Tag: Rob Manfred

Time skip

More teams are spending the resources they have even as others run in place, the next CBA is Manfred’s last, with his final major act likely being a landscape-altering broadcasting deal. Pieces are starting to come together that will still be in play at the end of the decade.

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The Juan Soto deal has me thinking about the future a bit. Not Soto’s future, but what’s going on in MLB. You’ll have to excuse me for using this space to get some thoughts down and further organize them, but it’ll end up resulting in another piece or two down the line once that’s all done.

Event: The Dodgers spend and spend some more, deferring even more money, and are projected for a $279 million Opening Day payroll after kicking off 2024 at $267 million — please recall that Shohei Ohtani was paid just $2 million in 2024, with the other $68 million in the deal deferred until the playing time portion of the contract expires for 2034. The Dodgers ranked third in payroll, but second for luxury tax implications, as more of Ohtani’s deal counts towards that figure in the present than in the figure calculated with actual dollars.

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MLB reportedly has ‘gag order’ on interested A’s buyers

It’s not that the Bay Area lacks people who want to buy the A’s, it’s that they’ve been ordered to be quiet about it until MLB says it’s fine to speak up.

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I had missed this originally when it ran in the San Francisco Chronicle back on July 17, but Noah Frank’s recent Baseball Prospectus column linked to and quoted it, bringing it to my attention. Apparently, MLB has a “gag order” out on anyone in the Bay Area interested in purchasing the Athletics from John Fisher.

Scott Ostler of the Chronicle wrote about how John Shea, another Chronicle journalist, had asked commission Rob Manfred if a potential mayoral change in Oakland could bring the city back into contention “if the Las Vegas deal falls apart,” or just as a potential expansion location in the future, and then, well, here you go:

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Notes: Scheduling jewel events, trading draft picks

All-Star Game week means All-Star Game week press conferences to pick apart.

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MLB’s All-Star week means it’s time for the Home Run Derby and a glorified exhibition game, but more importantly for our purposes, it’s also a time of press conferences. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred fields all kinds of questions related to the health of the game, and he even manages to answer some of them without being visibly annoyed about it, too.

One question was related to the Rangers receiving the 2024 All-Star Game, despite the fact that they don’t have a Pride Night during the season. Which is a thing that’s weird in a vacuum, but when you add in the context that they’re the only MLB team that doesn’t hold a Pride Night event, well. It sticks out, you know?

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Notes: Manfred’s legacy, uniforms, ‘collusion’

What will we remember Rob Manfred for, plus the latest on the pants, and the use of the “c-word”

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For Baseball Prospectus this week, I covered what commissioner Rob Manfred’s legacy could be (paid subscription required). It’s not a simple question, really, for two reasons: one, by the time Manfred leaves the role after the 2028 season, he’ll have been commissioner for nearly a decade-and-a-half, and two, there seems to be some new embarrassing thing he’s yelling about pretty much constantly.

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Is it Rob Manfred’s last term as commissioner?

A comment made by the current MLB commissioner makes it sound as if this current contract is his last one.

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MLB’s owners had their annual preseason meetings last week, and The Athletic’s Evan Drellich covered quite a bit of what commissioner Rob Manfred had to say after them. Lots of it is important to consider for different reasons, but this one stuck out first:

“In times of uncertainty, it’s hard to talk about additional change. Having said that, look, I got five (years as commissioner) left, this year and four more. Those teams, even if I push the issue, they won’t be playing by the time I’m done.”

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Notes: MiLB lawsuit, Rob Manfred’s lies, Nevada educators

Another win for the latest suit against MLB, Manfred calls someone else a liar, and more on Schools Over Stadiums.

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Earlier in September, a judge in New York state’s highest civil court declared that the lawsuits of the Tri-City Valley Cats and the Norwich Sea Unicorns, both former Minor League Baseball affiliate clubs, can proceed to trial in November. This was a significant victory for them, as Evan Drellich detailed at The Athletic, as Major League Baseball wanted to have the suits dismissed: not settled, but just gone.

