I don’t normally “repost” items on MORE TO COME, but sometimes there’s a piece that just screams to be shared (even with my small corner of the world).

Joe Posnanski (regular readers know how much I love his essays) has just posted Rob Manfred Doesn’t Love Baseball on his Joe Blogs site.

It begins with the following:

“Lots of people think Rob Manfred hates baseball—I’ve never quite bought that. I’ve spoken with him about it and come away fairly convinced, no, he doesn’t HATE the game.

What I do believe is this: Rob Manfred doesn’t LOVE baseball.

I feel entirely sure that no one who loves baseball would be able to casually talk about killing off the American and National League—during a Little League game, no less.”

For those who don’t know, Manfred is the commissioner of Major League Baseball, although Joe suspects that he would “happily become the NFL commissioner tomorrow because there’s more money to be made. Or run Goldman Sachs. Or become CEO of an AI company.”

It isn’t that Joe doesn’t understand the job of commissioner:

“Yes, I realize that it’s not Rob Manfred’s job to love baseball—his job is to make the owners richer and feeling good about their greed—but still: ‘I think our postseason format would be even more appealing for entities like ESPN…’ is such a soulless sentence, the vowels should be replaced with skull and bones.”

However, you at least want someone in charge who both understands and loves the game. “Baseball is not like other American sports. It just isn’t,” Joe writes.

“Baseball matters because of its history, because of our childhood memories, because of the storytelling. More than 500 of you have already signed up to be part of our Scoresheet Celebration. Think about that: in what other sport is it fun to sit in the stands and keep score? None. That’s the answer.

And that makes sense: We have no other team sport where we believe the best ever played 100 years ago. No other team sport where we all stand together during a random moment that has nothing to do with the game and sing a dopey and ancient song together. No other team sport where there is always time for a comeback.

Baseball is its own thing. That’s what Rob Manfred never gets … and never appreciates.”

Change in baseball “is not only good, it’s essential. The right kind of change keeps the game vibrant and alive and, paradoxically, connected to its past,” Joe adds later.

“It’s that last part—the connection to the past—that Rob Manfred never seems to get.”

The entire piece is worth reading, so I’ll stop now and send you there once again, in the hopes that you’ll click through.

More to come . . .

DJB

Image from Pixabay