It’s time for a change
“Of course, we won’t mind if you look around,” you’ll say. “It’s only twenty dollars per person.” They’ll pass over the money without even thinking about it. For it is money they have and peace they lack.”– Terrance Mann
At 5 PM EST on March 1st, the commissioner announced that six games would be purged from the baseball season. It is the second time Rob Manfred has been unable to salvage games in a season. He could blame 2020 on the pandemic and the pandemic certainly takes most of the blame, but he effectively botched any chance of playing 100 or 120 games because of his inability to make a deal.
Any baseball fan worth their salt knows exactly where the quote from above comes from. Any baseball fan worth their salt can rattle off the most famous numbers or relive the greatest moments in the game’s history. When you are a commissioner of the sport you first and foremost must love the sport. Loving the sport enables you to take all of the stakeholders and force them to negotiate in good faith. It also prevents you from succumbing to hairbrained schemes that alter the game for the worst.
Rob Manfred must resign as commissioner. He must resign not because he couldn’t broker an agreement between owners and players. He must resign not because of the ghost runner at second rule, the Astros cheating scandal that was really a league wide cheating scandal, or because he absolutely fumbled the pandemic negotiations. Those are all just symptoms of the disease. He must resign because he clearly doesn’t love baseball. He doesn’t understand baseball at its core. Therefore, he doesn’t understand when he makes the moves he makes how that eats away at the sport itself.
The offseason has a certain arc to it. There are owner’s meetings. There are general manager’s meetings. There are winter meetings. Free agency opens in November and has multiple waves of activity. Teams and players exchange arbitration numbers and have hearings. There is a Rule V draft and trades that boggle the imagination. More importantly, there is the excitement from fans that weaves its way through all of that. They call it the hot stove league. Fans were robbed of it this year.
Owners locked out the players in December. Keep in mind that many of the issues the two sides are currently debating have been known since the labor strife of 2020. They predicted this then. When asked why he waited until February to start negotiating, Manfred simply fumbled about and talked about the last ten days of negotiation. Yup Rob, that was the point of the question. YOU HAD 80 DAYS PRIOR TO THAT AND YOU DID NOTHING.
This is not one of those “make me commissioner” kind of pleas. I’m not qualified for the job, but I do have one qualification that Rob does not have. I love baseball. Of course, I’m not the only one. I’m not even going to try to argue that my love for the sport is superior to anyone else’s. It is superior to Manfred’s and that is clear with the way he talks about the game. It’s clear with the decisions he’s made to make the game shorter. People who love baseball aren’t desperate to have less of it.
The job of commissioner is difficult, but it is also easy to explain. The commissioner is a shepherd of sorts. They marry the interests of owners, players, and fans together to grow the sport and make it profitable for all. If one of those groups distrusts the commissioner he can’t effectively do his job. If more than one group distrusts the commissioner then the entire sport will sink. Don’t mind us now, but the sport is sinking.
“Oh, people will come, Ray. They will definitely come.”
1If you still love baseball, I have a bike race in France and a horse race in Kentucky to sell ya.
Any contest so mired in cheating that the guilty are offended for being caught is not worth anyone’s time or money.
2Manfred represents the OWNERS. Period. He does what they want him to do and they pay him $800,000/yr to do their bidding.
And, the idea that cheating is rife–coming from Astros fans–is insulting to the rest of us.
3Barb @3, if we need any more proof of how incompetent Manfred is, Goodell serves the same function but NFL owners pay him north of $40 *million*/yr for it.
MLB ownership, consisting as it does of wealthy, greedy, and stupid people, wanted this lockout to happen. They are more concerned with cutting labor costs and maintaining control than they are with the fact — and as a baseball lover going back to Ted Williams, I hate to say it, but it’s a fact — that baseball is dying a slow death. Manfred, as Nick argues, doesn’t care as long as the check clears.
Bud Selig may have been an ineffectual putz, but at least he did love the game. Come back, Bud, most is forgiven…
4@ el lagarto #4: The biggest blow to Baseball was the untimely death of Bart Giamatti. Fay Vincent was too good, too, so the owners fired him.
And, I was wrong. Apparently, Manfred makes about $11 million a year, which explains a lot.
5At our house we love baseball. We do not love major league baseball. We and our baseball-loving friends are still pissed off about the strikes in 1981 and 1994-95. There is a great sickness in MLB. And the ticket prices are abominable. We all go to minor league games these days.
6As someone else said in a different forum, baseball owners are a group of men who believe that government should pay for their stadiums but not your heart medicine.
7My wife’s high school class had their 50-year reunion a few years back in Waterloo, Illinois, which is in the St. Louis area. One of the events was a baseball game of the Gateway Grizzlies, an unaffiliated minor league team based in Sauget, a suburb of St. Louis.
The players in the Grizzlies’ league are not under contract to any major league team. In fact, many of them depend on the support of the locals for day jobs, living quarters, and the like. They all hope that some MLB team may notice them and sign them up.
Many of the players had played in college, so the quality of the play was quite good, and everyone in our group had a blast. To my mind, that was baseball in its purest form – playing for the fun and the simple beauty of the sport.
Big money has corrupted MLB, largely because of TV (all those channels need programming, after all) and it will inevitably corrupt every other big time sport if it hasn’t done so already. The pity is that we will never get the big bucks out of it.
8In terms of the cheating scandal, the Red Sox and Yankees were actually caught twice with lesser penalties than the Astros. The Dodgers and Rockies have credible accusations against them which means we are effectively scapegoating the Astros for something at least a portion of the league (everyone they beat in 2017) were also doing. I’m not a fan of the trash can thing but let’s be serious about the scope of this thing.
9Around my family, little league is almost everything as practice has started. My older grandson (9 this Sunday) is a Seattle Mariner fan I think just to be different than his younger brother (6 and first year out of T-ball) who is a Dodger fan (like his dad and grandpa (me)). I guess my point is, MLB is still something many kids still look up to (to some degree) and kids will be what keeps baseball popular in the future. The players, owners and commissioner should keep in mind that it’s still a game and they’re rich because of the fans- the future of which are the kids that play it for fun and for free (their parents pay). So, don’t neglect the kids and fans or you are doomed. And don’t cheat.
10Nick: “we are effectively scapegoating the Astros for something at least a portion of the league (everyone they beat in 2017) were also doing. I’m not a fan of the trash can thing but let’s be serious about the scope of this thing.”
team that was cheating got punished for cheating. add anything to that sentence and you’re just both-sidesing it.
as a former astros fan, i am very much over the attempts by other astros fans to excuse their cheating. cheating is cheating. maybe write a piece about lance armstrong next.
11Treehugger#6 – that would be this house also. I joined the Church of Baseball when we married, but those same sad episodes cased my spousal unit to change affiliations to futbol (soccer). I now know more about VAR, offsides, on-goal, and set pieces than I ever thought possible.
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