Tag Archives: Manfred Man

Commissioner, anyone?

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Adapted from JK’s speech to the Las Vegas chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research delivered 10 June 2023.

Calling baseball commissioner Rob Manfred an inveterate tinkerer is calling Donald Trump and Joe Biden mountebanks. Calling Manfred a visionary denigrates the very definition of vision. But those who pine for the so-called good old days, while letting themselves think Manfred’s lust for rule remaking/remodeling points toward them, must first be made to answer, “Which good old days?”

Certainly not the days when the bases were large stones. Certainly not when pitchers were required to throw no way but underhanded and from a standing position strictly. Certainly not when the one-hop hit to the outfield was ruled an out if the fielder snagged the ball on that hop. Certainly not when none but white men were permitted to play the major league game. 

There are some things from the so-called Good Old Days that ought to be preserved or exhumed, of course. That’s without regard to the particular period of Good Old Days the get-off-my-lawn crowd prefers to revive. There are also things heretofore inconceivable to which today’s governors of our game, Manfred on down, should lend far more thought than they do. But it cannot be Manfred to shepherd it any longer.

Would you like to become baseball’s next commissioner? If your answer is yes, at minimum you’ll need a reasonable station from which to disembark your train. What follows is a fourteen-step platform:

1. The august office itself. Upon assuming office, the new commissioner shall convene a rules committee to explore broadening the means by which commissioners are chosen in the future. There’s no sound reason why the owners alone should choose the game’s public steward and top administrator, since it’s long been proven that under the owners alone the commissioner thinks the good of the game is little more than making money for it, and them.

The commissioner of the future should be elected by the following group of 79 people: Single representatives of the owners and the players, each; and, designated representatives from each of major league baseball’s nineteen umpiring crews.

2.Tick-tock clock. On paper, and in the imagination, the pitch clock seemed sound as a nut. In actuality, it wreaks more havoc than should be allowed. Havoc, and no few injuries ranging from the simple to the serious and back. Not to mention the imposition upon pitchers with unique or at least colourful pitching styles. Those concerned about the coming of the Clockwork Baseball Player should concern themselves about and stand athwart anything that would make that coming reality.

3. Game time. Are we supposed to applaud that, thus far, the pitch clock and its concurrent impositions upon the batter have shaved a whole . . . half an hour on average off the time of play? Are we supposed to applaud that the truest culprit of the elongated major league game—namely, the broadcast commercial blocks after each half inning and during each pitching change—remains unmolested?

The pitch clock’s elimination should be matched by all effort to make a new broadcasting agreement that includes no commercial blocks longer than one minute after half-innings and thirty seconds during pitching changes. (Yes, Virginia, it really does take less time now for a relief pitcher to get from the bullpen to the game mound than for the commercials to play.)

4. Manfred Man. The free cookie on second base to open each extra half inning shall be eliminated. Permanently. The only Manfred man that should ever be in the public mind shall be, once again, the hitmaking band of the 1964-66 British Invasion.

5. We’re on the air, anywhere. Eliminate all blackout rules for television. Allow any major league game to be broadcast in any region regardless of whether the ballpark is in the same broadcast region. Let a million television sets bloom because decades of evidence have proven that, of all the reasons for people to stay away from the ballpark, television like radio before it is the least of those reasons.

(As a relevant aside, I still remember seeing Dodger Stadium fans clutching tiny portable TV sets in the park. With the pictures turned down but the sound turned up. Why? Because they wouldn’t believe what they’d just seen from beginning to end unless they heard it from the late Vin Scully.)

6. Umpires can be impeached, too. The umpires have been laws unto themselves for long enough. It’s past time for them to be held as accountable for their malfeasance as players, managers, and team administrators. There’s no reason on earth for accuracy below 96 percent to be permissible. If you doubt that, ponder that a surgeon with a 96 percent accuracy rating wouldn’t face job security, he’d face malpractise suits.

Umpires with accuracy below 96 percent shall be placed on probation for the rest of the incumbent season or the first half of the following season. Failure to improve will result in suspensions. And, yes, the rule book strike zone shall be enforced strictly. The days of umpires deploying their own strike zones must end. That by itself should help assure accuracy of 96 percent or higher behind the plate.

7. No tank you veddy much. Team ownerships who fail repeatedly to invest properly in their major league product and their minor league support systems shall be put on notice. You have one year to decide: Will you invest properly in your teams, every year, regardless of the free spoils of revenue sharings you receive before each season begin; or, will you sell your team to a local/regional ownership willing to do what needs to be done to put an honestly competitive team on the field.

