When Bud Selig left the commissioner’s office Jan. 25 after 22 years, he did not leave a clean desk behind. Rob Manfred, his successor, inherited several juicy items on which Selig had not acted.
In his strategically procrastinating way – that is, I don’t want to have to decide this – Selig ignored for more than 17 years Pete Rose’s application for reinstatement to the game he had left involuntarily in 1989.
Rose, however, was not alone in dangling from Selig’s rope. The commissioner’s college fraternity brother, Lew Wolff, has been waiting for six years or more to learn if he would be permitted to move his Athletics from Oakland to San Jose.
Much more recently another issue landed on Selig’s desk on East Wisconsin Avenue in Milwaukee, and he has gladly passed it on to Manfred’s desk on Park Avenue in New York. The Tampa Bay Rays filed a tampering charge against the Chicago Cubs in November, accusing them of inducing Joe Maddon to opt out of his contract with the Rays to manage Chicago’s Wrigley Field wonders.
Those are the issues with which Selig could have dealt before heading into retirement but opted to leave them for Manfred. The $25 million or more Selig was making in each of his final years wasn’t enough for him to feel responsible for such decisions. Instead, it was “let my buddy Rob do it.”
One other issue remained, and this is one that may be still hanging around when Manfred’s successor takes office, and I’m not assuming one five-year term for the new commissioner.
The Rays desperately need a new playground, and that facility may be impossible to achieve as long as team owner Stu Sternberg doesn’t want to abandon St. Petersburg. Selig, however, didn’t seem to do anything noticeable to help advance Sternberg’s cause.
I spoke with Manfred about each of these issues on the telephone last Friday. He initially commented on them in an e-mail but called me when I let him know I had more questions than he had answered.
The Rose matter erupted recently following interviews Rose did with the advent of Manfred as the new commissioner. Rose agreed in 1989 to be placed on the permanently ineligible list, thus removing himself from Major League Baseball.
He appealed for reinstatement in 1997, but Selig never acted on the application. Whenever he was asked about it, Selig said he was studying it. It was his way of avoiding making a decision.
In his e-mail to me, Manfred said, “In fairness to Mr. Rose, I do not wish to talk about this matter publicly except that I intend to be fully prepared and informed about the facts of the matter in the event that I receive a formal request from Mr. Rose or his representative.”
When I spoke to Manfred, I asked him if he would act on the 1997 application or require a new application from Rose.
“I’m not going to say anything about the Rose process,” the new commissioner said. “We’ll figure out what we’re going to do.”
Rose, meanwhile, continues to misunderstand his position. For example, he told USA Today, “I just want to be on that writers’ ballot. Let the writers decide. If they want me in, I’m in. If they don’t feel I should be in, I can live with it. Once they lift my ban, I should be just like anyone else. If I’ve never been on the ballot, my clock should start at zero. That will give them 10 years to decide, if they need it.”
Sorry, Pete, you long ago forfeited your right to be on the writers’ ballot.
“According to the current Hall of Fame rules,” said Jack O’Connell, secretary-treasurer of the Baseball Writers Association, “Pete Rose has been out of the BBWAA voting jurisdiction since after the 2006 election. The Hall’s board of directors would have to decide how it wishes to proceed.
“I do not believe anyone has come off the ineligible list since the Hall ruled in 1992 that no one on it could be considered for election, so this is an unprecedented area. But according to the rules, Rose is wrong if he says he is going on the writers’ ballot. Again, that would take a decision by the Hall’s board. I have had no discussions about Rose with anyone at the Hall since 2007.”
Rose is misguided in other ways. After lying for 15 years by denying he ever bet on baseball games, he admitted it in his book, but he said he never placed bets from his manager’s office. John Dowd’s airtight investigation demonstrated otherwise.
Commissioner Selig could easily have rejected Rose’s reinstatement request, particularly because A. Bartlett Giamatti, whom he has always described as his very good friend, was the commissioner who investigated Rose and found him to have violated baseball’s most sacred rule.
