Tag Archives: Rob Manfred

ASG: As (almost) usual, show biz yields to baseball

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Jarren Duran

Red Sox center fielder Jarren Duran hoists the clear bat awarded the All-Star Game’s Most Valuable Player. His tiebreaking two-run homer held up to give the AL the 5-3 win.

God help us all, everyone. The All-Star break began with a pre-Home Run Derby singing of “The Star Spangled Banner” Monday night (by country star Ingrid Andress) that made youth cringe and elders think wistful thoughts of Roseanne Barr. It ended with a tenth American League All-Star Game win in eleven seasons.

In between, of course, was much to ponder and much to dismiss as patent nonsense, which seems to be far more the norm than Chicago Tribune sports editor Arch Ward, who initiated the game in 1933, might have imagined.

Phillies third baseman Alec Bohm could be seen having to labour to keep from laughing (presumably, that he might not weep—or wish to commit manslaughter) when Andress tackled “The Star Spangled Banner” as though too well besotted. It turned out that appearance was everything: She copped the following day to being drunk and having enough issue with it to seek rehab and recovery.

Wish her well, but demand to know why nobody in baseball’s administration noticed she was drunk as she took the mike in the first place.

That was then: The Derby rules were, a participant had ten outs to hit as many homers as they could, the hitter with the most such bombs advanced, and that was that. So simple that, in fact, even Mark Belanger (human Electrolux at shortstop, but a spaghetti bat who hit three fewer homers in eighteen major league seasons than the late Hall of Famer Willie Mays hit in the first half of 1965) could have done it.

This is now: Round One—three minutes or forty batted balls, whichever came first, followed by an old-style three outs to hit as many bombs as possible. Round Two—the top four floggers moved to a bracket-like semifinal. Round Three—the two semifinal winners head to head. The net result: Teoscar Hernandez (Dodgers) defeating Bobby Witt, Jr. (Royals), who nearly forced a playoff with a ICBM-like blast stopped only by the left center field fence.

Some of us still wonder why we’re supposed to tolerate three-hour long Home Run Derbies but arise armed against two and a half hour-plus real baseball games. Or, why we had three-minute commercials aboard Fox’s All-Star Game telecast Tuesday before seeing supersonic relief pitchers blowing the side away in order in a minute and a half if that long.

Perhaps commissioner Rob Manfred might have an answer to that one. At least he has a sort-of answer to the question (posed by The Athletic‘s Tyler Kepner) of when the ever-more-hideous generic All-Star Game uniforms of the past several years will be disappeared in favour of returning the fine old tradition of All-Stars wearing their own uniforms and thus representing their teams.

“I am aware of the sentiment and I do know why people kind of like that tradition,” Commissioner Pepperwinkle told Kepner. “There will be conversations about that.” The proper two-word answer to that, of course, is, prove it. About knowing why people (more than kind of) like that tradition and holding serious conversations about it.

Well, take the proverbial pause for the proverbial cause. That very first All-Star Game featured the American League representatives wearing their own teams’ home uniforms with the National League wearing road threads, as modeled below by Hall of Fame catcher Gabby Hartnett:

Gabby Hartnett

Behold now this year’s threads for each league:

Yes, we have seen far worse for generic All-Star uniforms.

Except for each league’s colour scheme, is it really that radically different from the 1933 NL haberdashery? Now, this year’s threads would look far nicer if the American League jersey was done with red-on-white (the AL was the home team in Globe Life Field) and the National League was done with blue-on-gray (since the NL is the visiting team). And worn over either white (home) or gray (road) pants.

My normal position is to be all-in on returning to the practise of each league’s All-Stars wearing their own teams’ uniforms, representing their teams and fan bases, as their forebears did for so many decades. If Commissioner Pepperwinkle insists ultimately upon keeping generic league uniforms, this year’s style just might be the right way to go, switching the core white and gray each year depending upon which league is the All-Star host.

The wherefores of this year’s uniforms mattered less when the game got underway, and rookie NL starting pitcher Paul Skenes (Pirates) got to face Aaron Judge (Yankees) after all, thanks to Judge’s teammate Juan Soto wringing himself into a walk. The bad news: Judge forcing Soto at second with a grounder to third for the side.

AL manager Bruce Bochy (Rangers) was well aware of the marquee appeal of Skenes versus Judge while penciling Judge into his cleanup slot. But he sent three lefthanded swingers with impeccable on-base credentials up against the righthanded Pirate phenom to open, hoping precisely to get that marquee match without sacrificing his best chances to start winning the game.