Tanking is fan abuse, plain and simple. If you can afford to buy a major league baseball team, you can afford to put forth a product that gives honest effort to compete. Rebuilding on the fly has been done for eons, before and after the free agency era.

Concurrently, past commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s ridiculous prohibition on player sales shall be rescinded. Teams shall be allowed to sell their players on an open market for whatever price other teams are willing to pay—and the players to be sold shall receive at least 25-30 percent of the sale price. This will allow the supposedly not-so-rich teams to stay minimally competitive, too.

Call it the Averill-Landis Rule, after the ancient commissioner who thought Hall of Famer Earl Averill wasn’t nuts to demand to know how much of the sale price he might receive when the Cleveland Indians bought him from the Pacific Coast League.

While we’re at it, a tanking team must never be given permission to relocate, which leads to . . .

8. If you want to build it, we will come. Under no circumstances shall any team seeking to build a new ballpark go to the local and/or state government for help. For now we mean you, Oakland Athletics. It takes colossal gall to try strongarming your incumbent locale into building you a new ballpark and, when they call your bluff, try to strongarm Las Vegas into building one for you; or, at least, paying for half if not more of it.

The willful self-destruction of a team fan base should never be sanctioned. Neither should regional taxpayers be made to foot all or most of the bill for a new playpen. The Voice in Field of Dreams assuredly did not say, If you build it, they will pay for it.

9. Interleague, schminterleague. Eliminate it from the regular season. Entirely. Save it for when it truly matters—during the All-Star Game, and during the World Series.

10. Are the All-Stars out tonight? Absent one fan, one vote, one time requirements, eliminate the fan vote. Why? Because the All-Star Game must include rosters containing none but the absolute best players on the season thus far. If this means one or more teams lack All-Star representation, tough. This isn’t T-Ball.

While we’re at it, the next commissioner must rule that the All-Star Game also needs to cease being used as a gold watch, even for future Hall of Famers. They’ll get their tributes appropriately around the circuit without a final All-Star honorarium, not to mention those so qualified getting the big one in Cooperstown in due course.

11. Competition, not compensation. This nonsense must cease. The regular season’s meaning has been compromised long enough. And the saturation of postseason games has compromised more than enhanced the game. There’s no reason on earth why any team not parked in first place at season’s end should be playing for baseball’s championship.

Expansion should be pursued to create divisions with even numbers of teams. Then, two conferences of two divisions each shall be fashioned in each league. The wild cards shall be eliminated entirely.

Then, each league’s division champions will meet in a best-of-three division series. The winners in each league will then meet in a best-of-five League Championship Series. (You want the Good Old Days restored, there’s a splendid restoration.) The World Series shall remain its best-of-seven self with its primacy thus restored. (Postseason saturation will be scaled back considerably under such a system, too.)

Thus will baseball fans no longer be subject to the thrills, spills, and chills of watching teams fighting to the last breath to finish in . . . second or even third place.

12. We want a real ball! Something’s very wrong when the Japanese leagues can develop baseballs pitchers can grip easily and are eminently fair to both sides of the ball but the American major leagues—which own a major baseball manufacturer—can’t. All effort to develop a baseball that doesn’t require that new-fashioned medicated goo for pitchers but is consistent and fair to hitters as well shall be undertaken.

A new, consistent baseball shall be developed and brought into play within one year of the new commissioner taking office. It’s long past time for the thinking person’s sport and those who support and supply it to start thinking. Hard.

13. Pensions. The new commissioner shall convene an immediate panel from among all team ownerships and the Major League Baseball Players Association. This panel, at once, shall agree that it was wrong to eliminate pre-1980 short-career major league players from the realignment of 1980. That realignment granted pensions to all players who accrued 43 days of major league service time, and health benefits to all players accruing one day of major league time.

The calculations shall be done to ensure full and proper pensions, based on their actual major league time, to all 500+ surviving short-career players who played before the 1980 realignment. The 2011 Weiner-Selig stipend—one small payment per 43 days service time, which today equals $718 per 43 days—was laudable, but insufficient.

Those players backed their players union’s actions that led to or upheld free agency, too. They do not deserve to remain frozen out.

14. As your absolute first order of business in office. Before assuming office, the new commissioner’s first official pronouncement shall be to demand . . . a recount.

Ugly flamingo

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Once and for all. When they began referring to the free cookie on second base to begin each extra half-inning as Manfred man, I cringed. Not just because of the concept itself, but because I did and still do like only one Manfred Mann. And it’s taking every ounce of psychic strength to keep Manfred man from killing Manfred Mann for me.

