August 1, 2022
Late last week, Major League Baseball sent a letter to Congress arguing the organization deserves its antitrust exemption. One would think MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred might wish to express his deep care and love for baseball as the base motivation for all his decisions, but as with many of his other public statements this message communicated the commissioner’s view that maximizing short-term profitability for MLB franchise owners is his primary concern. The tragedy of Manfred is he occupies a role that, historically, has been conceived as caretaker of a major American institution, and yet almost everything he supports and stands for diminishes the long-term prospects that baseball will flourish.
July 17, 2022
With reports that the Washington Nationals are exploring their options for trading young superstar Juan Soto, it is worth stating plainly that this is a travesty because the team will almost certainly be better off paying the man what he has asked for rather than trading him for a collection of players who, because most of the other teams in Major League Baseball are run by reasonably intelligent people, will face extremely long odds of ever producing as much on-field value as Soto, combined, let alone individually.
