If you can believe it, Rob Manfred actually wants more baseball.
This revelation may come as a shock, since many of us have been under the impression that he doesn’t really like baseball.
But recently, after a long time ESPN interview, Manfred finally tried to get rid of that reputation. He claims that not only does he hate baseball, but that he’s actually trying to save it all the time. He says he grew up a Yankees fan and loved going to games with his dad, which is very attached, even though my dad has better taste in teams (go Sox). And did you know he’s the only Commissioner in MLB history to have played Little League?
Maybe Manfred loves baseball. Maybe he even loves her deeply, deep down. There is plenty of evidence to the contrary. Regardless, he shouldn’t try to expand the league.
That’s right, Manfred thinks big. Two new teams to be 16 teams per league, officially twice the size of the original modern Major League Baseball, which had eight teams in each league from 1901 to 1960.
The last expansion was in 1998 when the Arizona Diamondbacks and Tampa Bay were [Devil] Reyes became teams 29 and 30. Since then, Team Ratings Profits shot up, but many baseball problems either stayed the same or got worse. In 2004, Estimated average value of the MLB team was $295 million; As of May, the average was $2.07 billion.
When New England Sports Ventures, now known as the Fenway Sports Group, bought the Boston Red Sox in 2002, they paid the team $660 million, more than double the price the MLB team had previously paid. This year, annual Forbes estimates put the team at $3.4 billion, and that outrageous number still puts them behind the Los Angeles Dodgers and $6 billion men, the Yankees.
MLB expansion is not the answer to baseball problems
But before I get into the long talk about how all these billions (or at least most of them) should go to teachers and nurses and end world hunger, not to mention not increase the US federal minimum wage since the last time a team won World Championship Yankees, here’s a short list of things I think Manfred should work on before he even considers adding more teams: pretty much everything minor leagues, international recruiting corruption, broadcast costs and blackouts, ticket prices, And the franchise prices, tanks, the old-fashioned grooming policy of the Yankees, and the fact that the Los Angeles Angels are somehow allowed to waste the best years of Mike Trout and Shohei Ohtani. These are just a few of the many things that should be on Manfred’s to-do list before he “adds more teams”.
Manfred wanted to expand MLB like when I was a kid and I was asking for a new Barbie mom, and she told me I wasn’t playing enough with the ones I already had.
In fairness, my mom wasn’t really a Barbie mom. A bit like how the long slash joke’s complaint is that Manfred doesn’t like baseball, which, again, he says is untrue. And then one day my younger sister went and gave all Barbie “haircuts”, and that was the end of us getting Barbie, sort of some team owners were content with destroying the teams they own, and in doing so, they were ruining everyone else’s playing time because non-competitive teams hurt with the collective experience.
Of course, many of baseball’s biggest problems aren’t due to Manfred alone; The commissioner may be, but it serves the interests of the owners. Ultimately, the chain of command is irrelevant, because the fact of the matter is that adding two more teams to this league at this juncture would be as if your toilet was overflowing and the house was flooded and instead of calling a plumber, you called a contractor to build a patio in your backyard. priorities.
I’m not against expansion, though. What I’m against is expansion without reform, without improvement, without taking care of what we already have. Baseball should not try to grow while parts of it are rotting on the inside. Before adding more teams, they need to address issues such as low attendance for existing teams. Instead of expanding, maybe moving.
What could MLB’s expansion ultimately look like?
The interesting thing about the potential (eventually potential) expansion is that if each league had 16 teams instead of 15, the two leagues could be restructured from three divisions of five teams into four divisions of four. Doing so would particularly benefit the US Eastern and National Western League, two divisions always awash with talent that has left a worthy team out of the post-season. We’ll see if the new three-team Wild Card format changes this year.
Of course, the divisions’ restructuring definitely means they’ll have to change the post-season structure as well. Do you see how all of a sudden, there is a huge amount of new work to do that has nothing to do with solving the above issues that need fixing?
There’s a lot to like about the MLB expansion. Pitch can boost the local economy; It creates new jobs, increases tourism, and drives local business in the surrounding area. The flip side of this coin is that sports arenas make everything around them more expensive: dining, parking, housing, just to name a few of the many costs of living. Of course, that brings us back to the larger, more prevalent issues in this country of minimum wages and high inflation.
All this to say, I would like to have more baseball teams. I want this game to grow and be accessible to more people. I want more nights on the ball court, to see more players have a chance to live their dreams and more kids to fall in love with the game I fell in love with before I was old enough to know what love really is.
Sadly, I’m pretty sure that’s not why Rob Manfred would want to add more teams. As with many, if not most of the changes he’s made since becoming commissioned, it’s safe to assume that this new campaign is all about money. Because this is the subject of baseball for responsible people. But if we don’t fix baseball, the money will go. So if you really care about baseball, you need to fix it first.
Stop looking out the window, Rob, the call is coming from inside the house.
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