Joe and Jane Fan insist, “This is just an exhibition, dammit!” Maybe they’re right. Maybe the metastasis of regular-season interleague play to a full-season thing has left the All-Star Game bereft of meaning, as opposed to such artifices as the period when postseason home field advantage went to the league who won the Game..

But maybe a Hall of Famer in waiting who’s won four World Series as a skipper knows, however the game’s been kicked around like a commissioner’s plaything for too damn long, that himself, his NL counterpart Torey Lovullo (Diamondbacks), and the players on both sides, actually do play this particular game as baseball, not show business.

Shohei Ohtani

Shohei Ohtani detonating a three-run homer in the third inning. “To be able to share a dugout with him was surreal.”—Pirates pitcher Paul Skenes. Ohtani is now the only player in Show history to earn a pitching win in one All-Star Game and a home run in another All-Star Game.

So Bochy got Joe and Jane Fan their marquee matchup the old fashioned way, and Skenes came out of it on top, but Bochy’s diligence left him the only manager in major league history to win a World Series and an All-Star Game in each league. And, the first since Hall of Famer Joe McCarthy to manage an All-Star Game at home the season after he won a World Series.

Putting baseball ahead of show biz has enriching payoffs, of which Commissioner Pepperwinkle seemed as unaware as both managers were reminded soon enough en route the American League’s 5-3 win Tuesday.

Lovullo got the first such reminder when Shohei Ohtani (Dodgers) faced Tanner Houck (Red Sox) in the top of the third with nobody out, two men on, and sent a 2-0 splitter a few rows back into the right center field seats. (The last Dodger to hit one out in All-Star competition? Hall of Famer Mike Piazza, 28 years earlier.) Bochy got his in the bottom of that inning, when Soto shot a two-run double to center and David Fry (Guardians) singled him home to tie the game at three after another Judge ground out.

Two innings later, Lovullo got the reminder that ended up counting for the game, when Jarren Duran (Red Sox) batted with two out and one on, took a strike from Hunter Greene (Reds), then caught hold of a Greene splitter and sent his own message into the same region of seats where Ohtani’s blast landed.

“It won’t hit me until I try to go to sleep tonight,” Duran told The Athletic postgame. “Who knows if I’ll be able to sleep tonight.”

A guy in his fourth Show season who entered this All-Star Game leading it with ten triples and the AL with 27 doubles, then detonated what proved the winning bomb Tuesday, deserves to sleep the sleep of the just. So does the rookie whose first two months in Show have made him a name and an arm to reckon with as it was, without giving him the additional gift of being an Ohtani teammate even for just one game—thus far.

“I tried to enjoy the three hours I had on a team with him,” Skenes said postgame, “because that’s probably only going to happen once a year. It was really cool to watch him do that, really cool to watch him go about his business and get to meet him and all that. You know, he’s—I don’t know of any hitters I’ve faced that’s better than him in my career. So, to be able to share a dugout with him was surreal.”

The only thing better for either would have been an NL win, of course. Nobody had to tell Skenes it was neither his nor Ohtani’s fault the NL came up two bucks short Tuesday.

Where’s baseball’s Mr. Blackwell?

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Shohei Ohtani

If he wasn’t already the arguable most famous player on the planet, Shohei Ohtani might be unrecognisable in baseball’s new Vapor Jersey.

Rob Manfred has announced he will retire as baseball commissioner when his contract expires in 2029. Before anyone thanked him for the gift a day after pitchers and catchers reported officially for spring training, enough remembered that it means he has nearly six full seasons yet ahead to commit more mischief than he’s committed already.

He’s the classic instance of the tinkerer who develops one sound idea in the middle of developing twenty more about which “sound” is inoperative. Perhaps more than most commissioners, Commissioner Pepperwinkle’s been one to whom there’s rarely an issue he can’t make worse.

“Politics,” Groucho Marx once observed, “is the art of looking for trouble, finding it, misdiagnosing it, and misapplying the wrong solutions.” Baseball under Manfred’s stewardship has been the same art on another level.

Manfred sought and imposed assorted changes aimed mostly at appeasing that part of its audience to whom the ballpark and its intended presentation shouldn’t interfere with its online life. So long as it continued to make money for the owners, there has seemed precious little he couldn’t entertain, the game itself be damned.

