Dear Commissioner Manfred

A Lifelong Fan Says Goodbye

Welcome to The Quarter Inch, a publication of The Square Inch Newsletter! This Wednesday edition is ordinarily paywalled, but this week—for obvious reasons—I offer it to one and all in hopes that you share it with baseball fans everywhere.

Photo by Rachel Xiao

To: Robert Manfred, Commissioner of Major League Baseball

Dear Commissioner Manfred,

It is with a sad heart that I write to inform you that after forty-six trips around the sun, I will be finding a different pastime next year. It is evident to me that Major League Baseball does not believe in or value its product, so I do not know why I, as a consumer and fan, should believe in it or value it, either.

I know that a letter from a single fan is unlikely to ever reach your desk or computer screen. Even if it did, I think it stands little chance of moving you to reconsider anything you’ve done in your tenure as Commissioner. But I must write this anyway.

The straws have been stacking up on the camel for a considerable time, and before I get to the really serious matters allow me to start with the thin, slender blade which on Friday night began the spine-crushing avalanche. As is my custom, I fired up MLB.TV to watch the AL Central Division race between my beloved Twins and the team from Cleveland. I was informed that I could watch the game “exclusively” for free (ooh! Thank you!) on AppleTV+. Now, that’s something I’ve been noticing this year. Sure, I’ve always been blacked out for national broadcasts on Fox, but now more and more I’m getting blocked from the game by “exclusive” broadcasts from AppleTV+ and YouTube.

Mr. Manfred, do you know what AppleTV+ and YouTube are? They are Internet streaming services. The thing is, I already have an Internet streaming service that pipes the games into my house every night for a fairly substantial fee. It is called MLB.TV. That’s right. Your product. I have to ask myself: why is Major League Baseball pimping me out to its competitors? You want me to go and subscribe to AppleTV or YouTubeTV to watch games? Why am I paying you?

MLB’s blackout rules have always been absurd (my MLB-designated “home” team plays nearly a thousand miles away), and you’ve managed to make them more ridiculous still. If you don’t believe in your product and want to ship me off to a different service, then, well, okay. I will not be renewing my subscription to MLB.TV.

And that isn’t the only thing I won’t be renewing. The frustrations that followed that experience on Friday mean that I won’t be renewing my interest in baseball at all next year. I have tolerated all of your tinkering with the game over the years, and now something has to give. Since you and MLB will certainly not give, it is left to me.

The game broadcasts over the weekend were hilarious, in a jet-black gallows-humor sort of way. Commentators were universally praising your changes. Ken Rosenthal was an enthusiastic “All in!” John Smoltz rhapsodized about how hitters “can’t” adjust to the superior pitching and so we need to ban the shift! I had to take care that my eyes didn’t roll all the way out of my head. The broadcast weekend of September 9th through 11th, 2022 should forever be remembered as one long hostage video. All of these people—who very much know better—make their livelihoods by way of Major League Baseball, and it was just amazing and I’m sure just coincidental how none of them had any problems whatsoever with the rule changes! Funny, that.

Well, you’re not selling that load of horse manure to me because I don’t get a paycheck from you, one of your franchises, or any of the media outlets that financially benefit from your game.

Have you noticed, Mr. Manfred, that all of your “pace of play” changes over the years have made very little difference in the length of a baseball game? Of course you have, because you keep ratcheting down on new ideas to accomplish the feat. But it appears to me that you do not know why your efforts have failed. You begin from a faulty premise. You think there is some flaw in the game that needs fixing. But allow me to clue you in on something:

A game of professional baseball takes approximately three hours to play.

Simple. That’s it. There is no mystery. Just another serendipitous Trinitarian “three” to add to the mystique of this marvelous game. Three strikes, three outs, and … three hours. For 150 years this has been a game of leisure and relaxation. Baseball is chill.

I recently wrote an essay extolling the heavenly virtues of the game of baseball. It included this paragraph:

There is no clock in baseball. No frantic, impending apocalypse of a buzzer going off. No lost causes due to shortages in the temporal supply chain. Baseball is on Sabbath time, not workaday time; it has eternity in its heart. The game ends simply when the game ends. Yet for such a leisurely pastime it can produce indescribable anxiety and heartbreak. It is a slow build, inning by inning, out by out, down to the very last strike. Until that last out is recorded, it remains the day of salvation. No team is ever without hope, for judgment will not intrude from the outside—the shriek of a referee’s whistle or deafening din of a horn—but only from final failure. Swing and a miss!

Imagine my dismay that now, just weeks after writing this, you are implementing this demonic device. A clock! A CLOCK!? No more “Sabbath time.” The intrusion of the monstrous and rapacious vice of impatience—the addition of any temporal pressure at all in a game of baseball—is, for me, a mortal sin. The game has more than enough pressures of its own. A 3-2 pitch with the bases loaded is not something that can or ever should be rushed. What are we? Hyped-up meth addicts? Well, maybe you are. Maybe we all are. And maybe the purpose of baseball is to sanctify us, slow us down, inject a little Sabbath time into our frenetic, attention-deficit-disordered lives.

