Bill Shaikin discusses Rob Manfred’s success story, bringing a new generation into a love of the game.

A generation that was supposed to have dismissed baseball as irreparably slow and boring and was supposed to have been lost to esports and screens of all sorts has found its way back to baseball.

Half of MLB’s television viewers last year were younger than 44, according to Playfly Insights. The median age of an MLB ticket buyer has fallen from 51 in 2019 to 45 today, according to the league.

In that time, the average age of a new fan engaging with the league’s data base — by buying a ticket or a player jersey, for instance, or setting up a streaming account — has dropped from 43 to 36.

Baseball isn’t dying, but it could have been. Its revival required a game plan.

MSN.com

Fans in general don’t like Manfred, and much of that comes from often presenting himself poorly in public. Many feel the commissioner should be looking out for the fans, and often Manfred does not express that aspect of his job. I hope I’m still here in 2050 to see the judgement of history on him, and I suspect he might go down as baseball most effective commissioner.

Once more fascinating item from the article:

Nonetheless, he agrees the work of cultivating and maintaining a younger audience is far from done. On the field, the league’s focus is in finding ways to cut down on strikeouts — pitching to contact reduces the time of an at-bat; more balls in play means more action, and more flashes of the athleticism that lights up social media.

“That’s the way baseball was originally conceived: the hitter versus the defense, not the hitter versus the pitcher,” Sword said.

That’s really tough to do. Hitters and pitchers keep getting stronger. Here’s a radical idea: ban the fastball and require hitters to swing a bat 36 ounces as a minimum. Any pitch over 92 MPH is a ball if taken. I know the physics show that the weight of the bat doesn’t matter that much, but a combination of slower pitches and slower bats should mean fewer home runs, but more balls in play. MLB would probably want to bring this down slowly so as not to render a generation of pitchers ineffective. Manfred does like to use the minors to run multiple tests of changes, so if something like this was brought to the majors, it would have some level of success in professional baseball.

Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred said he will retire at the end of his term in 2029

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Manfred, 65, replaced Bud Selig as commissioner in January 2015 and has since been given two five-year terms. The owners voted in July to give him a third term.

“You can only have so much fun in one lifetime,” Manfred said to reporters at Grapefruit League media day in Tampa, Florida. “I have been open with [owners] about the fact that this is going to be my last term.”

ESPN.com

Seventy is a good age to call it quits. Given how he is roundly booed whenever he makes a public appearance, he might regret taking the third term. Then again, there were times we thought Bud Selig would step down, but the he always seemed to get another term. As long as Manfred keeps the game in good financial order, the owners will try to keep him no matter how much the fans dislike him.

That said, I think there is a good chance he will go down as one of the better commissioners. I think his strength in managing changes in the game will eventually seen as more important than his weakness of publicly talking about the game.

MLB extended the contract of Rob Manfred through the 2029 season:

“At a critical moment in the history of our game, Commissioner Manfred has listened to our fans and worked closely with our players to improve America’s pastime,” John Stanton, chairman and managing partner of the Mariners and the elected presiding officer of the Commissioner re-election process, said in a news release. “Under his leadership, we have been responsive to the fans’ desire for more action and better pace, continued the game’s spirit of innovation, expanded MLB’s role in youth baseball and softball and beyond. The significant momentum that MLB has built reflects his ongoing initiatives that are advancing the game.”

MLB.com

Manfred is not a perfect commissioner. He is often tone deaf in his utterances, and sometimes seems a bit dismissive of the history of the game. He doesn’t pretend to be the fan’s commissioner, he clearly works for the owners.

He does a lot of things well, however. I very much like the way he floats ideas into the baseball world to see how people react. He is willing to experiment and develop these ideas in the minors before bringing them to the majors. I do believe that is the right way to go about things.

Secondly, he gets deals done. While 2020 was a bit of a fail is this regard, under him leading negotiation, there hasn’t been a loss of a 162 game season due to an impasse.

He showed very little resistance to improving the quality of life for minor league players. It came at a cost, as the number of teams was reduced to play the remaining players more, but there was no resistance at all to the minors forming a union.

At the end of the day, I like Manfred much more than Selig, and many of Selig’s predecessors. We could do a lot worse.