Baseball still has issues enough to resolve or relieve without Commissioner Pepperwinkle and his minions trying and failing at fashion consultation. The players were greeted for 2024 with new uniforms about which the word “abomination” seems an understatement so far as many if not most are concerned.

Officially, the new jerseys are known as the Nike Vapor Premier, the athletic gear maker promoting the new product manufactured by Fanatics. The good news is that they’re made to withstand the peaks of the summertime heat, and that exhausts the good news. Nike’s claim that the new jerseys are “softer, lighter, stretchier,” in the words of Athletic writer Stephen J. Nesbitt, seem to enough players code for poor fitting, cheap looking, and inconsistently made.

“It looks like a replica,” says an Angels outfielder, Tyler Ward, to Nesbitt. “It feels kind of like papery. It could be great when you’re out there sweating, it may be breathable. But I haven’t had that opportunity yet to try that out. But from the looks of it, it doesn’t look like a $450 jersey.”

It also doesn’t look like anyone will be able to recognise its wearers. The name on the uniform front may be the most important thing, but the names on the back look to be about half or less the size they usually were. “Look at the last names, bro,” urged another Angel, relief pitcher Carlos Estévez, to another Athletic writer, Tyler Kepner. “I’m six-foot-six. This is going to look tiny on me.”

“Hey, maybe the players–many with Nike sponsorship deals–will change their minds once they play a few games,” Kepner observes. “Maybe, in time, the jerseys won’t look like the replica you buy when you’re trying to save money but still want to kinda look authentic. But the underlying concept persists. Baseball, guided by Nike, is trying to force-feed all these stylistic changes instead of just letting them happen organically.”

If Shohei Ohtani wasn’t already baseball’s most famous and familiar player, you might have a hard time recognising him in his new field threads.

Trying to force-feed changes not limited to the stylistic alone has been a Manfred trademark, one he took up only too happily from his predecessor and former boss Bud Selig. You remember Selig, the man who believed baseball needed regular-season interleague play and wild card postseason entrants in the first place, beliefs Manfred has pushed to extremes that have turned baseball’s postseason into just another playoff system and rendered the All-Star Game entirely meaningless.

Remember: Manfred was the man who assumed office swearing baseball uniforms needed no advertising on them. He swore it long enough to cave in and allow it, a few years later. At least, as Kepner notes, he was honest about it when talking about it two years ago: “It’s a revenue source that is significant enough that it’s really impossible for a sport to ignore over the long haul. I think that’s the truth.”

Some think he’s full of what’s spread around the infield and outfield grass to keep it healthy. That works for the field but not for the game. “[J]ust because you can make money by selling something,” Kepner continues, “doesn’t mean you should.” True that. Ask anyone who thinks as I do that such abominations as City Connect and All-Star Game uniforms make baseball look like anything but the thinking person’s sport.

Baseball never seems to have a Mr. Blackwell around when it needs him.

Speaking of the All-Star Game’s threads, Manfred did just that when getting candid about the advertising patches on the sleeves: “I never thought that a baseball team wearing different jerseys in a game was a particularly appealing look for us. I understand that people can have different views on that topic, but it is part of a larger program designed to market the game in a non-traditional way.”

It’s one thing to acknowledge there’ve been several baseball “traditions” that needed to go the way of large stones for bases. But did Manfred ever stop to think there was particular pride in ballplayers chosen as All-Stars representing, you know, their teams and their home fans? (The super cynics among us might follow that by asking, “Did Manfred ever stop to think, period?”)

Manfred has also spoken up about himself and the owners for whom he truly works pondering a defined free agency signing period. That seems not to be a terrible thing in and of itself, when you observe how many valuable free agents are still without teams as spring training settles in. On the surface, a defined signing period looks sound as a nut. On the surface. Beneath the surface? Be very afraid.

Baseball ownerships historically have found ways to make the sound unsound and to sneak around what were thought to be impeccable guidelines. They’ve been pulled over as scofflaws often enough by officers of Murphy’s Law. And Commissioner Pepperwinkle may yet have more cringe-creating in him before the intended retirement enough people think can’t arrive soon enough.

The last of the big boys buried

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Johan Rojas

Young center fielder Johan Rojas making the catch of his life so far, robbing Ronald Acuña, Jr. of a possible Game Four-changing double and saving the Phillies’ NLDS triumph in the bargain Thursday night.

If you consider 100+ game regular season winners the truly big boys, they’ve all been knocked out of the postseason before it even got to the League Championship Series. The 90-game winning Phillies secured that dubious distinction when they sent the Braves home for the winter Thursday night.

