A DIRECT MESSAGE
Straight-shooting commish rewarded with a new deal
ATLANTA — To get a feel for Rob Manfred’s persona, you only needed to hear him muse Thursday morning at the conclusion of the Major League Baseball owners’ meetings about how fast his initial stint as commissioner has felt.
“It seems like about 15 minutes ago, I was spending a really dreadful day in a not-very-nice hotel suite in Baltimore, waiting to see if I could get vote number … what was it, 23?” Manfred asked, turning to his deputies.
It was vote No. 23 of 30, the 75percent majority, which required six attempts to achieve on Aug. 14, 2014. This time, with a year left on his original stint and sports leagues not proponents of the lame-duck dynamic, Manfred predictably notched a sweep, 30 of 30, on his first try Thursday. The 60-year-old received a fiveyear extension to lead the sport through 2024.
The present-day good news for him prompted the old bad memory, and let’s excuse the unfortunate reference to lousy hotel suites as MLB works to become more accessible socio-economically and focus instead on Manfred’s unvarnished recall. The upstate New York native tends to be a realist and a pragmatist, attributes baseball needs right now.
If Manfred’s predecessor and mentor, Bud Selig, reminds one of the late Apple co-founder Steve Jobs utilizing his “reality distortion field” to offer ceaselessly glowing forecasts for the game (especially once he implemented his desired changes to the industry’s financial structure), then Manfred feels more like Jobs’ successor, Tim Cook, known for his “methodical, nononsense” style, as per a Reuters profile. And as baseball tries to corral the slippery millennials, an emphasis on diligence and an absence of noise pollution is the way to go.
“I think that the biggest challenge for us is to make sure that we continue to attract that avid, committed fan base that baseball has always enjoyed,” Manfred said when I asked him what he considered to be his biggest challenge as commissioner.
He proceeded to list a number of initiatives that rank as progress: the recent launch of an elite youth league that will start next summer; the partnership with the streaming platform DAZN, run by disgraced former ESPN CEO John Skipper, that will feature a “whiparound” show with live look-ins during the week; a $5.1 billion extension with Fox, the dollar figure reported by Eric Fisher of the Sports Business Journal, to keep most of the sport’s jewel events on the network with which it has enjoyed a long and prosperous relationship.
In conjunction with this, Manfred knows, the game itself must become more appealing to the young ’uns. The proposed pitch clock remains on the table for 2019, although Manfred strongly hinted he would give up on that — which he has the right to institute unilaterally — if the players gave in on other pace-of-play issues. The commissioner announced an amendment to the Basic Agreement regarding footwear, and while this sounds like a great headline for The Onion, don’t underestimate the draw of more creative and colorful shoes.
Attendance dropped by more than 3 million fans from 2017 to 2018, and Manfred, while refusing to the use the word “concern” to describe his owners’ sentiments, conceded the topic came up in Thursday morning’s general session, as did the topic of how to better monetize the new gambling landscape.
If Manfred isn’t saying the sky is falling, he at least acknowledges it isn’t a perfectly sunny day in baseball’s world. So much work remains — so much uncertainty, really — and now Manfred can return to his very heavy lifting with the confidence that his bosses approve of the way he does it.