MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred Speaks: Expansion, Realignment, Signing Deadline, Salary Cap, Much More ...Middle East

Attribute it to whatever motivation you like, and I’m sure there’s at least some early public relations battling baked in there, as well as just an interest in connecting with the fans, but MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred spent a long time in studio with WFAN discussing all manor of big baseball topics. I’ve embedded the full appearance at the bottom of this post so you can check it out.

Among the highlights (or lowlights, depending on your perspective):

Expansion to 32 teams is still very much something Manfred wants to see underway before he leaves the Commissioner job in three years. With that, we would see realignment in the sport to eight four-team divisions, a la the NFL, and a necessary change in postseason structure. Notably, although Manfred wants to see geographical realignment, he does not want to see same-city teams in the same division. Whew. No Cubs-White Sox in the same division. (Bring me the NL Mid-Central with the Cubs, Brewers, Cardinals, and Royals.) As for the upcoming Collective Bargaining Agreement negotiations, and the possibility of a lockout, Manfred said he felt like there’s a rush to that negative expectation by some in the media (I’ll say it for him: it’s literally the ENTIRE media believing there will be a lockout). He emphasized that the goal is to play 162 games, and that has always been doable. The negotiation hasn’t really started yet. Manfred wouldn’t quite get into salary cap stuff, but did concede that he thinks about what resources are available to some clubs and not to other clubs, and also about whether the right incentives are there for lower-revenue clubs to spend more. (He wasn’t going to say the goal is a cap-floor system, but I have little doubt they’d like it. I tend to think a stiffer luxury tax and changes to revenue-sharing are probably going to wind up being the compromise.) Later, Manfred mentioned the momentum behind the sport right now – everyone sees it, things are going very well for MLB right now and its players – and addressing various issues during the bargaining process doesn’t necessarily mean it has to become a war about the salary cap. From his perspective, Manfred sees the two biggest issues to deal with in the negotiations from the fan perspective are media blackouts (i.e., centralizing more local broadcasting to become a national, blackout-free approach) and the competitiveness of a number of teams (i.e., getting more competitive balance financially). Manfred said, when it comes to an offseason signing deadline (and something in that vein is going to be discussed in these CBA negotiations, I’m sure), the league/owners are not trying to create leverage, and the deals would still get done in the end. Instead, he sees the approach as trying to concentrate the action in December, where MLB can get a lot more positive attention. (He’s not wrong about that, and I do think the fans would want it in the abstract, but it’s pretty hard to see a FIRM deadline not causing serious leverage problems for players.) “We’ve talked about split seasons. We’ve talked about in-season tournaments,” Manfred said of changing the nature of the 162-game straight season. “We do understand that 162 is a long pull. I think the difficulty to accomplish those sort of in-season events, you almost inevitably start talking about fewer regular season games. It is a much more complicated thing in our sport than it is in other sports. Because of all of our season-long records, you’re playing around with something that people care a lot about.” I think “talked about” is doing a lot of work there, because it’s assuredly something that’s been discussed and researched internally at the league offices, but is hardly something ACTUALLY anywhere close to being on the table. An in-season tournament for MLB makes almost no sense, in my view, because you either have to do series (and break up the season WAY too much), or you do single games, and baseball is kinda silly when broken down to a single game (especially in a tournament that is artificial anyway). As for the split season, like they do in the minor leagues, I don’t really see the value. In the minors, you have so much player movement, especially at midseason, that it can make some sense. In MLB, I don’t see teams being willing to turn the second half of their season into a three-month-long nothing-burger if they’ve already clinched a playoff spot in the first half.

The full visit, which features a whole lot more:

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MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred Speaks: Expansion, Realignment, Signing Deadline, Salary Cap, Much More ...Middle East

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