For the life of me I can’t imagine Commissioner Rube Goldberg writing, never mind singing, the lyric to Manfred Mann’s greatest single and maybe the single prettiest love song of the 1964-66 British Invasion this side of “And I Love Her”:

Some sweet day, I’ll make her mine, pretty Flamingo,
then every guy will envy me, ’cause paradise is where I’ll be.

Because it was anything but some sweet day when Manfred decided it needed to be in the Show. And not every guy envies him for it. His idea of baseball paradise often includes detours into baseball’s Inferno. One of his predecessors began his professional life as a teacher and scholar whose specialty was Dante. We’re lucky if Manfred’s knowledge of Dante goes as far back as Bo Bichette’s one-time slugging father.

Many baseball “traditions” have deserved to go the way of the large stone bases with which the game we know began. Extra inning games without encumbrance or monkey business aren’t one of them.

Seriously. I get the alarm from teams concerned for the issues a long game one day leaves on their rosters for the game the day after. (Such issues are why I favoured the doubleheader of seven-inning games, and still do.) I get relief pitchers concerned for the extra erosion on their arms and shoulders if they’d worked a day or two before and then went into a late, long-lasting marathon.

But I don’t mean to say I don’t care whose arm gets ground down when I say that half the fun of baseball in the first place was the prospect of a tight game going to extra innings. When Astros rookie Jeremy Peña homered to end an eighteen-inning division series marathon and the Mariners’ season at once, it ended an affair that included twelve pitchers used between both sides and grand theater.

They don’t all go as marathon as that, regular or postseason.

They don’t all go 26 innings the way Brooklyn and Boston did in 1920, ending in a one-all tie because of darkness. (This was prehistoric baseball, before the lights went on in Cincinnati and in due course elsewhere.)

They don’t all go 25 the way the White Sox and the Brewers did in 1984 (this was the game that provided Harold Baines his [snort] Hall of Fame credential: he homered to end it), or the way the Cardinals and the Mets did a decade earlier. (This one ended with road running: the Cardinals’ Shake ‘n’ Bake McBride scored all the way from first . . . on a wild pickoff throw. No, they didn’t now dream up the pickoff throw limit the better to keep pitchers from being embarrassed by run-scoring throwing errors in the bottom of the 25th or elsewhere.)

They don’t all go 24 the way the Astros and the Mets did in April 1968, when the game ended on a classic Astroturf hit: a grounder skidding away from Mets shortstop Al Weis, allowing the winning run to score. (Credit to the Astrodome’s scoreboard operators for an inspirational message in the 20th inning: We hope you are enjoying tonight’s third game as much as you enjoyed the first two.)

Or, the way the Giants and the Mets did in a doubleheader nightcap in 1964, the Giants finally winning it and teenage Mets first baseman Ed Kranepool ending his day having played all 33 innings. (The Mets are the only franchise in Show history to play three 23+ inning games in their lifespan. They also lost all three.) In fact, in over a century plus of major league ball as we’ve known it, only eight games have gone 23 or more and only nine have gone exactly 22.

They don’t even all go eighteen, the way the Red Sox and the Dodgers did going eighteen in Game Five of the 2018 World Series, before Nathan Eovaldi’s stout six-inning relief performance was wrecked by Max Muncy with a leadoff launch over the left field fence. And I sure don’t remember anyone kvetching about the length of that one while it was ongoing.

So Manfred man was created first as one way to quicken things up during the pan-damn-ically shortened 2020 season, then kept year-by-year to quicken things up with or without a pan-damn-ic. Now, Manfred man’s been voted permanent by a joint competition committee until or unless voted otherwise by another joint competition committee. But who’s kidding whom?

Too many from Manfred onward complain incessantly about the length of baseball games. How many of those people kvetch about Super Bowl LVII requiring what proved to be three hours and thirty-one minutes to play? (No kvetch except over the halftime shows. I get that, too. For crying out loud, save the mini-concerts for post-game.) The team sport which yields its own singular blend of comedy and drama might take three plus hours—and even those who think Manfred’s as good for the game as a grease puddle to a pedestrian believe too much is more than enough.

“Certainly, everyone working at the game appreciates avoiding twenty-inning marathons,” writes The Athletic‘s Eno Sarris. “But those attending the game might disagree, and cite the fact that, with this rule in place, extra-inning runs have scored at over two times the rate they score in the first nine innings. That’s fundamentally different baseball! Their retort might ask baseball teams to build their rosters with more pitchers capable of going longer in emergency situations.”

