ messaging and alleged censorship. In response, White House Deputy Press Secretary Kush Desai told her, “Save your tears,” a reference to one of her songs. Last month, after the White House used her song “Bye” in an anti-immigration video on TikTok, she commented“Please do not ever use my music in relation to this barbaric, inhumane, heinous nonsense.”
Trump has repeatedly lashed out at Taylor Swift. The White House poked fun at the mega star earlier this month when shemarried Kansas City Chiefs player Travis Kelce at Madison Square Garden. Its official X account posted photo-shopped images of the venue’s billboards blaring, “TRUMP IS YOUR PRESIDENT.” After she endorsed his opponent, Kamala Harris, in the 2024 election, Trump wrote, “I HATE TAYLOR SWIFT!”
Last year, Trump went after Bruce Springsteenfor insulting the president at a concert in Manchester, England, where the Boss called the administration “corrupt, incompetent and treasonous.” Trump called the Grammy-award winning artist “highly overrated,” writing in part, “Never liked him, never liked his music, or his Radical Left Politics and, importantly, he’s not a talented guy.”
Erum Salam is a breaking news reporter for MS NOW, with a focus on how global events and foreign policy shape U.S. politics. She previously was a breaking news reporter for The Guardian.
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