As Major League Baseball’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, boarded a private jet in Phoenix in June, he was convinced he had finally put his sport’s season on track. He had just met with the head of the players’ union, Tony Clark, and had hashed out what he thought was a framework to play an abbreviated season, seemingly ending weeks of an ugly back-and-forth between team owners and the players.
Finally, Manfred thought, he could focus on transforming a sport steeped in tradition into one played safely in the age of social distancing.
But as Manfred’s plane passed over Nebraska on its way to New York, he received a message from Clark. The sides did not, in fact, have a deal.
Aboard the jet, Manfred realized he was staring down an existential threat not only to baseball, but to his career as well. Voices inside and outside the sport were looking to M.L.B. to give the country some semblance of normalcy, to ease the seemingly unending frustrations of infections, lockdowns and a sprawling pandemic.
Manfred knew that the chances of holding a season would dwindle by the day. He has risen through the sport on his ability to create labor peace with the players, but he knew the blame would rest at his feet if he couldn’t resolve the financial dispute between the athletes, many of whom make millions per year, and the owners, who are worth billions.
“We cannot be the one sport that doesn’t figure out how to play,” Manfred would tell himself repeatedly in the days and weeks that followed, as he sat in his den at home, working the phones with the owners of the 30 teams and his deputies.
Manfred, who has an unusual ability to vacillate between pugnacious and charming, cajoled owners, stressing the idea that the sport had to have a season. Ideally, the owners would negotiate a plan with the players’ union to hold a season, but Manfred knew he ultimately needed only the owners’ approval to issue a schedule.
As he tried to steer the players and owners toward agreement in the weeks that followed, he leaned into his willingness to endure withering news media coverage, and took a pummeling from players and fans.
Two weeks later, he emerged with an announcement that the sport would return to play. An abbreviated 60-game season began on Thursday, making baseball the highest-profile North American sport to begin in earnest since the pandemic struck.
“Well, we’re going to make it to the starting line,” Manfred said on Thursday from Nationals Park, the site of the season opener between Washington and the Yankees. “Everybody seems excited, like we have done something; all we have done is get out of the gate — the hard part is playing 60 games.”
As he sought to salvage the 2020 season, Manfred discussed his efforts in a series of interviews with The New York Times from May through July. What emerged from those interviews was a portrait of an executive confronting the stress of trying to settle a labor dispute and hold a season amid a confounding global health crisis — nearly all of it from his den at home. Manfred’s determination to return the sport to the field — and his renewed engagement with his predecessor and former boss, Bud Selig — demonstrated how the sport’s 1994 strike still haunts the game.
A science puzzle becomes a labor issue.
Even before the pandemic, Manfred was facing possibly the toughest period of his five-year tenure as commissioner. Attendance had fallen for the fourth straight season in 2019, and he was under pressure to implement measures to speed up the pace of games.
In January, he had released a report detailing an illegal sign-stealing scheme that the Houston Astros had used during their championship season in 2017. Manfred punished the team’s manager, general manager and front office, but he did not suspended any players, creating a backlash among rival teams and fans. Perhaps his biggest misstep came when he referred to the World Series trophy as “a piece of metal” when explaining why he declined to strip the Astros of their title.
For some team owners, the remark illustrated the stark differences between Manfred and his predecessor, Selig. No owner could ever get through a conversation with Selig without him referring to baseball’s history. To some owners, Manfred, a career labor lawyer who succeeded Selig in 2015, needed to do more to embrace the folksier and romantic aspects of his job.
But when the pandemic forced swaths of the country to lock down and pro sports leagues suspended operations, it seemed like a problem that more suited Manfred’s strengths. Before becoming commissioner, he had been the sport’s top official to deal with the gnarly problem of steroids, and this conundrum felt similar, covering an unusual collision of legal, labor, financial and health issues.
Right after the N.B.A. suspended its season on March 11, Manfred shut down the commissioner’s office in Midtown Manhattan, and set up at his home office in Florida. But even before he could try finding a way to safely playing the game, he had to deal with the financial problems the pandemic had created.
“There was an initial phase of survival, literally, of the business and that mostly involved liquidity,” Manfred said.
Baseball, a $10 billion industry, took on $2.5 billion worth of debt over a matter of days, Manfred said. M.L.B. quickly made a deal with the players’ union to lay out a rough framework of pay for players and other considerations for the 2020 season — whenever it might be played.
