BALTIMORE — The 30 Major League Baseball teams endured a long, winding and occasionally contentious journey Wednesday and Thursday, in a hotel just a few blocks from Camden Yards. And after all that? They wound up opting for the safest destination.
Rob Manfred is your 10th baseball commissioner, having prevailed on the sixth vote Thursday in a process that took nearly 10 hours to complete on top of a long Wednesday. Manfred, the COO of Major League Baseball since last fall, represents an endorsement of baseball’s status quo and a final salute to outgoing commissioner Bud Selig, who wanted Manfred to replace him upon Selig’s retirement this coming January.
“There is no question that I would not be standing here today if not for Bud,” Manfred said in a news conference. “I hope that I will perform as the 10th commissioner in a way that will add to his great legacy.”
“He’s been at it for 20 years. He graduated with a Ph.D. in baseball,” Peter Angelos, the Orioles’ managing general partner, said of Manfred as the owners’ session broke up. “There are great expectations. Is he perfect? No. No one’s perfect. But I think he’ll do a sterling job and he’ll follow up successfully in the path of the retiring commissioner.”
Said Yankees president Randy Levine: “There’ll never be a commissioner like [Selig]. He’s revolutionized the game. I think Rob is going to try to continue and expand on it.”
The 55-year-old Manfred, a top MLB executive since 1998, entered the process as the favorite, yet had to outlast not only a pair of contenders but also a cadre of opponents who lobbied hard against his coronation. Tim Brosnan, baseball’s executive vice president for business, dropped out before the first votes were cast, leaving Red Sox chairman Tom Werner as the sole other candidate in an election in which 23 votes [75 percent] would win.
The first vote went 20-10 in Manfred’s favor, according to an industry source, and when the next vote went 21-9, that took Werner off the ballot, as per the parameters that a candidate needed at least one-third of the ballot to stay alive.
At that juncture, the vote turned into a yes or no on Manfred, and that underlined the reality that a group led by White Sox chairman Jerry Reinsdorf stood as much anti-Manfred as pro-Werner. Manfred got 22 yeses in his first-go-round, then down to 20, then back up to 22, with the no votes cast by Arizona, Boston, the White Sox, Cincinnati, the Angels, Oakland, Toronto and Washington. Milwaukee and Tampa Bay had voted against Manfred earlier in the process.
The Nationals flipped on the sixth ballot, giving Manfred the 23 votes he needed and avoiding a stalemate the current commissioner clearly did not want. Selig then ordered a symbolic seventh vote in which the teams supported Manfred unanimously.
Werner and Brosnan both admitted to their disappointment. Werner just goes back to his job with the Red Sox, with momentum to advance some of the innovations he discussed in his presentation.
“I think some of the ideas we talked about to speed up the play of the game, to capture a generation of young fans, to make the game more popular internationally, they got a warm reception, and I’ll continue to work on those,” Werner said.
Brosnan’s future, on the other hand, is uncertain. “We’ve had a fantastic run,” Brosnan said, “and I’m looking forward to the next fantastic run.”
Since 2000, Brosnan negotiated all of baseball’s lucrative television and sponsorship deals; he got to speak to the owners four times a year and tell them how much he was filling their pockets. Manfred, meanwhile, dealt with less sexy matters like labor talks and drug investigations. Yet he made the trains run at times more than anyone else at MLB — most important of all, he has been the key player in the last three stoppage-free collective bargaining agreements — and that proved to matter the most.
“The other candidates are excellent also,” Angelos said, “but he’s got the experience, and everyone’s looking to him to solve the problems that baseball has and to expand on the success of baseball.”
Said Selig: “I’ve given him many tasks, a lot of them not very pleasant. … I have justifiably very high expectations.”
Manfred, having just been elected, chose not to get very specific in his goals and priorities. He said: “I think the most striking thing for me the last couple of days is how passionate the owners are about the way the game is played, the business of baseball. I think there’s a huge amount of consensus about certain types of efforts that we will be undertaking to move the game forward. I think the modernization of the game that you saw with instant replay, innovations like that which Commissioner Selig has begun.”
Selig may not be very popular among the general public, but he was legendarily so among the owners’ fraternity. Manfred, if not quite as popular in that set, won the contest nonetheless. When the stakes are this high, the safe choice often fares well.