MLB Succession

Robert Manfred, Jr.'s Last Mile

For me, the change in seasons from winter to spring means one thing: it's baseball season. Now, I'm a happy camper. Zero complaints.

Except one. A short-sighted baseball commissioner who will oversee Major League Baseball's expansion from 30 to 32 teams by the time he retires at the end of the 2029 season. MLB started with 16 teams in 1901 and didn't expand until 1961. The last expansion was 25 years ago when the Arizona Diamondbacks and the Tampa Bay Devil Rays were awarded franchises.

It seems like succession is part of every discussion these days following the conclusion of the fourth and final season of Succession, the highly acclaimed Dark Drama Comedy that satirized and lionized media patriarch Logan Roy.

Following the conclusion of the award-winning HBO series, several high-profile successions were already underway. The most important and least talked about is the generational succession of Baby Boomers as Gen X enters the C-Suite. Then there's the Murdoch succession that is in progress at News Corp., with the Arnaults (LMVH), the Lauders (Estee Lauder), and the Lees (Samsung) waiting in the wings to anoint new heads of ultra-wealthy families. All of these successions promise to be great entertainment for anyone hooked on dysfunctional family dramas.

None of them will hold a candle to the race for baseball commissioner that started this weekend as the first slate of spring training games began. There will be plenty of time to pick apart Junior's commissionership, but his legacy no doubt be the two chosen expansion cities.

ESPN's Jeff Passan has already inside dealt Junior's hand by reporting the six cities that have the best expansion odds. There was also an ESPN staff-written piece that included three outliers which was encouraging. The outlier cities included Austin-San Antonio, Mexico City, and Montreal. Tokyo has not made anyone's expansion list but mine.

Baseball fans comprise the smartest fan base on the planet with the possible exception of European football and cricket. Yet MLB owners have continued to saddle baseball fans with incompetent commissioners for over 100 years (exceptions are Bart Giamatti, Fay Vincent, Jr., "Bud" Selig).

Now comes a pivotal moment for Major League Baseball. Will it become an international institution for the next 100 years on par with European football (with the world's largest fan base of 3.5 billion fans) and cricket (with the world's second-largest fan base of 2.5 billion fans)? Or, will it atrophy inside U.S. borders and ultimately be swallowed up by the sport of cricket? Make no mistake, cricket is coming for baseball.

Today, baseball counts more fans (500 million) than either American football (400 million) or basketball (400 million). MLB can thank Selig for its international popularity. First, he hired Bob Bowman to become CEO of MLBAM (Major League Baseball Advanced Media) in 1990 to centralize all digital media on a common platform. Bowman then created BAMTECH to stream MLB games. Disney bought out BAMTECH for $3.8 billion at the end of Selig's term in 2015, split evenly among MLB's franchisees. In 2005, Selig partnered with the MLBPA (Major League Base Players Association) to launch the wildly popular World Baseball Classic.

Unfortunately, the current commissioner, who made his name as a former labor lawyer busting the chops of MLB's union leaders, appears to have no idea where MLB's future value lies. Junior missed the overt message delivered by Mexico and Japan in the 2023 World Baseball Classic. He has already ruled out Mexico City as an expansion option despite 30 percent of MLB rosters being comprised of players from Mexico.

Anything less than awarding Mexico City, where the country's richest man also happens to be its biggest baseball fan, and Tokyo, a city with a population greater than the State of California located in a country that is home to the best and richest player in the history of the game, will be a travesty.

This type of forward-thinking international expansion is an anathema for Junior. You can expect Manfred at some point to suddenly become head of the Chamber of Commerce on behalf of reputationally solid cities such as Nashville or Salt Lake City or illiberal disasters such as Portland.

In closing, I'll appeal to MLB ownership to hire a new commissioner with an economics background and the ability to keep a perfect baseball scorecard. Baseball fans worldwide would greatly appreciate it.