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It was a sad day indeed when the owners of baseball clubs finally made clear that the Commissioner was no longer even a pretend neutral arbiter, but rather their partisan representative in dealings with the players and the game as a whole.
For over a decade now, baseball has labored under the dictatorial reign of a man who obviously doesn’t much understand baseball and certainly does not much like it. He rightly sees his job as nothing but pulling the teats on the cash cow. And there are no signs that things will be any better under whoever replaces him when he steps down, as he has said he soon will.
The procession of Commissioners prior to Manfred had their ups and downs; even the best (or least bad) did some harm (though even the worst did a little good). But the real assault on the game emerged with Bud Selig. The atrocious—because spurious— clamor over so-called “Performance-Enhancing Drugs” did damage not yet abated. As to Manfred, well, as Wikipedia puts it, “Manfred’s tenure has seen numerous changes to the game.” Oh yes, indeed.
The universal Designated Hitter (a terrible mistake in 1973, now made worse); the three-batter minimum for relief pitchers (often referred to as “the Bochy Rule”); the so-called “placed runner” (often called “The Manfred Man”); changes in the size of the bases (taking the bases from 15" square to 18" doesn't sound like much but it’s about a 45% increase in area); limitations on the placement of fielders; the abominable pitch clock (“Waiter, I have a complaint: you have served me too much of this good food I ordered and am paying for!”); the two-throws-over rule; those are just the most hideous distortions of baseball he has wreaked. Besides those enormities are his faint wrist slap on the Astros for their gross, blatant cheating; his remark that the World Series trophy is just “a piece of metal ”; and the 2021-2022 lockout (the sport’s first work stoppage in 27 years). Oh, and Pete Rose will be posthumously eligible for the Hall of Fame. Thanks for everything, Rob old boy.
But he’s a big success in the eyes of the owners, because those greenbacks just keep rolling in. That they are no longer rolling in from baseball but rather from a version of Calvin Ball doesn’t matter to those receiving them.
The owners are a fascinating bunch. Even without Marvin Miller and Donald Fehr heading the players’ union, every time there is a new CBA (Collective Bargaining Agreement) to be negotiated, the owners again dream pipe dreams of this time “breaking” the MLBPA (Major League Baseball Players Association), and every time they get their collective butt kicked. And we are virtually certain to have yet another re-run of that sorry script again this coming season. Slow learners.
It is worth remembering that there was once an era in which club owners wanted more than anything to win. None of them were eleemosynary institutions: they were well aware of money. But by and large, purchase of a club was an ego thing rather than purely an investment. They almost all really, really wanted to win. And they understood that a great part of the draw of baseball—“The National Pastime”—was its generational continuity. The baseball changed, the way players conditioned changed, much changed: but the rules changed little if any from year to year or decade to decade or generation to generation. Granddad’s baseball was Junior’s baseball. The biggest marker of the change from then to now was the disappearance of the owner whose sole business was baseball. When the game is your only livelihood, you take care not to damage it. Not so any longer: all hail Calvin Ball.
I suppose this remark really belongs to the section above, but anyway: how dead does one’s brain have to be to use the ABS system under that ridiculous challenge system? A pitch is either a ball or a strike, and ABS reliably tells you which it is. Why should pitchers and batters (and catchers) have to “challenge” dubious calls? And that system not only lets lots of wrong umpire calls escape, but encourages a fan belief (which, as we will see, is correct) that many calls (some crucial) are wrong.
Umpire reliability—or rather, the lack of it—has been a major blot on the game right from the start. It’s not so much that umpires are bad: it’s that they are being asked to do something that rather obviously humans are just not capable of doing well.
We all suffered with that blot year in and year out, decade in and decade out, because there was nothing much anyone could do about it (the rare occasions when minor-league umps were used proved that). But now we have a means to always and ever get each pitch called correctly. And what do we do? We make a game show out of it. Here ya go, guys! Spin the wheel and decide whether to take the risk! Oh, you lost: too bad. Oh, you won: silly us!
One can find varying opinions about the ABS. Catchers don’t like it because they feel it denigrates “framing”, presently a valuable asset for those good at it. Some folk, whom I simply cannot understand, say that relying on quite fallible umpires “adds a human element to the game”. Requiring a pitcher to throw four strikes to get a strikeout, or a batter to get five balls to get a walk adds to the game? On what planet?
You can see tons of data on umpire accuracy at the excellent Umpire Scorecards web site. For 2026 (through 16 September) the range of umpire accuracies went from a best of 95.4% (Dillon Wilson) down to a worst of 91.33% (C.B. Bucknor). Some 65 out of 91 umps (over 71%) had accuracies worse than “expected” (visit the site for explanations of these terms). The second-best ump (because the best only worked 9 games) missed 190 pitches in 26 games, or a bit over 7 a game. At the other end, the fourth-worst (the 3 worst were also small samples) missed 324 calls over 27 games, or 12 per game. If we take, as a broad-brush approximation, the average of those two extremes, we see an average bad-call rate of close to 10 pitches a game (9.5, but you can’t have half a pitch). As a sanity check, the ump whose accuracy is about average had just that 10 missed calls a game.)
Thus, even in the ABS era, we see an average of more than a pitch an inning being called incorrectly. Some of those missed calls will have turned out to be immaterial to the progress of the game. And some might well have been game changers. Can we please stop being the poster sport for stupid and get actual accuracy into that critical part of the sport? ABS all the time, right now!
Another thing: having regular umpires handle replay challenges is a bad, bad idea. You are asking them to call a fellow umpire wrong; they may not consciously let that affect them, but even the appearance of favoritism is unwise. What is needed is a separate crew of replay reviewers, especially trained in how to study the images—focus in, change angle, whatever. Umpires who themselves make the on-field calls are not the best people to review their comrades’ calls. And they too often make manifestly wrong calls even after supposedly careful review.
And that brings up another matter that not a few have groused about over the years: the Official Scorers. These folk are, at present, local reporters who get paid some measly amount (in my days in press boxes, it was $50 a game, though I’d guess it might be more now) to do a game. The negatives of having reporters as scorers are so obvious that most major news outlets simply won’t allow their staff to be scorers. What is sorely wanted is a crew of scorers, analogous to crews of umpires: well-trained men and women who rotate around baseball as umpires do (but not with some one umpiring crew).
The obstacle to those two comon-sense ideas is simple: money. (What did you expect it to be?) The owners are forever looking for ways to spend less (while making ever more): they seriously cut back the number of minor-league teams, so much that organizations now have problems with insufficient players and no place to properly play and train them. They drastically cut the rounds in the draft, so that they can snap up more players who once would have been drafted without having to offer big contracts (keep watching the increasing number of undrafter free agents showing up in the majors). The owners would as soon run nine half-trained orangutans out there daily if the fans would still come. Are these folk who will spend money for something as silly as making the game nontrivially better?
Maybe Congress will finally do what they keep pretending they’re contemplating doing: take away baseball’s utterly absurd antitrust exemption. Probably at the Greek kalends.
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This page was last modified on Thursday, 17 September 2026, at 8:21 pm Pacific Time.