By Robert Whiting (2017)
I recently had the pleasure of moderating a press conference at the Foreign Correspondents’ Club for Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred, who visited Japan on the occasion of the first and second rounds of the 4th World Baseball Classic, a tournament created by MLB to spur international interest in the game.
Manfred, a smooth, well-dressed lawyer in his late 50s who graduated from Harvard Law School, was elected the 10th Commissioner in the history of MLB in August 2014 and assumed his post in January 2015. He now presides over the second most profitable sports league in the world. With 2016 a record year for industry revenues and overall business performance at nearly $10 billion a year, MLB trails only the National Football League at $13 billion. It is far ahead of the National Basketball Association, which takes in $5.6 billion annually for the #3 spot, and the Premier League, which draws about $4 billion a year for the #4 spot globally. (The NPB, in case you were interested, is 10th in the world with $1.3 billion annually.)
Manfred is the 10th MLB commissioner in a long line dating back to Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis in 1920, a man who banned several players for life for conspiring to fix the 1919 World Series and rooted out gambling in baseball, but also perpetuated the color line and prolonged the segregation of organized baseball. Happy Chandler, a former US senator and governor of Kentucky, broke the color line, allowing Jackie Robinson to play for the Brooklyn Dodgers and become the first Black player in MLB, while Ford Frick, a former sportswriter and National League PR executive, suspended baseball relations with Japan in 1965 over the rights to Masanori Murakami. Bowie Kuhn ushered in World Series night games, while Bud Selig, former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, monetized the game, increasing revenue six-fold through a program of new stadiums, integrated media and merchandising rights, regional TV packages and digital platforms. Rob Manfred, a labor lawyer, has made collective bargaining his specialty since joining MLB in 1987. It is primarily because of his efforts that MLB is in the midst of a quarter-century period without a strike or a lockout.
In a wide-ranging Q&A session that lasted an hour, the Commissioner touched on a number of subjects, including media reports in the US that suggested the 2017 World Baseball Classic might be the last one.
“Nothing could be further from the truth,” he said with some irritation. “The WBC is being broadcast in 182 countries. It is a $100 million event over a period lasting less than two weeks. It has been profitable from Day 1 and has really grown in terms of its revenue significance and its popularity around the world. The WBC is the premier international baseball event. It is a great event because it allows the greatest baseball players in the world to compete against each other and gives them that competition with the extra honor of representing their country… So I really don’t know where the report came from.”
However, Manfred acknowledged that the place where the WBC is most popular is Japan, followed by Taiwan and Korea—and not the US, where baseball was invented. Japan won the first two tournaments, in 2006 and 2009, thanks to the participation of its MLB players including Ichiro Suzuki, Daisuke Matsuzaka and Yu Darvish, and the Dominican Republic won in 2013.
As a result, games in the aforementioned Asian countries draw top TV ratings—for example, 60 million fans in Japan tuned in for the 2006 WBC final to witness Japan’s victory over Cuba in San Diego, while the 2013 Japan-Taiwan matchup was the most-watched TV program in Taiwan history.
By contrast, the United States, for its part, has yet to even win a medal, much less make the finals. WBC ratings in the US were in fact so bad that ESPN stopped televising the games; they are now shown on MLB TV, but primarily as filler.
The problem for the US, Commissioner Manfred explained, is that the WBC is always held in March, when Major League players are just starting spring training. Many players are reluctant to commit to playing for Team USA in the tourney and risk injury before the season starts. Players from Japan, Korea and Taiwan, by contrast, start their training in January and are in top shape by the time the tourney begins.
Thus, the value of the tournament for MLB, which controls WBC global rights, is as an international marketing tool for baseball. And the international market is growing—WBC ratings were sky-high in Puerto Rico, for example. But baseball is still struggling to catch on in China and Brazil, where the growing middle classes are an MLB target.
Switching topics to baseball in the Olympics, Manfred said he did not think MLB would ever supply players from 25-man rosters to play in the Olympics. “Having players away from their teams in mid-season would alter the competition, and I don’t think owners would support any kind of break in our season other than what we already have—four days at All-Star time. Continuity is the key to our competition.”
