Mike's Mets - Rob Manfred Inserts Foot Firmly in Mouth

Rob Manfred Inserts Foot Firmly in Mouth

By Mike Steffanos July 02, 2020

Rob Manfred went on the Dan Patrick radio show yesterday and essentially admitted that MLB never negotiated in good faith regarding the length of the season. So, basically, Manfred is letting us know that the excruciating weeks we just lived through, where MLB was constantly leaking offers for longer slates of games but included such poison pills as revenue sharing, drastic pay cuts beyond prorated salaries, and lower regular season pay if the playoffs were cancelled, was all just a huge waste of everyone's time.

We'll let Manfred's own words from the interview speak for themselves:

The reality is, we weren't going to play more than 60 games no matter how the negotiations with the players went... We're playing sixty games in sixty-three days. I don't see, given the reality of the health situation over the past few weeks, how we were going to get going any faster than the calendar we're on right now.

Of course, once the feces hit the fan, Manfred had somewhat of a retraction in USA Today, which often lately seems to serve as a safe spot for the commissioner. Manfred was, of course, claiming that he was simply misunderstood. In an effort to "clarify" his remarks on Patrick's show, Manfred was quoted:

My point was that no matter what happened with the union, the way things unfolded with the second spike, we would have ended up with only time for 60 games, anyway. As time went on, it became clearer and clearer that the course of the virus was going to dictate how many games we could play... If we had started an 82-game season [beginning July 1], we would have had people in Arizona and Florida the time the second spike hit.

I'm going to make some points here that I think are important:

• I don't really believe that Manfred was "confessing" to anything on Dan Patrick's show. I do, however, believe that MLB really did have a number of games they wanted to play all along, and purposely made offers they knew were unlikely to fly with the players to string negotiations along until the clock ran down far enough. I'm hardly alone in that suspicion, but it's almost beside the point.


• Given the current tension between MLB and the Players Association based on the above suspicion, Manfred's comments on the subject were inartful to the extreme. The man is Commissioner of Baseball and also a trained lawyer. His comments on Patrick's show represented the rankest of rookie mistakes. They were guaranteed to cause a controversy. You don't have to impart the worst possible motives to Manfred's comments to still find fault that they were so very stupid.


• I'm not quite sure how MLB managed to obtain from the coronavirus the exact day when the second wave of virus is going to hit, but Manfred has constantly implied that days mattered when they were setting a schedule. MLB could have tossed the union a bone and offered a compromise between 60 and the 70 games in the union's last proposal. The season would have stretched another week maybe? Somehow that week would have made the difference between completing and not completing the playoffs?

Seriously, Manfred speaks with such authority about when the second wave of coronavirus is going to hit. If he has some inside information, perhaps he will share it with the rest of us. Even better, he could step down as commissioner and take over handling coronavirus response for the country. Maybe we could get someone in the commissioner's office who could give an interview without adding fuel to an already smoldering fire.

On Patrick's show, Manfred gave the following quote about the negotiations between MLB and the union:

Look, we did get a sub-optimal result from the negotiations. The fans won't get an expanded postseason, which I think would have been good with the shortened season. The players left real money on the table. That's what happens when you have a negotiation that, instead of being collaborative, gets into a conflict situation.

Again, could MLB have reached an agreement with the union that included the expanded playoffs that the owners wanted so badly if they had just counteroffered a season that went one week into October? If MLB was worried about protecting the postseason they could have moved it to a single site and quarantined everyone until their team was eliminated. This robotic insistence that the season end the last week of September rather than the first week of October took away the last chance at a mutually negotiated agreement.

Bottom line: I don't care what Manfred really meant. He continues to prove himself to be not up to the challenge of his job.

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