Like Favorit, I need to ssh out of the office in order to establish a connection to bat. Now, I know that batclient is intentionally hardcoded to connect only to batmud in order to prevent its being used by other muds. So, a solution to this predicament has dawned on me.

Add Networking options which enable the client to create an ssh tunnel:
Checkbox: Use ssh tunnel
Inputbox: Tunnel host
Inputbox: Port

Then, batclient can issue the ssh command, check that it's working, and then establish a connect to localhost on the port. If desired, it could grep the process string for <port>/<bat ip>/23 to ensure that the tunnel is valid and hasn't been hijacked to a different mud/host. This would work for all *nix based OS clients.

The only limitation I see in this implementation is the need for a valid ssh command on Windows. I suppose that Windows would require custom code and probably an installation of a particular ssh client unless there's a Java ssh client which could be embedded in batclient.