The good news, and it’s the only spot of it in this regard, is that Manfred man still won’t show up in the postseason. Yet. The further bad news is that Manfred man won’t necessarily prevent the occasional extra inning games from turning into the equivalent of two games or even a third. There’s no absolute guarantee that Manfred man will turn into a run as swiftly as its advocates love to believe and its opponents per Sarris fear.

Suppose we re-aligned one of the actual key causes of protracted sports contests: broadcast commercials. (Admit it: at the stadium, you’ve seen players lingering before continuing play, the better to accommodate this call to the bullpen, that insertion of the special teams, the other double switch, the kickoff team’s advent yonder.) Imagine how much shorter a baseball game might be with broadcast commercials only between the full, not the half innings.

(Don’t go there: No, the Lords of Baseball don’t want their broadcast revenues cut; but, yes, they might go for negotiating delicious prices on mere full-inning commercials and getting them.)

Maybe that’s the core of the problem. The thinking person’s sport is somewhat overrun with short, shallow thinking. (It makes you wonder about the real objection to analytics/sabermetrics: it requires thought, and lots of it.) Starting with the man who brought to baseball’s extra half innings the ugly flamingo, also known as the ghost runner. (Who you gonna call? Ghostbusters, hopefully.)

Roots and Blues

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Vladimir Guerrero, Jr.

Vladimir Guerrero, Jr. takes Corbin Burnes across the Colorado state line in the All-Star Game. Manfred wants baseball back to its roots? How about also knocking off these hideous All-Star uniforms and letting the All-Stars represent their teams in their own uniforms again? It was good enough for the Home Run Derby, it should stay good enough for the All-Star Game.

Who are the faces of baseball today? Put the current injured lists to one side. Barring unforeseen complications or corollary issues, one and all on those lists now will be back either this season or next. Barring, too, one player of extraterrestrial achievement—you should spot the one most likely to produce it the rest of the year, too—it shouldn’t really be a singular face.

They should be players like Ronald Acuna, Jr., Pete Alonso, Mookie Betts, Shane Bieber, Kris Bryant, Nick Castellanos, Jacob deGrom, Rafael Devers, Freddie Freeman, Vladimir Guerrero, Jr., Bryce Harper, Aaron Judge, Clayton Kershaw, Trey Mancini, Shohei Ohtani, Max Scherzer, Juan Soto, Fernando Tatis, Jr., Mike Trout, Brandon Woodruff.

Instead, the face of the game, singular, seems to be its ten-thumbed, two-left-feet, too-lawyerly-for-his-own good commissioner, a man who seems almost never to let pass a chance to let the stars shine in baseball’s sky without sending up a homemade cloud.

On Home Run Derby Night, the Coors Field audience and baseball nation transfixed upon Ohtani (the prohibitive favourite), Soto, Mancini (the sentimental favourite), Guerrero, and Alonso (the eventual winner), among others. During the All-Star Game—which the American League won, 5-2—Ohtani and company were at least as watchable and discussable as those missing in action due to health concerns might have been.

So, perhaps naturally, Rob Manfred stepped all over himself yet again. Asked whom he thought the face of baseball is today, Castellanos named Manfred. Informed of that designation, Manfred said no. Then, he dropped a few matters to indicate his lips said no-no but there was yes-yes in his eyes.

He told a Baseball Writers Association of America meeting the day of the All-Star Game, “I think anything that distracts from the attention being on what goes on in the field is a bad thing.” Unfortunately, Commissioner Nero—who’s spent too much of his commissionership fiddling while baseball seems to burn—went on to do just that.

Manfred could well enough have waited until after the All-Star Game, confined his remarks to the BBWAA to just his thought on “distraction” from the All-Star field, then said he’d talk a little more the day after if they were willing to listen. (And who wouldn’t have been?)

I’ve already discussed his thought that the doubleheader of seven-inning games might disappear after this season. (And, why I think keeping the idea is sound as a nut.) Manfred also spoke of disappearing the free cookie on second base (known to wags as “Manfred Man”) to open each extra half-inning, a disappearance devoutly to be wished. As would be the three-batter minimum for relief pitchers. (Unless they enter during a jam and get rid of the side before batters two, three, or both appear.)

Unfortunately, Manfred didn’t address that third part, so far as I know. He must have been asleep at the switch the night Bryce Harper and Didi Grigorius got hit back-to-back by a fresh Cardinal reliever whose control took the night off but whose manager couldn’t relieve him legally until he faced his third batter.