The Commissioner also talked about being invited to Trump Tower this January to meet with US President Donald Trump, a huge New York baseball fan, shortly before the presidential inauguration. He said he did not see any changes in Trump’s immigration policy that would have an effect on MLB, be it in regard to Japanese players and their families living in the US during the baseball season, or players and their families from Latin America, and Mexico in particular, despite the immigration issues raised by Trump during the presidential campaign and beyond. “We are getting our visas in exactly the same way that we have for many years,” he said, “and I don’t foresee any changes.”
The Commissioner also said that superstar Shohei Ohtani, of the 2016 Japan champion Nippon Ham Fighters and MVP of the Pacific League last year, will face restrictions because of the new CBA agreement that limits the money payable to international free agents under 26 and with less than six years as a professional—a move designed to put them under the same limitations as active major leaguers, who must put in six years with an MLB team before earning free agency. The rule states that MLB teams are not allowed to spend more than $6 million per year total on international free agents.
What this means, said Commissioner Manfred, is that Ohtani will not be able to go to MLB until the end of the 2019 season if he wants to negotiate a big-money free agent contract of the type Masahiro Tanaka signed with the New York Yankees in 2014 (a 7-year deal for an estimated $155 million). If Ohtani wants to go earlier, via the posting system that allows NPB teams to send players to the US before free agent eligibility for a special posting fee, the most he could possibly get is $6 million a year, assuming the signing team wanted to spend all of its allotted pool money for free agents on one player.
Asked if a special exception could be made for Ohtani, grandfathering him in under the old posting rules, which did not have a salary cap, Manfred replied, “Before being elected MLB Commissioner, I was a labor lawyer, and rule number one in labor negotiations is that individually driven exceptions with a union get you into a lot of trouble. As appealing as Mr. Ohtani is to everyone, it’s important when doing a collective bargaining agreement to keep your eyes on what the rule should be for all players and not get distracted by the appeal of any one person.”
Finally, Manfred dismissed the idea of an MLB franchise in Tokyo or Osaka, or an MLB Asia Division with teams in South Korea, Japan and Taiwan, citing long travel distances and jet lag, and then addressed the question of a “Real World Series”—a reference to the long-standing wish of Japanese baseball leaders to play a series between the champions of American baseball and the champions of Japanese baseball.
This idea of an “RWS” dates back to the days of the V-9 Giants of Sadaharu Oh and Shigeo Nagashima, and the special dream of Yomiuri owner Matsutaro Shoriki to have his team, a perennial Japan champion, take on the best of the US. MLB teams—and quite often very good ones—had often visited Japan in the post-season to play goodwill exhibition games on schedules determined in the pre-season. The winners of the Fall Classic, however, had never made the trip. Commissioners had rebuffed such suggestions by saying that the level of Japanese baseball was not quite up to MLB standards.
“How can the Japanese compete when American players no longer usable in the major leagues were playing regularly in Japan?” said MLB Commissioner Ford Frick back in 1965. “The time is not yet right,” said Commissioner Bowie Kuhn in 1981, forming a committee to study the question that was never heard from again. In 2005, Commissioner Bud Selig rejected an offer of $100,000,000 to play a Real World Series from SoftBank owner Masayoshi Son. “That amount of money is nothing to us,” Son was told by a spokesman for Selig.
Manfred’s response to this question? “We already have a Real World Series, and it is played in the United States every October.”
From the private meeting before the press conference
Q: What do you think of the Tokyo Dome?
A: “That stadium has to go,” he said. “It is nowhere near major league quality. It’s old. It’s too small. Amenities outdated. MLB needs something completely new.”
Q: Why do Japanese like baseball so much?
A: Certain cultures appreciate the slow pace. Japan is one of those cultures.
Q: Is there a possibility MLB games will end in ties, obviating the need for ultra-long extra-inning games?
A: No. We would only do that in the minor leagues.
Q: What are your goals as commissioner?
A: Youth outreach, embracing technology, quickening the pace of play, strengthening player relations, and creating a more unified business operation.
NOTE: This column also appeared, in edited form, in the FCCJ’s Number 1 Shimbun.
Tokyo Junkie 