Selig, however, chose to let Rose’s application sit in a desk drawer for the last 17 years of his 22-year tenure. The San Jose matter, as unnecessarily prolonged as it has been, hasn’t taken that long. Manfred will resolve that issue, too, though not while the matter is in litigation.
The city of San Jose has lost its lawsuit in federal and appellate courts, and earlier this month the city council voted to appeal the latest ruling to the United States Supreme Court, claiming Major League Baseball is violating antitrust laws by blocking the A’s move.
For San Jose to win the case, the Supreme Court has to overturn the court’s 1922 decision, which is extremely unlikely to happen. The court has never demonstrated a desire to overturn the original decision, even though time and circumstances have changed significantly.
Subsequent SCOTUS decisions have said or suggested that if the 1922 decision is to be altered, Congress is the appropriate body to do it, and Congress has never shown an inclination to do such a thing.
“It’s important that we prevailed in the recent litigation because the exemption has been very important to the way we’ve done business,” Manfred said in the e-mail.“I also think that it’s a good thing that hopefully this will be the end of the San Jose litigation.
“Litigation often distracts people from what the real issue is. And I think the real issue for us, going forward, is that the A’s need a new ball park, and we need to get focused on making sure that we get that done as fast as we can.”
On the telephone, Manfred wouldn’t say how he felt about allowing the A’s to move to the south segment of the bay but said, “We have ongoing litigation with San Jose that we intend to defend vigorously.”
MLB officials are focused on burying the San Jose lawsuit. By now, city officials most likely realize they have to win to have any chance of getting the Athletics. With its lawsuit, the city has done its case no good. Unless it wins in Washington, San Jose will not win in New York.
Had Selig not withheld a decision for so long and had wanted to do what was in the best interests of baseball, San Jose, the 10th largest city in the United States, would already be home to the Athletics.
However, March 30 will mark six years since Selig appointed a three-man panel to study the situation, and San Jose grew tired of waiting and sued. As it will most likely turn out, the city’s impatience was inadvisable and foolish.
Unless the outcome forces him to allow the A’s to move, why would Manfred give San Jose a major league team after the city challenged the game’s antitrust exemption and forced M.L.B. to spend millions in fighting the suit? San Jose, after all, has no greater right to a team than any other city.
Nevertheless, the Athletics will not survive at their present site. Manfred didn’t acknowledge that likelihood but said, “I think there’s a possibility of getting a stadium in Oakland.”
The Rays need a new park, too. Recent rumors have raised the possibility of the team leaving Tampa Bay for Montreal.
Speaking of the Rays’ owner, Manfred said in his e-mail, “Stu Sternberg has stated repeatedly that he wants his club to remain in Tampa Bay. We ardently support Stu’s optimism and his vision. With an appropriate facility, Tampa Bay can be a vibrant major league market.”
The Rays and the rest of Major League Baseball have known since their inception in 1998, the year Selig was formally elected commissioner and Manfred became MLB’s chief labor executive, that the Rays needed a new park. That is another issue Selig left for Manfred.
“We’re supportive of their efforts,” Manfred said.
The most recent left-over development facing Manfred is the Rays’ tampering charge against the Cubs, who are not new to tampering suspicions.
The Cubs’ quick signing of Maddon to manage them raised suspicions that they induced Maddon to opt out of his Rays’ contract for a 5-year, $25 million contract in Chicago.
“There is an ongoing investigation,” Manfred said in his e-mail. “When the investigation concludes, we will be transparent.”
When I asked Manfred on the phone to expand his comment, he said, “It’s an ongoing investigation about which I will not comment.”
When the Cubs hired Theo Epstein in 2012 as their president of baseball operations and Epstein hired Jed Hoyer as general manager, some baseball people suspected tampering. However, no one filed a tampering charge, and Selig said he had no reason to investigate the hirings.
During his tenure as commissioner, Selig played down tampering to the extent that he gave the impression he didn’t care about it. By saying “we will be transparent” when the Maddon investigation concludes, Manfred is offering a refreshing approach that didn’t exist under Selig.