ESPN posts a story based on a series of interviews with Rob Manfred. I have not had a chance to read most of it, but I wanted to make sure people saw it. I did see this quote from Bud Selig, which is apt:

THE OVERARCHING LESSON Bud Selig says he tried to teach Manfred was that leading baseball is “a political job,” one in which you must broker a fragile peace, not just with the players but with the clashing owners of big-market teams and small-market clubs.

ESPN.com

On top of that, the clashing owners are your boss.

The Athletic posts a very thorough look at the tenure of commissioner Rob Manfred. (Subscription may be required.) They touch on one aspect of Manfred’s tenure that I like alot, his trial balloons on rule changes:

“I’ve thought about it a lot,” Manfred said. “I’ve thought about transparency, I’ve thought about the backlash, and then I’ve thought about when we actually made change. And here’s my takeaway: When you’re transparent, you are always going to get backlash. If you believe that the change is correct and you have the fortitude to go ahead and make it, people then realize what the change actually means, then the reaction is generally positive.”

TheAthletic.com

There are a lot of people who think and write about baseball, and I feel this gives them a chance to be heard. I like that he tests things in the minor leagues. When you actually watch a game with a pitch clock, you realize it’s pretty good.

The article touches on all the good and bad of Manfred’s tenure, and is well worth your read.

My admiration for Rob Manfred keeps rising:

During a meeting with the Associated Press Sports Editors on Thursday, Manfred says this generation of players, not ”a 67-year-old,” will determine unwritten rules.

Manfred says he expects to ”see more exuberance from our players on the field,” and adds: ”I think it’s a good thing.”

Unwritten rules are often known as customs. The nice thing about customs, rather than actual rules, is that they can change with the times. Sometimes it’s not a pleasant change, but in the end all the old fogies die off and the new customs become the norm. It’s good to see Manfred recognizes this and stays out of the way.

Here’s a press release from the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference:

ANNOUNCING A 1-ON-1 DISCUSSION WITH MLB COMMISSIONER ROB MANFRED AT SSAC15

On January 25, Rob Manfred succeeded Bud Selig as the 10th Commissioner of Major League Baseball. And on February 27, he’ll take the stage at the Boston Convention & Exhibition Center for a 1-on-1 interview with SSAC veteran and MLB Network host Brian Kenny. Attendees will be treated to a wide-ranging discussion on Commissioner Manfred’s perspective as he begins his tenure.

For a full list of speakers, refer here. You can also check out videos from past SSAC baseball analytics panels. Follow us on Twitter and our website for the latest panelist updates as the conference draws closer!

I’m glad Brian Kenny is conducting the interview. Brian is a straight shooter.

Rob Manfred is taking some heat for appointing Fred Wilpon to the finance committee and talking about eliminating the defensive shifts. I like, however, his talk about better player relations:

“For a product to be popular, people want access,” he said. “They want to be able to get at stars. They want to know more than, ‘He went 2-for-3 last night.’ They want to hear the sounds of the game. The only way you deliver that kind of product is to have a relationship with the players, so they understand the need to engage in a way that’s maybe a little different than we did it 10-15 years ago. The way you get them to accept that is to build on the positive relationships we’ve been able to establish over the last 20 years. It’s all about the players at the end of the day. You can’t ever lose sight of that, and I won’t.

“The players have to understand, when I go to them and say, ‘I need you to do X, Y or Z today,’ it’s not because I’m looking to generate $200,000 more of revenue from that appearance to put in my pocket. It’s so we have the people who are going to replace Derek Jeter, so our sport attracts the kind of media companies that are so crucial to our business. To have that kind of attraction, certain groundwork needs to be laid. It’s crucial to growing the game day after day. We need to be with the players at all different levels of a great relationship. I am a player guy — all the time.”

During the height of owner/union struggles, baseball did not promote the stars of the game. I looks like Manfred wants to go in a different direction. We’ll see.

Major League owners vote on a five-year contract for new commissioner Rob Manfred today.

I’m very interested to see if Manfred can do the same job of Bud Selig at keeping owner dissent silent. Bud seemed to accomplish this by not bringing anything to a vote until he had convinced all 30 owners to agree on the subject. I’d actually like to see a little more public give and take among the owners. It would be nice to be able to judge final decisions against other proposals.