How Bob Saget ruined baseball
What makes a golden at-bat so golden, anyway?
Baseball’s Golden Moments
Last week, Major League Baseball Commissioner/Spokesnihilist Rob Manfred dropped a new trial balloon: What if, one time per MLB game, a team could let any player they want go to bat? A “golden at-bat,” if you will. A chance to put the team’s biggest star in the game’s biggest Golden Moment, so that excitement and profitability may ensue.
“Isn’t that what you people want,” Rob Manfred whispers contemptuously under his breath, “to see your wildest dreams come true every day?”
The idea is a generous if desperate offering to us mercurial multi-screen media munchers of the 2020s, who simply won’t sit around and wait for something to happen when nothing is guaranteed.
Baseball used to have the advantage of a captive audience that could tolerate boredom and uncertainty. We were willing to forgive our national pastime for seven months of absolute inconsequence, as long as we got roughly 10-15 minutes of thrilling Golden Moments randomly distributed throughout. We kept watching so we could say, “I saw something happen!” on the rare occasions when something actually did happen.
But now everything happens all the time, and no one misses anything. Golden Moments are available all the time and on demand. Perhaps baseball needs to give more assurances of guaranteed spectacle, rather than hazy promises of “something, eventually.”
I believe that baseball’s Golden Moment problem sprung roots in the 1990s, when the most popular program on television became a show called “America’s Funniest Home Videos.”
Each week, America’s Fullest House Dad Bob Saget would dress up in a suit and make funny voices1 while we watched a compilation of spontaneous comedy moments captured serendipitously by primitive amateur cameras. Joining Bob Saget in the studio was a giddy All-American audience dressed in their Sunday best, some of whom had submitted the very videos we Could Not Believe were authentic, uncontrived incidents.
At the end of the show, Bob Saget asked the studio audience to vote for their favorite video, and the winner would be announced after a word from their sponsors — generating yet another spontaneous moment of ecstasy and agony for the home audience. It was like the Oscars, but for plebs.
For a brief spell during its first season, “America’s Funniest Home Videos” was the number one show in America. It averaged a now-impossible2 38 million viewers per episode, outpacing scripted titans of the era such as “The Cosby Show,” “Roseanne,” and “Cheers,” as well as the groundbreaking docuseries, “ALF.”
Americans had never seen anything like this. Previously, all those hilarious, stranger-than-fiction moments in life were imperfectly preserved in the impalpable, you-had-to-be-there film reels of the soul. “Boy, if only we had a camera,” we’d say. But now, people actually had cameras!
Home movie cameras had been available for decades, but it wasn’t until the 1980s when laypeople could afford to be frivolous with their shot selection. Film gave way to video tape, and home footage no longer had to be rationed for milestones like weddings, graduations, and family trips to the World’s Largest Cherry Pie Tin. Now you could pull out your camcorder any time your dumb kid was doing some dumb thing with your dumb dog — and thanks to Bob Saget, it just might make you famous.
Since the 1990s, the act of capturing a moment — Golden or otherwise — has become almost subconscious. On my phone, I currently have stored 1,059 video clips, the vast majority of which are digital bagatelles of banality.
For example:
The problem with a life where you can capture every moment is that every moment can be captured. And now we don’t even have to be so discerning as to select the moments that are worthy of Saget: We can share all of them instantly with the entire world, with no TV edits, star-swipes, or funny voices.
Baseball shares this dilemma. With online digital media, it’s possible to make every moment of every MLB game available to anyone at any time — which is precisely what MLB does. Video of every pitch and play is now preserved, indexed, and searchable.
A high supply of easily consumable moments cheapens their value. Therefore, attention becomes the only measure of their worth. The savvy opportunists of our era are privy to this: They know more attention comes from Golden Moments, so they concoct the conditions to produce Golden Moments at scale and with reliable certainty.
Mike Tyson, a vestige of the “America’s Funniest Home Videos” epoch, brought our culture a string of indelible Golden Moments throughout a years-long, mythologized career. When social mogul Jake Paul challenged the decaying remains of Mike Tyson to a high-profile bout last month, he was exploiting our collective memory of a younger, sturdier Mike Tyson, who once reliably delivered valuable moments worthy of our attention.
The end result was Saget-tier levels of TV viewership, as millions of Americans tuned in to watch a shameless manchild turn our nostalgia into a wrinkly, withered punching bag.
Through the cynical pageantry, I take solace in one residual moment when the home audience caught a brief, accidental glance of Mike Tyson’s bare ass. If that debacle produced any lasting Golden Moment, that was it: a sudden, unexpected, unplanned bit of amusement captured by a downward-drifting camera.
Baseball, like boxing or life itself, thrives as a conduit for moments, not a producer. The most memorable moments can’t be harvested for profit, and they can’t be summoned or coaxed. It’s the opposite: The best moments summon us. A golden at-bat occurs of its own volition, without warning, in the second inning of an unassuming day game in May. Or it happens on a random foul ball that lands, against all odds, in your beer.
Rob Manfred can give anyone the bat whenever he wants, and it might even result in more attention at prescribed Golden Moments. But he shouldn’t be under any illusion about what makes an at-bat — or baseball, or life — special.
So here’s my alternate proposal for MLB and Manfred: Let’s see a guy’s bare ass once per game. Don’t tell us when, or who. Just announce prior to each game that, at some undisclosed moment, you will see one ass for several seconds. It could be a player, or a coach, or a celebrity guest star. Don’t look away for one moment, lest you miss the Golden Ass.
Do you have your own alternate proposals for improving the game of baseball? Share in the comments below!
Click Roulette
The below links match one of the two descriptions provided for each. Click at your own peril!
CLICK HERE FOR LINK ONE. This is either:
Rare footage of a Vaudeville act where two baseball players helplessly misunderstand each other, which is suddenly interrupted by an audience member who goes insane and tries to assault them with a prop bat.
A supercut of all the times a character on “Star Trek: The Next Generation” describes something as “some kind of….”
CLICK HERE FOR LINK TWO. This is either:
Shohei Ohtani’s secret DeviantArt page where he posts drawings of centaurs that all kinda look like Timothée Chalamet.
A dog giving her full, undivided attention to “The Lion King.”
CLICK HERE FOR LINK THREE. This is either:
Another boring edition of
by .A deep dive into the history of Americans slipping on banana peels.
Tortoise pic of the week
Wordle hint (SPOILER)
For a confidence boost, try this version of Wordle where the answer is the same word every day.
Eavesdrop of the week
“What are you trying to say? That my nose is bigger, so my noise is louder?”
— Seattle man on a sidewalk, Dec. 6, 2024
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Approximately three different voices: normalsmarm-mid, ladycreature-high, and moronman-low.
In all of 2023, only six television broadcasts had more than 38 million viewers, and they were all NFL games.
cmon!!! i tried to jazz this one up!!!
Three pitchers, all throwing simultaneously. One of the balls is a confetti bomb. Outfielders now have bats and can hit the ball back. The catcher is blindfolded. Foul balls can be thrown back into play by the crowd. Spring-loaded bases that are randomly activated throughout the game. A pitfall in the outfield moved every game. These are my well-thought-out, proposed baseball improvements. Feel free to steal them.