Robert Manfred, MLB Commissioner, in April announced the relocation of the Allstar Game out of Atlanta. The reason? In his own words: “Major League Baseball fundamentally supports voting rights for all Americans and opposes restrictions to the ballot box.”
Of course, he was lambasting Georgia’s new election law which was meant to correct some of the impromptu and ill-conceived, panic-inspired changes to voting last year. The law included the hated but popular – hated by radical activists – “voter id” for all voting, absentee and in-person. What led Manfred to hitch MLB’s wagon to the horse of radical politics? It was more than talks with radicalized groups associated with Al Sharpton, Stacey Abrams, and Big Sports’ mega-millionaires like Lebron James (worth $500 million+). The sport is bureaucratized and, as such, is as isolated as LeBron James in his sprawling estate in Akron or his $20.5 million mansion in Brentwood. When you’ve become separated from the fan base, it’s easy to mistake the barking of a few well-situated extremists for a popular groundswell.
Just last October, at the World Series trophy ceremony in Los Angeles, Manfred was stunned after being heartily booed by the remaining fans in the stadium. Earlier, he had truncated the season to 60 games in a COVID-panic. From his lawyer’s mind, he tried to upend a century of baseball tradition with “pace-of-play” rules. Honestly, some of the rules might be justified, but lawyers are famous for producing a host of unintended ill-consequences. And, quite frankly, the whole scene is another one of those big-moneyed Harvard lawyers in a pin-striped suit telling main street America what’s best for them.
Yes, Manfred was a labor lawyer for Morgan, Lewis, and Bockius, LLP, when he came to the attention of the MLB big wheels in New York City, home of MLB, Inc. The guy is only familiar with the corporate suite and has less familiarity with the locker room than the queen of England. She has more exposure to reality since her love of horses and horse racing regularly took her into the stables.
The detachment leads to dealings only with groups, groups that aren’t representative of the people buying the tickets, gear, or putting their eyes and ears to the broadcasts. Manfred is an organizational man, far removed from the lives of ordinary wage-earners.
Organizational men and women are, by definition, bureaucrats, functionaries in an administrative state. We can see this unique social eco-system gestating in MLB in the 1970’s. It was abundantly on display in the short history of the Portland Mavericks as portrayed in “The Battered Bastards of Baseball”, currently showing on Netflix.
MLB is sport as entertainment, as is true of all professional sports. The fan goes to the park to root for the team in a drama whose uncertain outcome has to be played out on the field. Bing Russell, the founder of the Mavericks, understood better than the corporate heads what drives fans, all fans. He gave them people to root for, care for, and have an emotional investment in. He didn’t see his single-A franchise as another cog in the wheel of the corporate machine. He loved being around the players and fans. To people like Manfred, it’s the opposite: the hoi polloi are statistical abstractions that are buried in the corporate balance sheet.
Bing reminded me of the early swashbucklers of Silicon Valley, or the Howard Hugheses in the young years of aviation: take chances and fly by the seat of your pants. That world is alien to a person whose chief qualification arose in matriculation from Cornell to Harvard Law to a federal clerkship to a law partnership to legal retainerships with the corporate suits.
In the end, we get a homogenized product without any of the grit of the qualities that make for personal attachment. We also get the blunders of an insulated nomenklatura. And all of us should know what happened to the Soviet Union by 1991.
See “The Battered Bastards of Baseball” on Netflix. You’ll enjoy it, and get a glimpse into MLB’s current condition. Oh, by the way, Bing’s son is Kurt Russell, the actor, who obviously has important memories to contribute to the story.
RogerG
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