Drellich, later in the month, tweeted out part of the transcript from the virtual meeting between the two sides, where the judge was “not having any of” MLB’s pleas for a delay in the trial — if the trial had to happen, MLB wanted to keep pushing it off as long as possible. From the sounds of it, though, the judge believes this should all proceed, which is good news for a few reasons. Most promising of which is that, the longer MLB’s antitrust exemption stays in the spotlight and looks like it does more harm than good, the better.

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Notes: MLB commissioner, Royals’ stadium, media and sports gambling

You don’t want a better liar even if you think you do, what’s going on with the Royals’ stadium search, and when a reporter also partners with a gambling site.

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“Surely things will be different with a new commissioner,” you think. No, no they will not. Maybe you’d be a little less angry at a new commissioner’s general public attitude, but their job is to be the representative of MLB’s 30 owners, which is to say, the job is to lie. To you, to local, state, and federal governments, to the players, to anyone who needs to hear the lies that would benefit the owners if they’re heard.

I got into this at Baseball Prospectus last week, in the wake of Rob Manfred basically making fun of A’s fans for getting together for one last home game to tell John Fisher where he could shove the Las Vegas stadium legislation. People dislike Manfred very much, and think things would be better with a new commissioner, but that’s just not how it goes by design:

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Rob Manfred made an empty threat against Oakland

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Well, I hope you’re sitting down for this. It’s some real heavy stuff. MLB commissioner Rob Manfred has threatened the city of Oakland. Saying the team could move to Las Vegas wasn’t enough: now the league is preparing to impose sanctions. In addition to claiming the A’s won’t be forced to pay relocation fees should they need to move, now Manfred has said if Oakland doesn’t give in and hand the A’s the stadium deal they’re looking for, so help them MLB is going to take away the A’s revenue-sharing dollars in 2024. May God have mercy on their souls.

If you can’t tell by all the ham above, this is some real goofy, empty threatening here, even my MLB commissioner standards. Neil deMause already covered quite a bit of the emptiness of it all at Field of Schemes, so you should read that, but I’ll grab a choice quote all the same:

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Rob Manfred said some unbelievable stuff hoping you’d believe it

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On Thursday, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred addressed the media following the quarterly meeting of the league’s owners. There… well, he said a lot of Manfred things, but none more Manfred than his declaration that owning an MLB team is a worse form of investing than the stock market. I don’t want to tackle how that looks from a Business Point of View, because it’s the kind of lie the wealthy who own sports teams want to be told in order to let them continue to operate in this exclusive, money-printing club with little questioning of where their money comes from, but I do want to discuss why we should consider this a lie in the first place.

I’m not even talking about an in-depth look at whether the numbers provided by the investment banker hired by MLB to tell the league they’re all good boys and girls who have been mistreated by the wicked press and players ring true or not. Just like, look at MLB’s history when it comes to how they talk about money, and how they hide how good the owners actually have it, and extrapolate from there.

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Jeff Luhnow is suing the Astros, claiming he’s a scapegoat

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Former Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow is suing his old team as well as Major League Baseball, according to the Los Angeles Times. Luhnow has been on something of an “I’m innocent!” tour of late, with regards to whether he knew anything about the Astros’ elaborate sign-stealing operation, and all of that was likely a way to plow the road for this lawsuit.

You are probably wondering why I’m bothering to write about this instead of just laughing it off as a desperate move by Luhnow to clear his name — and I cannot tell you how much I wish I were able to do that — but there might be a nugget of truth in here somewhere. Not regarding his innocence, of course: Luhnow definitely knew something was up, I do not care how many thousands of carefully curated text messages he brags about to tell you the opposite is true. The part of Luhnow’s suit that got my attention had to do with MLB and the Astros negotiating a punishment. Per the Times:

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