Brett Seybert

Yesterday, Commissioner Rob Manfred held a press conference following the MLB’s owners meetings. This has, of course, been covered pretty thoroughly by the usual baseball writers and I continue to grow more appalled every time I read a new iteration of that coverage.

First, Keith Olbermann worked it into the sports segment of his daily Countdown podcast, in between his latest takes on the Trump indictment. This, I found fitting because, while Rob Manfred has certainly not done as much damage to something so important as the United States of America as has Trump, he continually forces the comparison (at least in my mind) with his repeated smugness and apparent disdain for the people he claims to serve. And, while he has not accounted for any real or imagined damage to the nation (that I am aware of, anyway), every time Manfred speaks publicly I again feel that same feeling in the pit of my stomach that I felt throughout Trump’s presidency and that I again feel every time a new revelation comes to light outlining the myriad and despicable ways he abused the power of that office: a mixture of disgust at watching something I love so much being destroyed from the inside by someone who claims to be helping and a powerlessness to do anything to make it stop.

That said, there is one clear difference between Manfred and Trump, and that is the cause of the hopelessness part of the feeling I described. With Trump, that hopelessness was caused by the fact that so many folks around me–including many, many people who I otherwise hold (or held) in high esteem or who were, for all intents and purposes, normal insofar as I consider myself relatively normal–were seemingly participating in a version of reality that was altogether different from mine. This person, who was repeatedly saying the most vile, ignorant things imaginable and repeatedly proving himself to be unfit for the both the office of president and for life in civilized society, was somehow appealing to these folks. I don’t think I’ll ever fully understand that appeal (and every plausible explanation is too simple and depressing to dwell on for too long). And that inability (or unwillingness) to understand led to that hopelessness. If I had so misunderstood so many of my friends and colleagues, how could I hope to convince them that my way of seeing the world was in fact the correct one? If we we’re essentially experiencing different realities and speaking different metaphorical languages, what hope was there of finding a common ground or of making sure things were better the next time around?

With Manfred, that hopelessness is entirely different. All the normal people in my life–friends and family, colleagues, baseball writers, etc.–think this guy sucks. From baseball fans, at least, it’s nearly universal agreement and this guy is an awful person hell bent on making baseball worse. So, it’s nice to feel like I’m experiencing the same reality as my peers, but it’s no help when the commissioner of baseball is not elected by my (or really anyone else’s) peers; his power is not awarded by us normals, but by the owners, and the owners have a lot more in common with Trump than with any “normal” people by any definition. But I’ve got the same chance of wresting control of baseball from the owners as I do of ever understanding Trump’s appeal to so many.

Anyway, the second recap of these Manfred comments that got me wound up enough to write a blog post was the incomparable Craig Calcaterra at his excellent Cup of Coffee substack. I’m going include a lengthy excerpt because Craig says it all so well.

Evan Drellich of The Athletic faithfully transcribed the Q&A with the press. I’ve been writing about baseball and the crappy men who run it for a long time now and even I was shocked by just how horrible Manfred came off.

Here he is talking about how Major League Baseball, which Manfred claims prefers teams to not move, has come around to being OK with the Athletics moving:

I feel sorry for the fans in Oakland. I do not like this outcome, I understand why they feel the way they do. I think that the real question is, what is it that Oakland was prepared to do? There is no Oakland offer, OK? They never got to a point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site. And it’s not just John Fisher. You don’t build a stadium based on the club activity alone. The community has to provide support and you know, at some point, you come to the realization, it’s just not going to happen.

This is objectively false. There was an all-but-done deal with Oakland to build a stadium at Howard Terminal. It was a hell of a lot closer to being done than anything in Las Vegas at the time. The A’s broke off negotiations with Oakland, however, not because they weren’t getting an offer on a stadium deal but because one was imminent, it was quite clearly going to be a much better offer than anything Las Vegas was offering, and would’ve, in fact, been much better than what the A’s eventually got in terms of public money to be spent and out-of-pocket expectations for John Fisher. It’s an offer that, once official, would’ve been very hard for the A’s to turn down and still leave town, that’s for sure.

