Is baseball backing in to the right decision?
In which I try to concoct a scenario wherein Rob Manfred is not terrible at his job
During the draft last week, baseball commissioner Rob Manfred said there was a “100 percent” chance that Major League Baseball would play this year. Yesterday, he said something else.
Because negotiations between the owners and the players are going extremely badly, yesterday Manfred said that he was “not confident” that there would be any kind of baseball season at all.
If you were truly conspiracy-minded, just absolutely adrift in a sea of facts, able to connect any six to each other no matter how tenuous or ludicrous the links between them, then you could make an argument that Rob Manfred is competent at his job.
Let’s do it, just for kicks. First, six facts:
(1) The players will never back down from their “we want to get paid for every game we play” stance
(2) The owners will never back down from their “we will not pay you for every game you play” stance
(3) Any kind of negotiated settlement would make the owners, who hired Manfred, angry, as they would have to give something up, which is the exact opposite of what they want to do
(4) The pandemic will not disappear one day like a miracle
(5) There will be an inevitable second wave of the pandemic
(6) It would be disastrous if the league started up and then had to suspend play because a player got sick
You see where I’m going with this, right? What if Rob Manfred hatched a secret plan to have the league not play because, as badly as it would damage the sport, the sport would be damaged worse by playing and then stopping. What if he threaded a needle so fine that it would pass through the eye of every camel in the world and get all the billionaire baseball owners into heaven?
What if this was always the plan, and it’s going perfectly?
YOU: That’s incredibly stupid
Well, fucking duh.
I’ve delved as deep as I can into the rabbit hole without calling anyone a reptilian when I emerge, and in the best tradition of all conspiracy theories since the dawn of time, what I came up with was easily debunked garbage. But that’s what it takes to praise Rob Manfred right now.
Manfred has been an unequivocal failure during the biggest test of his commissionership. He has tried bullying the players, imposing his will on the players, threatening the players, and publicly complaining about the players, and yet somehow none of it has worked. The two sides are still at as much of an impasse as they ever were, just impassin’ it up, and as a result it’s becoming more and more possible that there won’t be any baseball at all this year.
This is the owners’ fault, of course. Owning a business carries risk, and the long-term health of a business entails spending some money that you won’t get back this year because over the course of a lot of years, you will get back that money and more. Baseball’s owners have no appetite for risk, and no appetite for possibly losing money this year in order to remind the public what there is to love about baseball, and keep it healthy in the long run. And so, they move closer and closer to a year without baseball, solely because the rich are greedy.
And yet, maybe they shouldn’t be playing this year anyway.
COVID is coming back with a vengeance right now, skipping the trough part of the classic peaks-and-troughs and heading right back uphill. Arizona and Florida are being hit hard, but so is California which has 5 major league teams. As disgusting as it is for the league to leak that multiple players have tested positive for COVID, which they did for tactical reasons, that does underscore the point that, you know, maybe people shouldn’t be playing team sports right now.
There is a ton of potential PR danger in not restarting the season, but there is a massive amount of potential medical danger in restarting it, which would lead to a massive amount of PR danger anyway.
It is, one could argue, an act of lunacy to play baseball at all right now. And they are avoiding that act of lunacy in the dumbest way possible. Do you want to know what a Smart And Good league looks like as they lean into a bad idea?
“Give in to the virus,” said the absolute best commissioner in any of the four major sports. Every NBA team would be sequestered at the Disney World resort, in the middle of Florida, where cases are rising dramatically. And yet, here is the NBA, doing its best to push through and give the nation precious, precious entertainment, even if it is a colossally bad idea.
What chance did baseball ever have to avoid weapons-grade stupidity? How much better than this did we ever think they’d be? What if they knew they could never be better than this — thanks, Wilpons! — so instead they had to be much, much worse? What if they shot the moon, collecting every stupid idea out there, which saved them from the hole they’re in?
YOU: We’ve been over this. That’s incredibly stupid.
Okay, fair point.
It’s hard to look at the world and think, yes, baseball is the main thing we need. It’s hard to think that we should threaten the safety of all the players in order to get baseball back. We are screwed, and will be screwed for months.
And in the middle of it, as if by design, baseball might take a step back and allow its players to not risk their health, not interact with dozens of teammates in a closed room. And if that’s what happens, it’ll all be by accident. The players don’t want 0 games. The owners don’t want 0 games — 0 regular season games, maybe, but they definitely want as many playoff games as possible.
But Rob Manfred’s wild incompetence may well win the day for the forces of sanity. This is the dropped-third-strike of labor. There’s almost no chance this works. This move, really, shouldn’t even be possible because no one knows where the hell it came from. But somehow, the ball squirted away from the catcher and the runner’s sprinting to first. Against all odds, he might even make it.