Owners extend Manfred, Fox deals
ATLANTA — Baseball owners have extended contracts with their commissioner and their main broadcast partner, too.
Any decisions on speeding up the game and perhaps making it more enjoyable to watch will have to wait.
After wrapping up two days of meetings at a hotel next to the Atlanta Braves’ SunTrust Park, the owners announced a new contract for Commissioner Rob Manfred, keeping him on the job at least through the 2024 regular season. Manfred, 60, started a five-year term in January 2015.
“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 I looking for, 23 right?” quipped Manfred, who won the vote to succeed Bud Selig in August 2014 after beating out two other contenders. “It seems almost impossible that four years have gone by.”
The owners also agreed on a new television deal with Fox, which still has three seasons to go on its current eight-year contract that pays baseball an average of $525 million per season. The seven-year extension, which runs through 2028, will be worth just more than $5 billion to MLB — roughly a 36 percent increase to an average of about $715 million per season.
The relationship with Fox, which began in 1996, will continue to include the World Series and All-Star Game, as well as extensive playoff coverage on both the network and its allsports cable channel, FS1.
The new agreement also commits Fox to showing more games from the League Championship Series on its main network, beginning in 2019.
In addition to the extension with Fox, MLB also approved a $300 million, three-year with DAZN, a subscription videostreaming service run by former ESPN President John Skipper. Manfred called it a key part of baseball’s strategy to reach a new generation of fans.
However, baseball has yet to come to a consensus on the best ways to improve a sport that suffered a 4 percent dip in attendance this season to 69.6 million, its lowest since 2003.
Manfred and the owners continue to look at ways to speed play. Nine-inning games averaged 3 hours, 4 minutes in 2018. Though that was 4 minutes lower than the previous season, it still matched the third-highest average in baseball history.
Baseball’s style of play is also under scrutiny as teams have become increasingly reliant on a home run-or-bust offensive strategy to beat defensive shifts and reliever-heavy pitching staffs that are able to mix and match for almost any situation.
Tampa Bay, most notably, began using relievers even to start games, expecting to get only an inning or two out of them before beginning a series of changes. Although baseball set a record for homers in 2017 and stayed close to a record level this year, it also had more strikeouts than hits for the first time in 2018 as the cumulative batting average dipped to .248 — the lowest since 1972, the year before the designated hitter was introduced in the AL. Spikes deal: MLB and the players’ association ended a footwear flap, agreeing to loosen restrictions on the colors of spikes that may be used.
Ben Zobrist, Kyle Schwarber and Steve Cishek of the Cubs wore black spikes in May despite a warning from the commissioner’s office that they were violating a regulation requiring that at least 51 percent of the exterior of a player’s shoes be the club’s designated primary shoe color. For the Cubs, that color is blue.
The majority requirement was eliminated under the new agreement. Players now may wear shoes with black, white, any colors on the team’s uniform and additional colors approved by the team. Briefly: Texas agreed to a contract with catcher Jeff Mathis, the Athletic reported. Mathis, 35, batted .200 in 69 games with Arizona this season . ... The Twins plan to hire University of Arkansas pitching coach Wes Johnson to succeed Garvin Alston for that position in Minnesota , the Athletic reported.