Alas. Now, thanks to you, we have several hundred impending little apocalypses scattered all throughout the game, with the threat of sanctions every fifteen or twenty seconds. With this, you have not tinkered around the edges. You have attacked the very soul of baseball and robbed it of its spiritually medicinal value. My objection is not borne of mere traditionalism for traditionalism’s sake. I am talking about what baseball is. This is a matter of metaphysics. Clocks and baseball are water and oil, workdays and Sabbath. They do not mix, and your new “pitch clock” rules (I cannot believe I am even writing that phrase) are a monstrosity.

I could continue in this vein, explaining how your novel extra-inning “phantom runner” on 2nd base is likewise a related and direct violation of the spirit of baseball (no one gets on base without earning it, and, again, the specter of impatience lurks behind it) but that would take me too far afield.

Mr. Manfred, recently I have been working my way through Graham Ward’s (with Ken Burns) Baseball: An Illustrated History. What a deeply compelling and moving volume. One of the things that stands out is the organic evolution of the game. Just as the origin of the game itself is a mystery—it just “happened,” a truly grassroots phenomenon—the enhancement and development of the game is also mysterious. Styles of play have changed. Not because a committee decided to change the style of play, but because ballplayers are a free and wily bunch. Ty Cobb used to bunt and scratch-hit himself to batting titles. Ruth came along and showed the value of raw power. Pitching and hitting are always evolving—“making adjustments,” they call it. And these adjustments are organic; they are very rarely top-down sorts of things.

But you? You think that the game of baseball can be organized from Olympian heights, a centrally planned top-down imposition of perfection. Like Woodrow Wilson, the first great central planner in American life, you have no regard for liberty and freedom, nor the law of unintended consequences. You seem to think there are no tradeoffs for all this “expert” tinkering, but you will discover differently. Actually, you already have. In the span of just three seasons we’ve gone from a “crisis” of home runs to a “crisis” of no offense, and all of it created by you tinkering with the manufacturing of the ball. I have a better idea: why don’t you just leave the game alone? It has proven pretty resilient for a century and a half.

And now, for the first time ever, with the exception of a mound, batter’s box, and running lanes, you are decreeing to professional ballplayers where they must stand on a field. Oh, sure, the infield shift can be irritating, and I can understand why one might make an argument for why it should be banned. I think it’s a bad argument because it assumes the game can be designed and/or perfected “from above,” which it cannot because it is a living, breathing, evolving thing. But what really pushed me over the edge—that straw that killed the camel—was the announcement that not only must infielders arrange themselves in a particular way (already bad enough), they must have both their feet on the infield dirt.

Ah. I see. What a telling little detail. Major League Baseball wants to be Little League Baseball. What a micro-managing and condescending infantilization of professional athletes, and what complete disrespect for the game itself in its ability to change and adjust. What next? No leading off until the pitch is thrown? A ten-run mercy rule? Mr. Manfred, this is quite the surprising development following that whole advertising campaign you had a couple of years ago. What was it? Oh, yes:

“Just Let the Kids Play!”

I guess you do think of them as children and you’re going to tell them where to place their feet. What a ridiculous busybody you are. I do not pretend to understand how the players have so little self-respect that they go along with this. Maybe alongside all the franchise television and radio commentators they are hostages, too; maybe their sizable paychecks are worth these compromises to their athletic pride and prowess. However it may be, whether they realize it or not, you are degrading the players and you are degrading the game and you are robbing fans of this glorious pastime. Yes: the game itself, which is already a miraculous and uncanny balance of form and freedom, order and liberty that doesn’t need your help at all.

There is no need for me address your other novelties because they do not matter to me. You have robbed baseball of her sacred and inviolable vision of time and freedom within the boundaries of her foul lines.

Foul ball. If foul balls could be counted as strike three—maybe that’s next, to “move the game along”?—you’d be heading to the showers, where you belong, so long as the water is bone-chillingly cold.

May your attendance for the 2023 season be a fraction of its potential. May your franchises declare bankruptcy because they cannot pay their marquee players, who pathetically and dutifully place their feet on the places of infield dirt to which you direct them. May your experiments be remembered by history the way it remembers the 18th Amendment. May you, above all, resign and be replaced by someone somewhere, if he or she could be found, who actually likes the game of baseball. Which, I think I have to remind you, takes approximately three heavenly hours to play. Enjoy it, or go be an inferior Commissioner of some other inferior sport.

Those are the terms under which I’ll be back. And I suspect I’ll never be back.

Sincerely,

Brian Mattson

Fan of the Minnesota Twins Baseball Club, 1976-2022.