Working for me. Switched from call … to cmd /c …. Cannot guess why Windows would claim that cmd does not exist, unless you somehow managed to remove the system entry from your %Path%?

…though even that would not make sense, since the changed code is run only in a script which itself is run via cmd /c.

Any specific steps to reproduce? Version of Windows?

Unfortunately no specific steps to reproduce. This happens on Windows Server 2012.
Currently I'm using Pipeline plug-in 1.13 and everything worked fine for a while. As a workaround I added a "withEnv()" wrapper when calling "bat" step adding "c:\\windows;c:\\windows
system32" to PATH manually.
Last week I added a new bat step (with the same PATH workaround) to my script and suddenly I get this error message again (EDIT: I simply overlooked one "bat" usage without the workaround).
Unfortunately the "withEnv()" wrapper does not seem to write anything to the log. So I'm not able to tell whether the environment looked OK or not when "bat" was called.

the script I use is very simple:

println("Running build step")
node('master') {
    println("Generating list of translatable strings")
    bat "if not exist test md test"
}

which results in:

Started by user User
[Pipeline] echo
Running build step
[Pipeline] Allocate node : Start
Running on master in D:\Jenkins\jobs\TestWorkflow\workspace
[Pipeline] node {
[Pipeline] echo
Generating list of translatable strings
[Pipeline] bat
[workspace] Running batch script
'cmd' is not recognized as an internal or external command,
operable program or batch file.
[Pipeline] } //node
[Pipeline] Allocate node : End
[Pipeline] End of Pipeline
ERROR: script returned exit code 9009
Finished: FAILURE

Running this on a node works as expected. So the "master" node seems to be in some strange state.
Changing the code to

println("Running build step")
node('master') {
    println("Generating list of translatable strings")
    def _path = "c:\\windows;c:\\windows\\system32"
    withEnv(["PATH+TOOLS=${_path}", "TMP=d:\\tmp"]) {
        bat "if not exist test md test"
    }
}

works around the problem.

In the global Jenkins settings I have set "Prepare jobs environment" -> "Unset System Environment Variables" and I can confirm that this is causing the issue on my master node (why slave nodes are not affected remains unclear to me, the nodes have not specific setting regarding to environment variables).

IMHO bat-steps should still work even if the "Unset System Environment Variables" option is set.