And they didn’t need Bryce Harper to do the heavy lifting this time. Nick Castellanos was more than happy to do that when he hit two more solo home runs, this time off the Braves’ best starting pitcher, this time making himself the first man ever to hit two bombs each in two postseason games.

Spencer Strider all but owned the Phillies in regular season play. In postseason play the Phillies puncture him just enough, including in their National League division series Game Four. And, unlike a lot of young men whose ownership thus becomes subject to hostile postseason takeover, Strider didn’t flinch when asked the wherefore.

“I’m not a person that makes excuses,” Strider said after the Phillies punched their NLCS ticker with an emphatic enough 3-1 win. “I’m sure there’s a lot of Braves fans out there that are not happy, and they have every right to be that way. We’ve got nobody to blame but ourselves. Me personally, I wasn’t good enough.”

Neither did he flinch when asked whether the postseason system awarding byes to the top two seeds in each league harmed the Braves for the extra week off.

“I think that the people trying to use the playoff format to make an excuse for the results they don’t like are not confronting the real issue,” Strider continued. “You’re in control of your focus, your competitiveness, your energy. And if having five days off (means) you can’t make that adjustment, you’ve got nobody to blame but yourself.”

“We got beat,” Braves manager Brian Snitker said, “by a really good club that has a penchant for this time of year.”

For me, the real issue is letting teams into the postseason at all who give their fans the thrills, chills, and spills of fighting to the last breath to finish . . . in second place. Forcing the teams who owned the regular season to run the gamut through lesser-performing teams in order to even think about a shot at the World Series.

And yet, it couldn’t hurt to watch the games, anyhow.

Especially between the Braves and the Phillies, finishers one and two in the National League East. Especially since the Braves were the only departing division champions who didn’t get swept out of what’s now their only postseason set of the year.

The Phillies didn’t have easy work to do. Not against the team who hit a record 307 regular-season home runs. But nobody figured anyone, never mind the Phillies, to out-homer these Braves in this division series 11-3, with Castellanos and Harper accounting for 63 percent of those bombs, and Harper himself hitting as many homers as the entire Braves team for the set.

And, with Ronald Acuña, Jr., Mr. 40/70, held to three hits without reaching the seats while walking twice but stealing nothing.

The nearest Acuña got to serious damage was in the top of the Game Four seventh. With Cardiac Craig Kimbrel relieving Jose Alvarado, entering a first-and-second jam, Kimbrel went from 1-2 to 2-2 before handing Acuña something to drive to the back of center field. Citizens Bank Park’s crash carts were on red alert.

Then young Phillies center fielder Johan Rojas, who wasn’t hitting much but who was making his bones with the leather (he was worth nine defensive runs on the regular season), ran the drive down and, after one hesitation step at the track, hauled it in on the track two steps shy of the wall . . . and just shy of becoming at least a two and possibly three-run double.

Strider dodged a Harperian bullet in the first inning Thursday night. He had Trea Turner on second with a one-out double down the left field line and off the wall. He tried to pitch around Harper, knowing that Harper needs only one swing to wage nuclear destruction, but after falling behind 3-0, Braves manager Brian Snitker said don’t even think about it, put him on.

For that moment Snitker resembled Casey Stengel the Yankee dominator, as Strider struck Alec Bohm out and got Bryson Stott to fly out to center field for the side. Strider didn’t look overwhelming with two walks and two hits on his jacket in two innings. He needed help from center fielder Michael Harris II again, Harris making a highlight-reel sliding catch of Rojas’s one-out liner to center in the second, then doubling Castellanos off second for the side.

The Phillies’ plate plan included just making Strider throw as many pitches as possible whatever the results. But they wouldn’t say no if an early count pitch looked delicious enough to dine. With one out in the bottom of the fourth, and the Braves up 1-0 thanks to Austin Riley’s solo homer in the top of the frame, Strider served Castellanos just such a slider, and Castellanos served it into the left field seats.

Phillies shortstop Trea Turner saw a similar feast heading his way on the first pitch with one out in the bottom of the fifth, breaking the tie with his own launch into the left field seats. Until then, Turner had faced Strider seventeen times in his career and gone hitless for his effort. What a difference two months plus makes.

One moment, in August, Turner’s struggles were so profound that someone asked, and Phillies fans agreed, to bathe him in cheers just for encouragement his first time up. Now, he put the Phillies in the lead and would finish the set with a 1.441 OPS for it. He also finished a triple short of the cycle in Game Three and became the first Phillie—ever—to have a 4-for-4 game in a postseason set.

