Baseball Picks Rob Manfred as Next Commissioner

With the retirement of Commissioner of Baseball Bud Selig coming up in January, Major League Baseball team owners got down to the business of picking his successor on August 14th. Their choice was 55 year old Rob Manfred, who, to no one’s surprise, was Selig’s favorite for the position.

Actually, Manfred has been in training for the job for a long time. A graduate of Harvard Law School, Manfred was named Chief Operating Officer for Major League Baseball in 2013 and spent 15 years before that as executive vice president for labor relations for baseball. The guy knows his way around the office.

During his 22 year tenure, Selig has had ardent fans and relentless critics. The baseball players’ strike that began in August of 1994 wiped out the World Series that year; the strike didn’t end until the spring of ’95, and was the worst crisis for the game since the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. Millions of dollars of revenue was lost, and many fans left the game, some never to return. But, baseball has had labor peace since that sorry episode, and will continue to do so at least through the 2016 season. Selig and baseball were accused of looking the other way when the players were juicing on steroids and other performance enhancing drugs in the ‘90s. But, baseball now has a tough drug policy, which continues to be refined, and players pay the price with suspensions when caught. Attendance is healthy, local and national TV money is good, and baseball has its own year round network now.

Still, baseball faces some challenges. Though there have been no job actions for 20 years, labor negotiations are always an anxious time. Baseball faces a lot of competition for young people’s free time attention, and isn’t helping itself by having World Series of other post season games running until late at night or the wee hours of the morning. Overall, though, the game is in better shape now than it was back in the dark days of ’94-’95, and Manfred is inheriting a pretty good situation.