The trials of Rob Manfred
Rob Manfred, Major League Baseball’s commissioner, knew he had a crisis on his hands. So he cut short his annual trip to spring training in Arizona on Wednesday, gathered the staff members traveling with him and flew back to New York.
Back at MLB’s headquarters, he convened all 30 team owners on a conference call, the type of event reserved for only the most pressing league matters. The purpose of the call, according to three people who participated, was for Manfred to address the bitter fallout from his investigation into the Houston Astros’ sign-stealing scheme and to issue a warning about what he has described as a “culture of cheating” in the game.
With players openly criticizing Manfred in preseason camps, the entire affair and its fallout were blossoming into baseball’s biggest scandal since the steroid era — not only undercutting Manfred’s authority as commissioner, but it was threatening the integrity of the game.
Speaking frankly to the owners, Manfred noted that the Astros scandal was only the latest in a series of cases in which team personnel — both players and executives — had broken rules to gain a competitive advantage. He also decried the pervasive code of silence within the game that made fact-finding so challenging, and urged owners to join him in rooting out the dual problems inside their organizations.
The next day, he gathered more than 1,000 employees of Major League Baseball in the atrium of their new offices in Midtown Manhattan, having moved up a town hall meeting planned for later on. Standing at a lectern, he explained his decision-making in the investigation and his choice to grant immunity to the Astros players involved even as he issued lengthy suspensions to two team officials, which was producing loud criticism from players on other teams.
“I abhor the fact that we made a decision that evoked this kind of emotion from the players,” Manfred said in an interview on Friday. “It’s not good for the sport.”
Just over a month after he announced the results of an investigation into the Astros’ brazen scheme, Manfred has become the focus of some of the harshest blowback, with players suddenly feeling emboldened to lash out at the commissioner on several issues, including his efforts in other areas unrelated to the scandal. Justin Turner of the Los Angeles Dodgers said he was “out of touch” with the players. Trevor Bauer of the Cincinnati Reds called Manfred “a joke” over a proposed new playoff format. And Adam Ottavino, a pitcher for the New York Yankees, labeled him “anti-player.”
To many in the game, though, Manfred inflamed a difficult situation with clumsy attempts to defend his actions. The low point came last Sunday when, in an interview with ESPN, he denigrated the Commissioner’s Trophy, presented annually to the World Series champion, as a “piece of metal” in an attempt to explain his choices in the Houston case.
In doing so, Manfred — a Harvard-educated labor lawyer and a former baseball investigator trying to sort out truth amid the competing interests of teams, agents, players and their powerful union — had committed a cardinal baseball sin: He failed to show reverence for the game and its most precious symbols.
“The commissioner has to be a bit of a romantic,” said Fay Vincent, who once held the job. “The commissioner has to believe in the mythology of baseball.”
Building Anger
Mythology and romance have been hard to find in the wake of the Astros scandal.
Major League Baseball commissioner
On Jan. 13, Manfred announced that he had suspended Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch for one season after determining that the Astros players had illicitly used technology to steal signs between opposing pitchers and catchers and relay information about incoming pitches to their teammates at the plate in 2017.
Luhnow and Hinch were promptly fired by the Astros owner, Jim Crane, and the scandal’s waves soon also claimed the jobs of Boston Red Sox manager Alex Cora, who was Houston’s bench coach in 2017, and New York Mets manager Carlos Beltran, a former Astros player implicated in Manfred’s report.
But perhaps the biggest point of contention was Manfred’s choice to grant immunity to all of the Astros players in exchange for their honest testimony.
Manfred last week again stood by that decision, which to those closest to him reflected the realpolitik sensibilities of a former investigator with experience in cases ranging from domestic violence to performance-enhancing drug use.
For a while, as the initial vitriol rained down on the Astros and their players, there was only sporadic criticism of Manfred.
But as hundreds of players began trickling into their spring training camps this month and speaking with reporters, Manfred’s decision not to punish the Astros players — and his unwillingness to vacate the team’s 2017 World Series title — soon put him in the spotlight. After Crane and some Astros players issued measured apologies that came across as insincere to many, the discontent grew. And Manfred’s prickly responses to challenges to process only exacerbated the conflict.
In the ESPN interview, Manfred defended the decision not to strip the Astros of their title by saying that “asking for a piece of metal back seems like a futile act.” With one offhand comment, for which he later apologized, Manfred handed the players more fuel for their anger.
Jon Lester, the Chicago Cubs pitcher, said only someone who had never played the game would say something like that, and his teammate Kris Bryant said people were “not accepting” Manfred’s apology. The Yankees’ Ottavino said he was “not very optimistic” about Manfred’s ability to be an effective commissioner.
But many feel Manfred got it right, including Gene Orza, the former general counsel of the players’ union known for his battles with Manfred during tough negotiations over labor issues and steroid-testing policy.
“He is far and away the smartest commissioner they’ve ever had, and he gives everything a lot of thought,” Orza said. “He’s taking a beating from people who might not know what he knows.”
Labor Peace, or Open Conflict
Manfred began working with baseball on collective bargaining in the 1980s, later helping to break the bitter deadlock that led to the cancellation of the 1994 World Series. He was hired by MLB in 1998 and then rose to chief operating officer in 2013.