An inning after Turner unloaded, Castellanos finished Strider’s evening’s work with another solo homer. This time, Castellanos was kind enough not to do it on the first pitch, hitting a 1-2 fastball not too far from where his first bomb landed.

The Braves had one more shot at forcing a fifth game in the ninth. Marcell Ozuna wrung a leadoff walk out of Phillies reliever Gregory Soto and Sean Murphy singled him to third. Exit Soto, enter Matt Strahm. He got Kevin Pillar to pop out behind second base where Turner hauled it in; he got pinch hitter Eddie Rosario to fly out to left not deep enough to score Ozuna; and, he landed a swinging strikeout on pinch hitter Vaughan Grissom.

That sealed the fate of the Braves who’ve been ousted from two straight postseasons after winning the 2021 World Series. This time, the Phillies pitching staff and defense found a way to keep their regular-season threshing machine from threshing in this set. (Their NLDS slash: .186/.255/.264.) The Braves’ pitching staff and defense couldn’t stop the Phillies from looking . . . almost like the regular-season Braves. (The Phillies: NLDS slash: .275/.373/.565.)

“Obviously, we’re going to have to make an adjustment in the way we handle the postseason and the way that we focus and prepare for it,” Strider said, “but we’re going to get to work the moment we get out of here.”

Like the Dodgers, the Braves had compromised starting pitching. They missed veteran Charlie Morton, dealing with an index finger injury. Also, having Max Fried pitch only once in three weeks prior to Game Two because of finger blistering hurt.

But Braves catcher Travis d’Arnaud, who pinch hit for Harris in the Game Four seventh and drew the bases-loading walk from Kimbrel, handed the Phillies the major credit. “All of them stepped up,” he said. “All of their big offense and their pitching. Their bullpen all stepped up. Their starters all stepped up. Ranger had a tremendous series, Zack (Wheeler) had a tremendous game, (Aaron) Nola, their whole bullpen. Their pitching was unbelievable.”

Wheeler, Nola, and Game Four starter Ranger Suárez have started all six Phillies postseason games thus far. Their collective ERA for the span: 1.54. The Phillies bullpen over the same six games: 1.29 ERA. D’Arnaud may have made the understatement of the postseason through today.

“In baseball, it’s not always the best team that wins, it’s the team that plays the best that day,” said Braves reliever A.J. Minter, who surrendered one earned run in two and a third series innings. “And they played better than us, that’s what it came down to. We’ve just got to come back this offseason and be ready to go at spring training . . . When we won the World Series in ’21, we weren’t necessarily the best team.”

The best team doesn’t always win. You can ask the 1921 Yankees, the 1924 Giants, the 1952 Dodgers, the 1954 Indians, the 1969 Orioles, the 1981 Reds, the 1987 Tigers and Cardinals, the 1990 Athletics, and the 2001 Mariners, among others. Now, you can ask this year’s Braves, Brewers, Dodgers, Orioles, and Rays, too. Those were baseball’s top five teams this season.

But now the number six Astros go to the American League Championship Series against the number eight Rangers, and the Astros will be the only division winner involved in an LCS. The number seven Phillies go to the National League Championship Series against the number twelve Diamondbacks. There’s a reasonable if not ironclad chance that baseball’s seventh or twelfth best team could face its eighth best team in the World Series.

You tell me something isn’t terribly wrong with that picture no matter how much fun the games were to watch, anyway. No matter how much you loved Harper answering the post-Game Two trolling Braves. No matter how much you loved Castellanos’s Games Three and Four demolition or Harper’s continuation as his own kind of Mr. October. No matter how much you loved watching the Phillies’ pitching keep the Braves from truly serious mischief. No matter how much fun we’ll have watching the two LCSes, anyhow.

Just don’t ask commissioner Rob Manfred.

“I’m sort of the view you need to give something a chance to work out,” Manfred said. “I know some of the higher-seeded teams didn’t win. I think if you think about where some of those teams were, there are other explanations than a five-day layoff. But I think we’ll reevaluate in the offseason like we always do and think about if we have the format right . . . It’s Year Two (of the three-wild-card format). I think we need to give it a little time . . . We all want the competition to be the best it can possibly be.”

As the great (and Spink Award-winning Hall of Fame) New York Times baseball writer Red Smith once said of then-commissioner Bowie Kuhn dismissing Curt Flood’s reserve challenge out of mealymouthed hand, Commissioner Pepperwinkle really seems to be saying, “Run along, sonny, you bother me.”

