I don’t know Rob Manfred well enough to know if he has a good sense of humor, but he sure got a good chuckle out of me the other day when he talked about his minority hiring program. He was as funny as his predecessor, Bud Selig, ever was in talking about the issue.

To his credit, Manfred told the gathering at Major League Baseball’s fourth annual diversity business summit that MLB’s “focus on diversity was a little too narrow.”

But if MLB.com’s coverage of Manfred’s appearance at the session reflected Manfred’s focus, the commissioner is straying far from focusing on legitimate minority hiring.

Again to Manfred’s credit, he has hired a black club executive, Tyrone Brooks, to create and run a program to build a pipeline of minority candidates who can fill major league front office positions. It would help, of course, to have some high-ranking role models for young minorities to want to try to emulate. MLB doesn’t have many of those.

While the commissioner’s pipeline plan has long-range possibilities, Manfred has belied his stated desire, showing no great interest in urging, even encouraging, clubs to fill decision-making positions with blacks or Latinos.

Fourteen new executives will start the season next month in the highest-ranking positions – 3 club presidents, 1 president of baseball operations, 1 executive vice president of baseball operations  and 9 general managers. One is Latino, Al Avila of the Detroit Tigers; none is black.

Forget the so-called Selig Rule. That was the commissioner’s 1999 edict that told clubs when they were hiring someone for a decision-making position they had to interview a minority, not hire but interview. The rule preceded the NFL’s Rooney Rule, which was instituted for the same purpose.

I don’t know how the Rooney Rule has worked, but MLB talks a good game where the Selig Rule is concerned (would you want your name on an ineffective policy?).

Selig occasionally enforced his rule, but at least as often as not clubs were able to evade the rule, offering flimsy excuses that Selig accepted. Once, I recall, the Tigers didn’t interview a minority candidate for their managerial vacancy and belatedly started a neighborhood minority program that Selig bought as their excuse.

This past off-season clubs came up with a new scheme, and Manfred bought it. The plan had to be coordinated because it involved four teams and they couldn’t have pulled it off by coincidence.

Four teams each chose a different black executive to interview as their designated interviewee. They were middle-level executives at best, and none had a better chance than I did of being named general manager. None, of course, got the job, but all four clubs could say we followed the rules.

One club did even better. The Milwaukee Brewers hired a nice young man named David Stearns to be their general manager. He came highly recommended – by Manfred, for whom he had worked in MLB’s labor relations department.

I have heard of no other new general manager who can cite the commissioner as his helping hand. Matt Klentak, Philadelphia’s new general manager, also worked in MLB’s labor department, but it was in that job that he met Andy MacPhail, now the Phillies’ president and the man who hired him.

Of all the new executives, MacPhail and Klentak are probably in the moat difficult position because the Phillies have fallen so far.

De Jon Watson is not one of the new executives. Watson’s continued employment as Arizona’s senior vice president of baseball operations, in fact, is the most telling sign that Manfred didn’t really care about minority hiring.

If Manfred’s concern were genuine, he would have talked earnestly to the teams seeking a general manager and strongly urged them to hire Watson, first to raise a hand gets him. However, Manfred sat on both hands and so did the teams. Not only didn’t the 50-year-old Watson get a job, but he also didn’t even get an interview. Nearly a quarter of the teams needed a general manager, and no one interviewed him.

Tony La Russa, his boss in Arizona, would have interviewed him. After La Russa hired Watson for the Diamondbacks, he and general manager Dave Stewart were so impressed with him they were ready to act on his behalf in a unique way.

“Dave and I met and discussed if it would be proper to make calls on his behalf,” La Russa said. “He’s articulate, very impressive and he works hard.”

I talked to an executive last Fall who said Watson topped the minority list of general managerial candidates. “He’s got a good personality, he’s a real nice guy and well liked. There’s nothing that should keep him from getting a job.”

Watson has been in baseball long enough to know that its life isn’t always fair. But he’s not looking for a handout, and he wants to get the job on his merits and not on his color.

“If they want to look at a qualified candidate, I’m that guy,” Watson said when I discussed the issue with him last Fall. “I don’t see myself as a minority candidate. If I weren’t qualified, that would be a different story. Show me a list of candidates and I’ll stand up to any of them.”

There’s one other element of Manfred’s remarks to the diversity business summit that warrants a chuckle at his expense. He gave his speech at Chase Field in Phoenix. Where does Watson work? At Chase Field in Phoenix.