Regardless Of How MLB’s Lockout Is Settled, Commissioner Rob Manfred’s Legacy Is Forever Tarnished

Opening Day of the 2020 Major League Baseball season was scheduled for March 26, which was only 710 days ago. Given how rapidly it feels we’re all aging due to the exhausting nature of the daily news cycle in the 2020s, it’s perfectly understandable if that feels more like 710 years ago, or if you have no recollection of the open letter commissioner Rob Manfred “wrote” to fans, never mind how it began:

“Opening Day holds an important place in our hearts. It signifies the arrival of spring, the promise of new beginnings, the return of following your favorite team on a long journey filled with twists and turns, and the hope that your team will put together a magical season you will remember forever.”

Almost two years later, Opening Day apparently isn’t as important as it used to be after Manfred canceled the first two series of the season last Tuesday, when CBA negotiations with the MLBPA petered out after a brief flurry of optimism the night before.

And March 31 — which can seem awfully far away given some of the events going on worldwide — will signify something else entirely: The continuation of long-festering grievances, fans of every team finding the path to their long journey already strewn with road blocks and the very real possibility that we’ll remember the 2022 season as the one in which Manfred decided it was better not to play at all instead of, in his words from Mar. 26, 2020, providing the latest example of baseball helping American society “…get through difficult times.”

It’ll also be the cementation and permanent soiling of Manfred’s legacy, even if negotiations resume soon, Opening Day happens just a few days later than scheduled and a 162-game season ends up played. We wouldn’t go running to your favorite MLB-approved online sports book to bet on that happening, though. As fellow Forbes contributor Marty Brown noted Feb. 18 — three days before owners and players convened for a week’s worth of meetings in Florida — once games have been lost, it’s less about negotiating and more about trying to inflict pain on the other side.

And the owners’ threshold may be infinite. To borrow a phrase from another sport (well, for a year or two, anyway), a work stoppage is running clock for the owners, whose investments will only get better and more lucrative regardless of what does or doesn’t happen this year.

It’ll be the latest evidence of how silly and easy it was to debunk Manfred’s claim that “…an investment banker — a really good one, actually” hired by Major League Baseball found that the stock market offered a better return on one’s investments than an MLB franchise. That claim didn’t match the eye/smell test for anyone who remembered the Mets selling for $2.4 billion in October 2020 — by which point investors everywhere were several months deep into the hourly doom scrolling of their portfolios — nor the number-crunching Brown did last month.

If owning a baseball team was really that difficult, there’d be 30 ownership groups lining up to sell with the shutdown now hitting its indefinite stage. Instead, as MLBPA executive director Tony Clark said Tuesday, it’s the players whose careers are defined by their finite nature. An Opening Day and the chance to be a part of a Major League Baseball season are as cherished by future Hall of Famers as by Quad-A types.

Manfred, for reasons timeless and unique, was never going to be anything other than the least sympathetic figure in this stoppage long before Tuesday. Commissioners are basically guaranteed to be unpopular with all factions. Good luck finding someone not annoyed by some element of Bud Selig’s 23-year tenure, which included his cancellation of the World Series, his anti-PED crusade after willfully ignoring the fuel of baseball’s post-strike popularity surge, the dilution of the regular season by adding wild cards and turning the All-Star Game into a farce first by overseeing a tie and then by granting World Series home field advantage to the league that won the Midsummer Classic.

Manfred has been even more unifying, which is what happens when one eliminates 42 minor league teams, does little to punish those on-field figures responsible for sign-stealing scandals, refers to the World Series trophy as “a hunk of metal,” oversees the least watchable era of baseball in generations and never even manages to occasionally at least pretend he enjoys baseball more than a root canal.

But last week, he had a chance to follow Selig’s lead. While Selig oversaw the most ruinous work stoppage in history (so far), he had enough sense to understand the optics in August 2002 — with the memories of the 9/11 terrorist attacks still frightfully vivid — to steer the game away from another self-caused disaster by coaxing the owners into negotiating a new CBA without the players going on strike.

Twenty years later, the world is entering the 25th month of a pandemic and the first full week of a conflict that has the terrible potential to be unlike anything most of us have ever seen. If ever there was a time for baseball to serve as a great unifier and diversion, it’s now.

Manfred’s actions in the early months of the Covid-19 era — when there was a real chance for Major League Baseball to take advantage of the first ebb in the pandemic by playing a season of 100 or so games before Manfred implemented a 60-game season — never provided much hope he’d match Selig.

But his public words and private demeanor — I’ve heard reliably that Manfred has shared with others how important it was to him that no games be lost due to the owner’s lockout — provided a glimmer of hope, one which glowed a little brighter for much of Monday night and Tuesday as the two sides appeared to near a settlement that would have been no worse than a draw for the owners.

Instead, we got to see Clark’s barely contained fury and Manfred’s…barely contained glee? Maybe he wasn’t ecstatic over this. Maybe he’s just awkward in social settings. But the sights and sounds of Manfred smiling and cracking jokes at his press conference sure were in contrast to the mood of Clark and the players and didn’t do much to convince anyone baseball is coming anytime soon in these most trying of times and years.

All Manfred did Tuesday was convince us of his legacy — equal parts all-powerful and powerless while unwilling and/or unable to appease the hawks still sore over 1994-95 — and that the only things emptier than the suits he wears are the words he “wrote” on Mar. 26. 2020.

“Baseball will return, just as soon as it’s safe to do so. We need to call on the optimism that is synonymous with Opening Day and the unflinching determination required to navigate an entire baseball season to help us through the challenging situation currently facing us all.”

Guess not.