ESPN writer in depth: Oakland was had

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Oakland Athletics fans

Few fans are more abused by the shenanigans of their team’s owner than A’s fans.

Come November, seemingly, baseball’s owners may have the chance to vote on whether or not to let Athletics owner John Fisher finish what he started, namely hijacking the A’s to Las Vegas. Seemingly.

Getting it to their vote is a three-layered process. It should end with the A’s told to stay put, with Fisher told to sell the team, and with new owners tasked for good faith work with Oakland that will keep the A’s there without one taxpayer’s dime to pay for it.

Right now, the best news for abused A’s fans is that the team isn’t going to equal the 1962 Mets for season-long futility. As of Thursday morning, the A’s sat at 46-106 with ten games left to play. They’re 7-11 in September including a current seven-game losing streak, but even if they lose those final ten they won’t overthrow the Original Mets. Swell.

Because the worse news, according to an in-depth examination by ESPN’s Tim Keown, is that Fisher and his trained seal David Kaval “blindsided” Oakland with their plan to move the A’s to Las Vegas. It’s also that Fisher running the so-called “parallel track” between staying in Oakland and moving to Las Vegas might well have been a one-way track in disguise.

Bottom line: Oakland was had. Fisher’s failed attempt to strong-arm the city into all but handing him a $12 billion Howard Terminal development project that seems to have included a by-the-way new ballpark for the A’s turned into Fisher picking up his badly-abused baseball toy and carting it off to Vegas in due course.

On 19 April, according to Keown’s examination, Oakland mayor Sheng Thao was driving home from a local business opening, comfortable that the gap in keeping the A’s in Oakland was down to a mere $36 million once the city learned of $64 million in federal grants coming toward Howard Terminal.

That’d teach her. Because as she drove, Keown said, Kaval called. Oops. “Hey, just a heads up. Somebody leaked to the press that we have a binding deal with Las Vegas.”

“Thao had scheduled a week of intensive talks with the A’s and a team of mediators to bring the deal home,” Keown wtote. “Hotel rooms were booked. Flights were reserved. Thao even gave it a name: The Negotiation Summit. At the event the evening of Kaval’s phone call, Thao told Leigh Hanson, her chief of staff, ‘I really think we’re going to get this over the finish line’.”

Not quite. After one call leading to another leading to another, Fisher himself called Thao. She told Keown Fisher said, quote, “I feel really bad. I really like you and I like working with you, but we’re going to focus all our energy on Las Vegas.” “In the very beginning,” she said she replied, “I literally asked you, ‘Are you serious about Oakland?’ and you said yes. But if your focus is on Vegas, good luck.”

The leaked story appeared in the Las Vegas Review-Journal. Thao’s chief of staff Leigh Hanson told Keown, “Not sure it’s a leak when you’re quoted in the story. Pretty sure that’s not how leaks work. If you’re going to be strategic, try not to be so sloppy.”

Sloppy? That doesn’t begin to describe this disaster. Neither does it begin describing Fisher and Kaval not only pronouncing the $12 billion Howard Terminal plan dead, but also trading Fisher’s so-called “legacy” project in Las Vegas—55 acres off the Strip, and a community park atop a ballpark—for nine acres where the Tropicana Hotel now sits.

Except that Keown says further that the A’s relocation application to MLB now doesn’t even include a ballpark proposal. Sketches were produced and published back last spring, of course, but there’s not only no park propsal in the application—a ballpark which would  have to be domed or retractably-roofed thanks to Las Vegas’s notoriously hot summers—there’s no financing plan noted and no architect designated.

All that after Nevada lawmakers approved and Gov. Joseph Lombardo signed a bill authorising $380 million public dollars to build a ballpark on the Tropicana site, and sports economists began tabulating how much higher prospective cost overruns would run the taxpayer price tag no matter how much the A’s would kick in to help cover them.

Nevada fell hook, line, and stinker after Fisher and Kaval essentially tried and failed to game Oakland. “Fisher wanted to build a new, state-of-the-art ballpark at Howard Terminal because he had a vision of changing those 55 acres around the Terminal,” writes Cup of Coffee‘s Craig Calcaterra, interpreting the damning Keown report.

Fisher wanted to be a hero; he didn’t want to build a new stadium because it would be good for the fans, or it was simply something the team needed after playing in a decrepit ballpark for so long. He wanted the plaudits. When Fisher didn’t get exactly what he wanted exactly when he wanted it from Oakland, he wasted no time in taking the next-best deal in Vegas.