The problem was that if Oakland’s offer was hanging out there, waiting for the A’s to accept or reject it, it would screw up Fisher and Kaval’s “Oakland doesn’t want us here" rebop that, in their minds, justifies the move. And yeah, the fact is that they, and Major League Baseball, want the A’s to be in Las Vegas, not Oakland, full stop. They want the close associations with the gambling industry, they want the glitz and glamor that comes with it, they think they have an opportunity to make massive amounts of money by virtue of corporate partnerships, and I suspect Fisher and Kaval themselves believe they will stand to benefit far more personally from the relocation than they would if the A’s stayed in Oakland. It’s their business, of course, and if they want to make decisions like that they can make decisions like that. They just didn’t want to say it out loud and now they’re weaving lies in order to trash Oakland and rewrite history to cover for it. It’s a horrible look.

Manfred was then asked if he was aware of Oakland fans’ “reverse boycott” on Tuesday night, when fans showed up to protest the team’s imminent move to Las Vegas and show their support. See if you can detect the shitty sarcasm:

It was great. It’s great to see what is, this year, almost an average Major League Baseball crowd in the facility for one night. That’s a great thing.

If you’re the Commissioner of Major League Baseball and you’re finding yourself giving quotes gleefully shitting on passionate baseball fans who were desperately trying to keep their team in town, you may want to ask yourself what in the actual fuck your problem is. Tuesday night’s showing in Oakland was one of the coolest and most inspirational fan moments in recent memory. It was a genuine show of love and support on the part of baseball fans who, despite likely knowing the gesture would be futile, wanted to express their love for their team. And then in wades Manfred with this shitty and backhanded wisecrack. I’d call him a turd in the punchbowl, but I have too much respect for turds to tar them with such a disparaging association.

Manfred was then asked about whether he sees it as his job to help baseball owners get public funding for stadiums. He kinda dodged for a moment but then said “it is in fact good business to have a public-private partnership to get those facilities built.” This was the followup question and answer:

How do you reconcile that there’s a large volume of academic studies that say these stadium subsidies do not produce positive benefit?

I love academics, they’re great. I think, take the areas where baseball stadiums have been built, OK? Look at what was around Truist Park before that was built. Look at the area around Nationals Park before it was built. I lived in that city. You know, academics can say whatever they want. I think the reality tells you something else.

Rob Manfred is not a dumb man and he knows better than this. He knows what the studies say and that just because there are shiny new buildings near a ballpark that it does not mean that public subsidies have created a net benefit. Indeed, he has hired bought-and-paid-for-experts to try to combat those studies when it suits him and he’s never been able to do so convincingly. The fact is that Rob Manfred is simply an asshole who has contempt for everyone except the 30 men who pay his salary so he has no trouble whatsoever spouting anti-intellectual claptrap like this which he knows to be false. Doing so helps him get past a question he doesn’t want to answer and ingratiates him to his employers, so he does it.

Manfred was then asked if he thinks Oakland fans will or should support the A’s once they move.

I hope so. I hope that they stay baseball fans, whatever they decide to affiliate with. Again, I’ll say it again: the piece of this particular series of events that’s the most disturbing to me is the idea of fans that have supported the team losing a team. We hate that idea.

Yeah, he hates it so much that a mere three minutes prior he was making fun of A’s fans for showing up and supporting their team. So you know it’s a totally genuine sentiment.

No matter how hard Manfred tries to be ambassadorial — and he tries less these days than he used to when he first got the job — he’s actually a petty and unpleasant little man. It comes through fairly often, but it’s been a minute since he packed this much slimy, disingenuous crap into one public appearance. It was a truly bravura performance.

Rob Manfred is a bad guy all around. Many in the game knew that already, but it’s remarkable how little he tried to hide it yesterday.