He, his deputies, and allies in ownership, including Yankees President Randy Levine, then bore down to study the health and science around the virus and how it might affect their sport, but hard answers proved elusive. Doctors and scientists had different opinions about basic issues, like whether the virus could live on surfaces — an essential question when talking about a sport played with a ball.
But as he believed he was confronting a science problem, a labor one arose. The dispute centered on whether players would receive their same pay per game even if there were no fans in the stands, which was becoming an increasingly likely prospect. Owners felt players should take additional pay cuts if there was to be no ticket revenue, but the union insisted on the initial deal they had struck: getting paid their full prorated salaries for every game played, whether fans attended or not.
Amid public jousting with the players and growing criticism of the owners, Manfred flew to Arizona to meet with Clark, the union head, in the hopes of hammering out a deal.
Accounts of what happened in the meeting differ. Manfred says that Clark agreed to a framework for the season, in which players would get their full prorated salaries for a 60-game regular season and the playoffs would be expanded. The union said no such agreement was reached, and that the meeting contained little more than a new pitch from the commissioner.
The union’s unwillingness to make a deal vexed Manfred as he flew back to New York. He had made his name on making deals with the players. Before Manfred joined the commissioner’s office in 1998 as the top negotiator, the sport had never signed a new collective bargaining agreement without first enduring a work stoppage. But in the two decades that followed, with Manfred taking the lead, the owners and the union had made four deals without missing a single game.
Now, Manfred, in the most high profile moment of his life, appeared unable to make a deal.
‘I remember what happened to you.’
Manfred, 62, said he felt a level of stress this summer that he had never before felt. For one of the first times in his life, he took up running, chasing after his daughters, who were much faster than him, as he tried to clear his head.
“There’s been like a couple of times I’m thinking, Oh, this is what it feels like to be really stressed,” he said. “Oh, I mean, I have had a couple of those days.”
Manfred said he tried to put distance between his sport’s fate and his own.
“The outcome of no games is a massive threat to the good of the game,” he said. “The me part of it — you know what, that’s the great part of this job: This is the last job I’m going to have. I don’t worry about that piece of it that much, I really don’t.”
Manfred knew there was one person who understood the perils of canceling a season: Selig. Manfred had been Selig’s top deputy until Selig retired as commissioner after the 2014 season. They had been very close, but had grown more distant as Manfred settled in as commissioner. Selig wanted to avoid looking as if he was still meddling; Manfred wanted to chart his own course.
But in June the two began speaking regularly again. Manfred said he looked to his old boss for guidance.
The Coronavirus Outbreak ›
Frequently Asked Questions
Updated July 23, 2020
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What is school going to look like in September?
- It is unlikely that many schools will return to a normal schedule this fall, requiring the grind of online learning, makeshift child care and stunted workdays to continue. California’s two largest public school districts — Los Angeles and San Diego — said on July 13, that instruction will be remote-only in the fall, citing concerns that surging coronavirus infections in their areas pose too dire a risk for students and teachers. Together, the two districts enroll some 825,000 students. They are the largest in the country so far to abandon plans for even a partial physical return to classrooms when they reopen in August. For other districts, the solution won’t be an all-or-nothing approach. Many systems, including the nation’s largest, New York City, are devising hybrid plans that involve spending some days in classrooms and other days online. There’s no national policy on this yet, so check with your municipal school system regularly to see what is happening in your community.
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Is the coronavirus airborne?
- The coronavirus can stay aloft for hours in tiny droplets in stagnant air, infecting people as they inhale, mounting scientific evidence suggests. This risk is highest in crowded indoor spaces with poor ventilation, and may help explain super-spreading events reported in meatpacking plants, churches and restaurants. It’s unclear how often the virus is spread via these tiny droplets, or aerosols, compared with larger droplets that are expelled when a sick person coughs or sneezes, or transmitted through contact with contaminated surfaces, said Linsey Marr, an aerosol expert at Virginia Tech. Aerosols are released even when a person without symptoms exhales, talks or sings, according to Dr. Marr and more than 200 other experts, who have outlined the evidence in an open letter to the World Health Organization.
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What are the symptoms of coronavirus?
- Common symptoms include fever, a dry cough, fatigue and difficulty breathing or shortness of breath. Some of these symptoms overlap with those of the flu, making detection difficult, but runny noses and stuffy sinuses are less common. The C.D.C. has also added chills, muscle pain, sore throat, headache and a new loss of the sense of taste or smell as symptoms to look out for. Most people fall ill five to seven days after exposure, but symptoms may appear in as few as two days or as many as 14 days.
