OC Register: Whicker: Rob Manfred makes a tough job look impossible

[AngelsWin.com]

Before we suggest that Rob Manfred shouldn’t be the commissioner of baseball, we have to wonder if anyone should.

Politicians, sportswriters, lawyers, professors, generals and judges have all failed. Happy Chandler brought Jackie Robinson into the game and established a pension fund, but he also threatened to use replacement players.

The standards are extraordinarily high. The NFL’s blissful ignorance of concussions and CTE would have earned any baseball commissioner the boot. The NBA had a rogue referee and nobody connected it to the crumbling of Western civilization and the commissioner’s role in it.

But even if baseball’s owners have little feel for the customs and the mentality of the game, they might consider hiring a commissioner who does.

Instead, Manfred uses cosmetic solutions for first-world problems, like the length of games and the postseason format, and then he is frozen by the Astrogate scandal. When asked if Houston should vacate its 2017 championship, he got his hackles up and referred the trophy as a “piece of metal,” like a defective bumper on a rusty Oldsmobile, and the Dodgers’ Justin Turner bitterly called him on it.

Joe Torre, now the righthand man to a commissioner whose hands consist of ham, knows how excruciating it is to win 11 playoff games after playing 162 others.

Instead, Manfred tries to solve nonexistent problems. His theoretical playoff would make the best teams in each league sit out the first round, damaging their timing and dulling their edge. Manfred’s decree that a reliever must face three successive hitters is just as baseball-deaf.

Prideful franchises like Detroit and Baltimore run out minor-league lineups to lose major-league games, souring a generation of hometown fans, and yet they have no incentive to get better. Unprepared players are rushed to the front, yet Manfred wants to slice off an entire layer of minor-league instruction, which also removes the game from its soil.

Now something monumental happens, like Astrogate, and Manfred responds with soft justice.

Astros general manager Jeff Luhnow and manager A.J. Hinch, who knew and concealed everything, are eligible to return in 2021. The Astros lose two first-round picks, which is not nothing, but they passed up Kris Bryant in 2013 to take Mark Appel and won anyway.

The vigilantes dig in. A guy showed up at an Astros workout Monday and began banging a trash can when Jose Altuve and Alex Bregman were hitting.

Ironically, baseball will profit short-term, because nothing sells like villainy. Check the attendance. If ESPN could show the Astros on the road every Sunday night this year, with all the shock-and-awe drama, it surely would.

Fans cry for player suspensions, title removal, even a postseason ban, which would of course affect Houston rookies and newcomers who were months and hundreds of miles from the crime scene.

To be fair, Manfred was hamstrung. He and his investigators had given players immunity for their cooperation. Without it, nobody cooperates. Baseball can’t use that information and then suspend the informers. That only works in reverse. Besides, the roster fluctuates. Marwin Gonzalez was an Astro in 2017-18 but is in Minnesota now. Would a suspension be fair to the Twins?

Moreover, Major League Baseball admonished club executives, not the players, about electronic surveillance in 2017. Luhnow never passed the information to the players. Had they been suspended, they likely would have flooded Manfred’s office with grievances and won them all.

Vacating a title sounds like a welcome cleanse, but it’s just a gesture. It’s not like lifting the gold medal from Ben Johnson in 1988 and giving it to Carl Lewis, because Johnson directly tested positive in a sport where the steroid-speed relationship was clear, and Lewis posted a time independently from Johnson’s.

No one knows whether sign-stealing really helped the Astros, or when, or how much. Some hitters say the process of digesting the signs slows down reaction time. The Dodgers pretty much knew what Charlie Morton was throwing at the end of Game 7 and couldn’t hit it. The Astros’ pitchers performed like champions. Why deprive them?

Maybe they could fetch Ford Frick’s asterisk and put it next to “Houston, 2017” in the record books. You could argue that such a scar would be a powerful deterrent, rather than expunging the result altogether, like eternal sunshine for the spotless mind.

To regain the players’ trust is a massive lift. To deal with baseball clouds that never move on is a wicked assignment.

To be the baseball commissioner has been beyond the mastery of everyone so far. Poor Rob Manfred. Someone should have given him the signs.

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[T.G.]

"like eternal sunshine for the spotless mind."

WTF?

[failos]

Hofstra quality article

[Keener]

I still take issue with the idea of "oh, you cant punish the Twins for hiring Gonzalez".  Fuck them and fuck him.  He is a cheater, and they signed him. 

[AngelsLakersFan]

TLDR: Being commissioner is tough, Manfred's hands were tied!

[AngelsLakersFan]

Just double checked to make sure this wasn't written by Fletch... I should've have known better. If it's crap it's usually Whicker or @Dollar Bill