Image credit: © Kim Klement Neitzel-USA TODAY Sports
Rob Manfred will no longer be the Major League Baseball commissioner as of 2029. That’s what we know for sure as of this writing: the man said so himself. Manfred took over for Bud Selig in January of 2015, winning the commissioner’s seat and the approval of MLB’s owners over Boston’s Tom Werner. He was Selig’s handpicked choice as a successor, thanks to decades of the two working together in a variety of roles, but the votes had to be there for that to happen. They eventually were, and he’s now beginning his third, and final, term. That’s the neat and tidy version of events.
We’ve already discussed how a different commissioner wouldn’t mean a better one, given the nature of the role: the commissioner is merely there to do the bidding of the owners while making sure they don’t get too deleteriously rowdy with their schemes. So we’re not here to remind you of that. Instead, let’s focus on what Manfred’s legacy is going to end up being. As Baseball Prospectus’ Editor-in-Chief, Craig Goldstein, said on Twitter:
Those are all strong contenders. As is the recent uniform fiasco, where MLB’s official statement can be summed up as “no, we’ve always been able to see these guys’ balls.” Now, I’m not going to share any of the photos in question here, but I do want to point out that my own tweet here preceded MLB’s reaction to said photos with good reason:
I know what I saw, MLB. Anyway, the point is that Manfred is certainly going to leave a notable legacy behind. There’s a whole lot to argue about which thing will actually be at the center of that legacy, though, and the above barely scratches the surface of the options.
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The cheating scandals are immense, or, at least should have been. But MLB protected Jim Crane, with Manfred at the center of that in one of those moments where he’s allowed to tell the owners they’re about to screw something up more than they intend—you know, the real “best interests of Baseball” power. The Astros got to keep their championship. The Red Sox got a tiny little punishment. Despite the claims that a whole bunch of other teams were also using technology to cheat in a way they weren’t supposed to, investigations basically didn’t happen, and everyone was just supposed to move on. The most significant punishment for Astros players was that they might get booed for their part in things, and even that process was interrupted by some local media members who thought it was going just a little too far.
The story is out there, though. Evan Drellich, who broke the story for The Athletic, even got to write a book about how it all went down. It can be minimized, but it can’t be erased. Somehow, though, it might end up as a bit of a footnote in Manfred’s career considering everything else there is to choose from.
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Manfred was the commissioner during the first lockout in the game in over three decades. A very obviously unnecessary lockout that handsome writers with good sense could see coming from years away. No games were lost to the lockout in the end, but it was also clearly a massive waste of time even to some of the kinds of journalists who usually have no problem backing MLB up on their anti-labor crusades. Admittedly, though, this concern is probably more the kind of thing I’ll remember than the general audience: there’s a reason there’s room for me on the historical labor beat, you know? People need to be reminded of how the past went down, it’s not always there in the present for them.
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Then again, Manfred and the owners did cost everyone games in the 2020 season by overplaying their hand in negotiations that, from the players’ point of view, had already concluded. So maybe that’ll be easier to remember, in the same way Bud Selig canceling the World Series in 1994 or ending an All-Star Game in a tie are recalled. Though… some people do need to be reminded that the cancellation of the ‘94 World Series was a feature, not a bug for Selig. So maybe not.
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The uniforms… it’s too early to know for sure. Will Fanatics actually fix them, so that the tops don’t look like they were made by someone selling replica knockoffs? And so that netherregions are no longer visible to anyone who is looking at them, regardless of whether there’s photo studio lighting around? This one is TBD, too soon to call, check back in a few years.
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Manfred could be remembered as the commissioner under which minor leaguers finally became so fed up with the working and living conditions on the farm that they successfully organized by joining the Players Association. More likely, though, is that he’s remembered for what got the players to that point: disaffiliating dozens of minor-league teams, costing 1,000 players their jobs, yes, but also ripping professional baseball out of 40 cities. This, too, isn’t quite over yet: Congress is still snooping around MLB’s antitrust exemption wondering about its necessity, and if they aren’t stopped by someone—be it Congress or the union—there will be future attempts at disaffiliation, more cities losing access to relatively inexpensive professional baseball, than there already have been.