Hilariously, the Fisher and Kaval’s rush to Vegas has been largely disorganized. Keown notes that in the Athletics’ revenue projections, they assumed an annual attendance of 2.5 million fans, but their proposed new ballpark in Vegas would only seat 30,000. Multiply 30,000 by 81 home games and you get 2.43 million — a mathematical impossibility, even if they sold out every single home game. Furthermore, the Athletics don’t have an actual ballpark design, a financing plan, an interim home for the team until they open the new digs, nor do they even have an architect.

After Lombardo signed the aforesaid bill, I wrote this: “An optimist may now be described as someone who thinks enough owners will a) wake up and decide, after all, that there’s something transparently stupid about billionaires unwilling to build their teams’ own digs without a taxpayer soak; and, b) show enough spine, accordingly, to stand athwart Fisher (and Manfred, their hired hand, after all), yelling ‘Stop!'”

But who will yell? Especially with the Rays reaching a deal for their own new $1.3 billion ballpark in St. Petersburg, for which the Rays reportedly will only have to pay half, with the other half coming from city and Pinellas County governments, which means from taxpayers living in or visiting that area.

Will it be the preliminary three-owner review panel of Mark Attanasio (Brewers), John Middleton (Phillies), and John Sherman (Royals), not exactly the Three Stooges but three of the smartest owners among a group not exactly renowned for brains?

Will it be commissioner Rob Manfred (whose hands are anything but clean in the entire A’s mess) and an eight-member executive board, knowing Manfred is too willing to grant Fisher and the A’s a bye on the usual required nine-figure-plus relocation fee?

Will it be enough among the remaining thirty owners if and when it gets far enough for their vote? Will they be willing to a Fisher who more or less abused the living daylights out of Oakland and its baseball team before deciding he and it have a future in Las Vegas, long-enough-suffering A’s fans in Oakland be damned?

The Attanasio-Middleton-Sherman panel should be brainy enough to do what they can to recommend against rewarding Fisher-Kaval’s bad faith playing and convince enough of their peers to vote no. “This whole process” Calcaterra writes, “has been even more of a circus than we thought.” In the Fisher-Koval circus, it seems the clowns and the animals trade off on holding the keys.

But at least the A’s won’t meet or beat the Original Mets for season-long futility. Isn’t that just peachy?

Where was Rob?

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Baltimore Orioles fans

The commissioner’s lack of thought or action over the unwarranted Kevin Brown suspension is more than just a terrible look.

In 1988, the Democratic National Convention rocked to Sen. Edward M. Kennedy’s list of doings and concurrent demands of Republican presidential nominee George H.W. Bush, “Where was George?” Those who knew too well of (speaking politely) Kennedy’s rakish and adulterous ways snarked right back, “Dry, sober, and home with his wife.”

This week’s uproar over Orioles broadcaster Kevin Brown’s suspension on perhaps the most nebulous grounds imaginable should have prompted the demand, “Where was Rob?”

Since not enough owners proved dry and sober enough to look all the way deep, the commissioner has another term to serve, through 2029. How delicious is this: Manfred got his extension on the same day Brown was last seen and heard on television for the Orioles. And from the moment we learned the Orioles took Brown’s matter-of-fact comparison between the Orioles’s lack of success in the Rays’ home stadium the past couple of years and its success there this year as fouling their nest, Manfred’s silence has been as deafening as a heavy metal concert.

The clip in question has been viral this week. It’s impossible to hear it and conclude that Brown was anything other than absolutely complimentary about the 2023 Oriole turnaround in Tropicana Field. The turnaround was included in the team-provided game notes. That didn’t stop Orioles boss John Angelos or a designated subordinate from suspending Brown.

It took Awful Announcing to unearth the suspension. It took about ten seconds from their posting it aboard the social media site formerly known as Twitter for the suspension to go pandemic-level viral. It took about that much time, too, for the Orioles to start taking it on the chin for Angelos’s stupidity. But it’s still too much time without a peep from the so-called steward of the game.

Major league broadcasters poured out support for Brown en masse. One, Yankee broadcaster Michael Kay, said that if Angelos didn’t like Brown speaking the plain facts, “then he’s thin-skinned, he’s unreasonable, and he should actually get a call from Rob Manfred, the commissioner of baseball, because it’s unconscionable that you would actually suspend a good broadcaster for no reason whatsoever.”