The law of unintended consequences too often escapes Manfred’s lawyerly ways.

He also suggested he’d like to ban defensive overshifting, formally, as part of what he says is part and parcel of returning baseball “to its roots.” He suggests the owners are all in on that return, though long experience tells you that with most owners changes or restorations have less to do with the game itself and more to do with whether something means making money for it, which usually means for themselves.

Never mind that the shifts could and would be neutralised if teams start instructing their batters to take advantage of all that free real estate. Screw the unwritten rules. Just hit the ball onto it. Take first base on the house before the shifters can scramble for the ball. Even if the other guys have a no-hitter going to the final outs. I’ll say it again: you hand me that free territory with a no-hitter going, let your pitcher hold you to account when I show up on first on the house.

I’ll say it again: that, or an infield you know to be full of butchers enabling such base hits, should be the only time you want to see a widespread return of bunting. In all other situations, a bunt is a wasted out. Outs to work with are precious. Why waste a third of your inning’s resources and do the other guys such a favour?

You guessed it: I’m all in if Manfred really does bring the universal designated hitter back to stay in 2022. Guess which defensive position sports the Show’s worst slash line this year? (.109/.149/.142.) The worst OPS? (.291.) The most wasted outs? (No other positions show more than the catchers’ 40; these guys show 221.) A real batting average (RBA: total bases + walks + intentional walks + sacrifice flies + hit by pitches, divided by plate appearances) of .167?

Hint: Since the final decade of the dead ball era, they’ve hit a collective .166. Tell me how long a catcher, an infielder, or an outfielder would survive in the Show—if he was lucky enough to get to it at all—with that kind of hitting. Even if he was the defensive second coming (based on runs saved above their leagues’ averages at their positions) of Ivan Rodriguez, Keith Hernandez, Bill Mazeroski, Ozzie Smith, Brooks Robinson, Barry Bonds, Andruw Jones, or Roberto Clemente.

Manfred should consider the Pirates owner of 1891 who first proposed what we know now as the DH. About whose proposal a journal of the time, The Sporting Life, said in concurrence:

Every patron of the game is conversant with the utter worthlessness of the average pitcher when he goes up to try and hit the ball. It is most invariably a trial, and an unsuccessful one at that. If fortune does favor him with a base hit it is ten to one that he is so winded in getting to first or second base on it that when he goes into the box it is a matter of very little difficulty to pound him all over creation.

It wasn’t an invention of that nefarious American League. And if it hadn’t been for Chris (I am der boss pressident of der Prowns!) von der Ahe, reneging on a previous commitment to support William Chase Temple, when the idea came up at the next National League rules meeting, the NL would have had the honour of introducing what Pirates catcher-turned-Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack tried but failed to introduce to the AL fifteen years later.

If you want to see a little more leveling out between pitching and hitting, be advised that when the DH is used this year (by AL teams, and by NL teams playing interleague in the AL Park) the DHs have the best OPS (.767) in Show at this writing. If you want more “strategy”—and you won’t throw things at me when I remind you that 95 percent of all “strategy” is plotted before the game begins—you should prefer that number-nine batting order slot go to either a second cleanup type or an extra leadoff type.

“Returning baseball to its roots” can be tricky. Even if it suggests Manfred might finally be willing to quit trying to prove that the birth child of that backstreet affair between Rube Golberg and the Mad Hatter should be a baseball executive.

It depends on the roots to which you want to return. How about eliminating regular-season interleague play? How about eliminating the wild card system that’s produced the thrills and chills of teams fighting to the last breath to finish . . . in second place?

How about a best-of-three division series with each league’s best first-place finisher having a bye while the other two winners slug it out? How about returning the League Championship Series to the best-of-five of its birth and childhood? How about thus eliminating October saturation and restoring the World Series to its proper primacy?

Unfortunately, those beg one further question right now: Since Manfred can’t seem to find the right way to make serviceable, field-leveling baseballs (easier to look into an acceptable stickum for pitcher grips, as he’s also doing), how far above his pay grade would those and other reasonable moves really prove?

Back to baseball’s roots? Be gone, hideous 2021 All-Star uniform! The threads (especially the American League’s “road” blue) made the horrific 1970s single-colour pajamas of some teams resemble something from Pierre Cardin. If players wearing their own uniforms, representing their teams, is good enough for the Home Run Derby, it’s still good enough for the All-Star Game.

Where have you gone, Bart Giamattio? A nation turns its lonely eyes to you.