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What’s the best material for a mask?
- Scientists around the country have tried to identify everyday materials that do a good job of filtering microscopic particles. In recent tests, HEPA furnace filters scored high, as did vacuum cleaner bags, fabric similar to flannel pajamas and those of 600-count pillowcases. Other materials tested included layered coffee filters and scarves and bandannas. These scored lower, but still captured a small percentage of particles.
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Does asymptomatic transmission of Covid-19 happen?
- So far, the evidence seems to show it does. A widely cited paper published in April suggests that people are most infectious about two days before the onset of coronavirus symptoms and estimated that 44 percent of new infections were a result of transmission from people who were not yet showing symptoms. Recently, a top expert at the World Health Organization stated that transmission of the coronavirus by people who did not have symptoms was “very rare,” but she later walked back that statement.
“I’m the only other guy on the face of the Earth who understands exactly what the pressure is and what the situation is,” Selig said.
During a phone call in June, Selig emphasized to Manfred that he had to narrow his focus to a singular idea: Finding a way to play.
“If you just keep thinking about that one phrase, you’re going to make really good decisions,” Selig said he told him.
Manfred acknowledged to Selig that there was one “sort of negative thought in my mind that I’m trying to avoid.”
“What do you mean by that?” Selig asked.
Manfred responded: “Look, I remember what happened to you in September of 1994,” referring to when Selig canceled that year’s World Series, the only time in M.L.B. history it has not been played.
Selig recalled the anguish he had felt after making that announcement. When Selig returned home that day, he went upstairs to his den, closed his eyes and recreated every World Series he could remember — starting with 1945 — in his head, as he mourned the season.
“I just sat there very quietly in deep thought, and I was heartsick,” he said. “It was one of the low moments of my career and in my life.”
Manfred was acutely aware that he could face a similar fate.
“He got hung with this,” Manfred said of Selig. “He canceled the World Series. That’s so unfair. You know, I mean, it’s really completely unfair. But I think that unfairness teaches you a lesson. And the lesson is our fans don’t ever want us to give up on the idea that we’re going to play.”
A resolution brings a whole new challenge.
In the days after Manfred and Clark met in June, Manfred made another push for a deal. The players didn’t budge; they said they deserved their full prorated salaries and began a social media campaign calling for the season to begin and urging Manfred to “tell us when and where.”
But Manfred knew he still had a card to play. As the commissioner, only he retained the ability to restart the season. That meant all he needed was the support of the owners.
From his den in June, Manfred had a call with all of them. He could tell that a majority of the owners still wanted to play a season, and those who were afraid of losing money and angry at the players would hold back on protesting.
The Yankees’ president, Levine, said Manfred’s bluntness helped him.
“He kept the clubs together by doing something that many people cannot do, especially when things are going bad: he refused to sugarcoat anything,” Levine said. “Some people would get embarrassed and don’t want to admit to what the facts are on the ground but Rob was self-effacing and very secure, which gave him a lot of credibility and held everyone together.”
On June 22, the owners voted to implement a season, eschewing a negotiated deal with the union. The regular season would be 60 games with full prorated pay for players, who retained an expanded postseason as a bargaining chip for the future.The league ended up expanding the playoffs to 16 teams on Thursday.
But even with the players back on the field, Manfred acknowledged that the hardest part may be yet to come as the coronavirus continues to ravage the country. That point was underscored on opening day, when the Nationals’ star outfielder Juan Soto was held out of the lineup because he received a positive virus test result that morning.
Manfred acknowledged in a phone interview on Thursday from Nationals Park that travel restrictions or an outbreak that threatened the integrity of the sport's competition could stop play. But for now, he believes the league can move forward, especially because the percentage of players who have tested positive is far lower than the general population of Americans.
“That can change, we understand that, and we know we have to be careful and vigilant to deal with the possibility that it is changing but right now, we feel like our environment is pretty good, our protocols are good,” Manfred said.
Then he thanked the players.
“I am really thankful that the players have been so good on this topic,” Manfred said. “I mean they have really taken it seriously. They have followed the protocols, they have worn the mask, they’ve distanced, they’ve adjusted. And that’s a huge part. You can test all you want, but all testing tells you is whether somebody’s sick, the way you keep from being sick is you follow the other protocols.”
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