So far as anyone knows at this writing, Angelos hasn’t gotten the call. Not even after broadcast legend Al (Do you believe in miracles? Yes!) Michaels said (to ESPN’s Jeremy Schaap), “I thought that it was either a joke or there was something much more insidious behind the suspension. And now that I realize that it had everything to do with what was said about Tampa Bay and playing the Rays. I agree, there should be a suspension here. They should suspend the doofus that suspended Kevin Brown.”

Manfred is renowned for a good many things that don’t include statesmanship. Baseball’s version of Winston Churchill he isn’t. But the commissioner has a very broad mandate within the rules outlining his job to act in the best interests of baseball and to act against a team, a player, a manager, an umpire, anyone who’s done something he believes detrimental to the game and the trust the public holds for it.

Commissioners have not always deployed that broad power wisely, of course. Without saying so outright, or with mealymouthed denials, Kenesaw Mountain Landis upheld the disgraceful colour line that wouldn’t be broken until after his death. (His successor, Happy Chandler, told Pittsburgh Courier legend Wendell Smith, “I’m for the Four Freedoms, and if a black boy can make it at Okinawa and go to Guadalcanal, he can make it in baseball”—and proved it by approving Branch Rickey’s signing of Jackie Robinson.)

Bowie Kuhn tried and failed to suppress Jim Bouton’s Ball Four but succeeded in stopping Charlie Finley’s post-Messersmith fire sale of several key Athletics players. The former merely left Kuhn resembling a damned fool. The latter, with its concurrent cap of $400,000 for player sales, probably did as much as any capricious free agency spending spree to abet the salary structure’s inflation and block truly less-endowed teams from sustained financial competitiveness.

And Fay Vincent’s foolish attempt to strong-arm three Yankee officials including then-manager Buck Showalter out of their testimony on behalf of drug-troubled relief pitcher Steve Howe just might have been the wick that lit the powder keg forcing Vincent—already in enough owners’ crosshairs over intervening in the 1990 spring lockout and other business issues—to resign before he could be fired in 1992.

Maybe Manfred didn’t like the thought that calling Angelos out or even disciplining him over the Brown suspension might amount to biting one of the hands that feeds him. Maybe he thought that calling Angelos out or even disciplining him over Brown would have compelled him to address the known Oriole brass objections to Brown’s observation included implications that they were “cheap.”

Translation further: Maybe Manfred thought calling out and disciplining Angelos over Brown would amount to admitting the Orioles tanked their way to where they are today. Manfred has objected to tanking verbally in the past while doing little to nothing in the public perception to put a stop to something that amounts to fan abuse. Tanks for nothing.

But there are times when a commissioner must consider that, as longtime New York Times writer George Vecsey once formulated (and as I’ve borrowed shamelessly over the years), the common good of the game isn’t the same thing as merely making money for the owners.

Manfred thought nothing of dropping a heavy fine upon Astros owner Jim Crane;  suspending general manager Jeff Luhnow, manager A.J. Hinch, and former bench coach Alex Cora; and, eliminating key draft picks from the team over the next couple of years, after the exposure and investigation of Astrogate. If he could act in the game’s best interest over its worst cheating scandal ever, he could certainly act on behalf of saying there’s no place for censorship on the baseball air.

He could, but he hasn’t.

Brown is due to return to the Orioles’ television booth tonight, when the American League East leaders open a weekend series against the Mariners in Seattle. Sports Illustrated‘s Jimmy Traina offers a sobering point when suggesting that Brown will be in a somewhat untenable position going in:

He’ll return to the airwaves with no explanation of him going MIA. His every word will be dissected and fans watching, while admiring and respecting Brown, will fully expect him to watch his every word, which hurts his credibility.

The poor guy has basically been neutered. A quick check of Brown’s Twitter account shows he hasn’t tweeted since July 26. Before that, Brown rarely went two or three days without tweeting. He’s probably terrified to say anything because he knows he can’t address the injustice he experienced honestly.

It’s just surreal to think about the irreparable damage that has been done by the Orioles in this situation.

“Free Kevin Brown” chants in Camden Yards a couple of nights ago must have fallen upon deaf ears in the commissioner’s office. Those fans would have been justified completely if they’d altered those chants with chanting “Where was Rob?” This time, answering “Dry, sober, and home with his wife” won’t be enough.

The doofus who suspended and thus may also have neutered Brown remains unsuspended yet. Where is Rob?