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The baseballs. The ones that weren’t juiced and were definitely the same as they always were, until investigation journalism proved otherwise and forced MLB to admit that what they had meant to say… you remember all of that. It’s hard not to, when multiple baseballs were once again used during the 2022 season after this was all supposed to be resolved. The whole situation is such a classic case of Manfred, too. No one would be bothered if MLB changed the baseballs because they felt that the game needed a bit more power in it. Other international leagues have changed their baseballs and said they were doing it and why, but MLB had to be sneaky about it and lie to everyone even when the truth was plain to see. When they could no longer ignore the suspicions because of the aforementioned investigations, that’s when some of the truth came out. Who knows, maybe the balls will be changed once (or twice) again before Manfred hangs ‘em up, keeping this story fresh.
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Here’s the one that might actually stick. “…how aggressively teams made last-ditch efforts to bilk the public out of money,” which as Goldstein notes, is not new, but has certainly intensified under Manfred’s watch. Back in August, I wrote that “the stadium schemes keep getting bigger,” and in the time since, the A’s have shown they might not even have wanted to move out of Oakland and to Las Vegas but screwed that up, too, and Jerry Reinsdorf has gone from maybe wanting a new stadium in Chicago by pretending Nashville was an option to leaking that he needs the most public money any stadium has ever had. Real threats to relocate as well as actual relocation could do a number on an already decimated legacy. And expansion isn’t going to happen under Manfred’s watch, if it happens at all, so it’s not like he’d be the one to bring baseball back to Oakland (if it even goes back there) following his allowing the A’s to leave in the first place.
Bud Selig had plenty of new stadiums come in with public financing, too, but the new stadiums and the demands for them are coming in both faster and much larger even after accounting for inflation. It’s incessant, to the point it’s unclear if expansion is a thing that will ever actually occur or if it’s just a carrot on a stick that makes some excited people enthusiastically nod in agreement with whatever demands are made to get the teams in need of stadiums their subsidies.
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Take your pick. There’s no shortage of options. And in fact, so many horrible things have happened under Manfred’s run as commissioner that it’s easy to forget that there were actually some good parts. Trying to make Trevor Bauer disappear forever was a rare moment of having to hand it to Manfred’s MLB. Some of the rule changes, like the addition of the pitch clock, are genuinely great and have returned the game to the kind of pace it used to enjoy before it became slower and bloated by more than just lengthier ad breaks. None of this on its own is going to end up being Manfred’s legacy, but then again, none of the negative bits might be, either. At least, not on their own.
Selig tried to remake his legacy, because it, too, was full of awfulness. The canceled ‘94 World Series, practically forcing the players to strike that same summer, being commissioner while steroids were everywhere in the game and then pretending that he had no idea the whole time and had never even heard of these, what do you call them, steroids before, even when Bob Nightengale asked him about it point blank in literally 1995. The collusion when he was an owner, the collusion when he was commissioner, the public execution of Alex Rodriguez’s career to attempt to end his own on what he felt was a deserved high note… there’s a lot there to dislike that sticks with him, and it’s tough to pick out just the one thing because of it.
Manfred, too, has a melange of bad vibes to consider, rather than just one specific thing that sticks out. Which, really, is its own kind of legacy. It’s not a complicated one, it’s just robust in its terribleness. There are no real hidden bits of greatness there that outweigh the rest of his body of work. And that’s how it’ll be for the next commissioner, too, whoever that ends up being, if they stick around for as long as Manfred has.
And hey, let’s not forget that the 2024 through 2028 seasons will be played under Manfred’s watch, too. There are still years left for him to do something even worse than everything that’s come before. Maybe there will even be official MLB-sanctioned betting lines on what that could be by that time!
Marc Normandin currently writes on baseball’s labor issues and more at marcnormandin.com, which you can read for free but support through his Patreon. His baseball writing has appeared at SB Nation, Defector, Global Sport Matters, Deadspin, Sports Illustrated, ESPN, Sports on Earth, The Guardian, The Nation, FAIR, and TalkPoverty, and you can read his takes on retro video games at Retro XP.
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