Month: June 2025

Notes: Rob Manfred’s new plan, Rays’ sale and stadium

Rob Manfred has a new way of explaining the salary cap issue, and signs point toward Tampa being the new home of the Rays… maybe.

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Let’s pick up where we left off with last week’s flurry of news, shall we?

If Manfred can’t convince the MLBPA of a salary cap, he’ll convince the players

A salary cap is a non-starter for the Major League Baseball Players Association. The league’s owners can bring up their desire for one as often as they’d like — and for some of them, that’s turning out to be more often than it used to be — but the PA has a standing “never going to happen don’t even ask about it” policy when it comes to salary caps.

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Notes: Dodgers and ICE, Fenway workers authorize a strike

The Dodgers finally speak up on what’s going on in their city, and Fenway’s workers authorized a strike.

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It’s like Lenin used to say: there are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks where for some reason a whole bunch of stories I can cover in this space happen one after the other. Let’s get to a couple of those today and hit the rest next time around.

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Rafael Devers’ crime was speaking his mind

Rafael Devers could have been reasoned with, but the Red Sox never bothered with any of that, and now they don’t have to.

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The Red Sox have traded Rafael Devers, their highest-paid player, and they didn’t even wait for the smoke to clear to start telling the press that they did it because they felt like Devers wasn’t a team player. His refusal to move to first base after Triston Casas’ season-ending injury was a poor portent, you see, and it was time to move on, as the player on the 10-year, $313 million deal had certain responsibilities they felt he was not fulfilling.

What of the responsibilities the Sox had to Devers, though? Per Devers himself, the team had promised him that, as part of his signing a contract with a franchise that had traded Mookie Betts to clear salary and had let Xander Bogaerts walk after yet another insulting offer for a homegrown player on the way out, that third base was his position now and into the future. After Devers spoke to ownership over the winter about their need to bring in some help — “I’m not saying the team is not OK right now, but they need to be conscious of what our weaknesses are and what we need right now” — they went out and signed free agent Alex Bregman… to put him at third base. Without consulting Devers on it.

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Rob Manfred is denying there are plans for a lockout, again

Rob Manfred is contradicting the words of Rob Manfred once again.

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For some reason, people keep asking MLB commissioner Rob Manfred about the looming threat of a lockout after the expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement. It’s so weird how this happens after you use an interview at the New York Times (by way of the Athletic) to say that there will be a lockout after the expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement, but that’s just how the media works, am I right?

Manfred has spent the first half of 2025 pretending he didn’t say that lockouts should be considered the new normal, as just part of the process of negotiating a new CBA, that he didn’t liken them to “using a .22, as opposed to a shotgun or a nuclear weapon.” In February, Sportico relayed that Manfred had “tampered down his rhetoric” by saying that, “I’m not going to speculate how we’re going to negotiate with the PA. We’re a year away. I owe it to the owners to coalesce around our bargaining approach. And quite frankly I owe it to our fans not to get into this too early. It’s bad enough when you’re doing it and bargaining, and everyone is worried about it. We’re just not there yet.” Attempt number one at putting the cat back in the bag, basically.

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