As bad as Rob Manfred is, and Rob Manfred is bad, he provides pretty effective cover for the people he represents—Major League Baseball’s thirty ownership groups. The man is so easy to revile, and at least in a professional capacity so worthy of loathing, that he absorbs a lot of the heat. Which makes it worthwhile, now and then, to remember who hired him. And who refuses to fire him. And who he is, at all times, representing.
To be clear, the MLBPA is not some white knight in the current situations. They’re complicit in a few regards, most substantially the suppressing of young talent, a practice that benefits major leaguers, already in the union, by shrinking the competition pool on the labor side. Many of the MLBPA’s incentives tie back to maximizing how much is spent on older players. They’re happy to keep the quality of the game that much worse and the conditions of minor leaguers that much worse in exchange for more money for themselves. Individually, sure, there are players who go against this. Plenty of them. There are shades of gray with all of this, and nothing’s 100/0 or 0/100 or 50/50 or anything else it’s easy to cast the thing as. The MLBPA is at some level of fault. The owners are at some level of fault. Within each group there are varying degrees of fault. But before we move on to the owners, a little smack on the head to the MLBPA, which does its job but hey, the owners are doing their job too, right?
The warranted disgust with MLB owners is well-documented. Owners cry poor, owners won’t open their books, and meanwhile MLB franchise values are soaring through the roof, meaning either the owners who cry poor are liars or people who buy MLB franchises are the biggest suckers in the world. But something owners are somehow distanced from is, again, their affiliation with Rob Manfred, a man who clearly does not like the game of baseball. We direct our vitriol towards Manfred and neglect those who program his motherboard, rather than telling those who give the man his orders to get him the hell out. Sure, we engage in vague, “Fire Manfred,” requests, but have you ever seen an owner’s feet held to the fire on the topic of the loathsomeness of their selected commissioner?
That selection, of course, says a lot about them. If you hire an MLB commissioner who doesn’t like baseball and continue to allow him to do his job, the only explanations are that either he is doing the job so well that you can look past his distaste for the game or that you share that distaste, and I can’t think of any reasonable argument which says Manfred is doing his job well, especially when considering that those franchise values could be soaring even higher were baseline competence a requirement in the league offices. In other words, at least a substantial share of the owners do not, we can assume, like baseball.
Yeah, maybe they like the idea of baseball, or maybe they like baseball in a jaded way, the way old men who heckle Javy Báez “like baseball.” But they don’t like the game enough to, say, make sure the 2022 season starts on time. They didn’t like the game enough to, for example, get the 2020 season going as early as it could have. They didn’t like the game enough to figure out the stupid ball thing. They don’t like the game enough to put an end to the stupid regional blackouts.
Every stupid, baseball-spiting thing Manfred does, he does on behalf of his bosses, the owners. Manfred stinks, as a commissioner, and that’s on him. But it’s also on the owners, who set up this whole debacle. It’d be one thing if they had a doof in there who at least liked the game. But they don’t. They have a wannabe conman who openly hates the sport it’s his job to lead. The owners continue to choose a commissioner who doesn’t like baseball. We can guess the reason why.