When he succeeded Bud Selig as commissioner in 2015, supporters lauded his success as the league’s chief labor negotiator, having ushered in more than two decades of relative peace with the players’ union after a generation of enmity and work stoppages.
A handful of detractors among team owners, though, worried that Manfred was too lawyerlike, that he did not possess the marketing skills to grow the game or handle intricate business issues like television contracts. Their fear was that Manfred, with his crisp suits and immaculate presentation, could come across as arrogant — a bureaucrat who enjoyed golf more than baseball.
No one questioned whether he knew the job. A superb negotiator and a meticulous thinker, he could recite chapter and verse of the lengthy basic agreement document that governs the sport. But acting as the face of the game, instead of its powerful No. 2, was a much different role.
The Astros crisis brought those concerns to the fore. Orza and others said Manfred’s intricate understanding of labor law and past encounters with the union surely informed his approach to the inquiry. Any attempts to ban players would have ignited a fight with the union, they said, and rather than producing a quick and clean outcome, risked extending discussion of the sign-stealing into this season and beyond.
“My suspicion is that he had to consider a whole host of things that others either didn’t know about or passed over,” Orza said, and added, “He comes to this against the backdrop of a lot of other issues.”
A few days before news of the Astros’ sign-stealing broke on Nov. 12, in an article published by The Athletic, Manfred was made aware of accusations that the Astros had used technology to pilfer opponents’ signs.
Manfred directed Dan Halem, his deputy and baseball’s chief legal officer, to reach out to Cora, said to be the mastermind of the scheme, and start gathering information. Cora, who left the Astros after 2017 to lead the Red Sox, was traveling in London at the time, however, and Halem had trouble contacting him beyond a brief phone call. Manfred worried that Cora was dodging them.
At the same time, Halem and MLB investigators were getting no useful information from their attempts to speak to former Astros players and coaches. Frustrated at Cora’s inaccessibility and their inability to uncover any solid facts from uncooperative witnesses, Manfred said, he instructed Halem to ask the players’ union for assistance.
There is some dispute over whether MLB first offered blanket immunity to the players or if the union insisted upon it, but Manfred knew he would have virtually no hope of making suspensions stick if the players appealed them, and he said that uncovering the truth was paramount.
“I know we would not even have known the facts here, and no one would have been disciplined, had we not proceeded the way we elected to proceed,” Manfred said.
Manfred also knew his credibility was on the line. In September 2017, after the Red Sox were caught using an Apple Watch in the dugout to relay signs, the commissioner sent a memorandum to the general managers of all 30 teams notifying them that they would personally be held responsible for similar incidents in the future.
Manfred did want to punish at least one Astros player: Beltran, who investigators had determined was central to the sign-stealing plot and who was later placed in a leadership role as manager of the Mets. But Halem convinced Manfred that Beltran, even though he had retired, was legally protected under the umbrella of immunity because he was a player at the time of the sign-stealing.
“His goal was not punishing people for doing it but making sure it doesn’t happen again,” said Orza, the former union official. “That goal overarched the other goal that would make people feel happy. People feel happy when players get punished. It makes them feel good.”
‘The only thing that would have been worse than where we are now is to say, “Gee, we did a big investigation, and we can’t really tell you what happened.” ’
Rob Manfred
A Surprising Backlash
While Manfred’s lawyerly calculus might have been sound, his sales pitch to back it all up fell short.
Manfred acknowledged last week that he had underestimated the anger that he would face from players and fans about his handling of the scandal and the lack of repercussions for those involved. He had assumed that if the union agreed to immunity for the Astros players, that must have reflected the sentiment of the rank-and-file. But he stood by his decisions about immunity, and his attempts at transparency.
“The only thing that would have been worse than where we are now is to say, ‘Gee, we did a big investigation, and we can’t really tell you what happened,’” Manfred said.
Manfred also is aware that he could face more criticism in the coming weeks as he prepares to issue another report on similar allegations against the Red Sox in 2018.
Anger toward the commissioner also spiked after a news conference this month in which Crane, the Astros owner, and two players, Alex Bregman and Jose Altuve, made what many felt were insincere attempts to apologize. Later, Carlos Correa, Houston’s shortstop, gave several interviews in which he defended the team against specific accusations he felt were unfounded.
“The Astros should just shut up and go play baseball,” said Jerry Reinsdorf, the longtime owner of the Chicago White Sox. Reinsdorf initially did not support Manfred’s candidacy for commissioner in 2014, but he now says Manfred has done a “marvelous job” and praised his handling of the Astros investigation.
“He’s a trained lawyer and he’s trained to be analytical,” Reinsdorf said. “But he moves at just the right speed, not too fast and not too slow.”
Reinsdorf, like many owners, may have been looking down the road. Baseball’s collective bargaining agreement with its players expires at the end of 2021, and the owners who employ Manfred are relying on him to navigate that process — which carries far more important financial stakes — just as he did the Astros scandal: by finding a resolution without getting bogged down by lengthy, damaging internal battles.
“I’m really saddened by this,” Selig, Manfred’s predecessor, said of the recent criticism of his former deputy, “because I think it’s unfair. After years of strife, we finally have labor peace, and Rob was responsible for that.”