Can money buy sympathy?
That’s the sort of question that probably plagues professional sports commissioners in the big four North American leagues.
Even setting apart the annual tradition of being booed at their respective sports’ drafts, it’s a pretty thankless job (though one that does pay exorbitantly).
The NFL’s Roger Goodell is perhaps the most infamous example of sports commissioner disdain, but that’s not to diminish the flak that the NBA’s Adam Silver gets. And hockey fans still haven’t forgiven the NHL’s Gary Bettman for completely losing the 2004-2005 season over a labor dispute and work stoppage, something that’s never happened before in major North American sports.
MLB commissioner Rob Manfred is not immune to this sort of disdain — from fans or players, apparently.
Despite generally facing the least amount of criticism of the big four commissioners, Manfred has apparently done enough to draw the very public ire of one of his sport’s top sluggers, Philadelphia Phillies star Bryce Harper.
And — surprise, surprise — the issue is all about money, according to a blistering ESPN report.
According to ESPN, Harper “stood nose to nose with Rob Manfred during a meeting between the Major League Baseball commissioner and the team last week.”
In no uncertain terms, Harper allegedly told Manfred, “If you want to speak about that, you can get the f*** out of our clubhouse,” while getting right in the commissioner’s face.
Do you watch baseball?
And what did he want to speak about?
Harper was apparently incensed by Manfred even floating the suggestion that MLB could soon implement a salary cap.
(For the unaware, MLB is the one major North American sports league with no restraint on a team’s spending on players. The NBA deploys a soft cap — where you accrue punitive punishments for how far over the cap you are — and the NFL uses a hard cap — where teams straight-up aren’t allowed to exceed the cap. A salary cap effectively levels the playing field between teams in bigger markets and with deeper pockets, and teams in small markets with limited funding. Baseball opts to throw much of that out the window.)
“The confrontation came in a meeting — one of the 30 that Manfred conducts annually in an effort to improve his relations with every team’s players — that lasted more than an hour,” ESPN reported.
“Though Manfred never explicitly said the words ‘salary cap,’ sources said the discussion about the game’s economics raised the ire of Harper, one of MLB’s most influential players and a two-time National League MVP.”
While MLB team owners have been pushing for a salary cap, the MLB Players Association (effectively a union) has vehemently opposed it.
The union claims that salary caps merely increase a team’s selling price without addressing any of the actual inequities between the haves and have-nots in the MLB.
For his part, Manfred apparently didn’t back down from the 6-foot-2, 210-pound Harper, and told him that he was “not going to get the f*** out of here.”
Manfred insisted that such discussions about the future of baseball and its financial were critical.
“It was pretty intense, definitely passionate,” Phillies veteran Nick Castellanos, who apparently played peacemaker, told ESPN. “Both of ’em. The commissioner giving it back to Bryce and Bryce giving it back to the commissioner. That’s Harp. He’s been doing this since he was 15 years old. It’s just another day. I wasn’t surprised.
“Rob seems to be in a pretty desperate place on how important it is to get this salary cap because he’s floating the word ‘lockout’ two years in advance of our collective bargaining agreement [expiration],” Castellanos added. “That’s nothing to throw around. That’s the same thing as me saying in a marriage, ‘I think divorce is a possibility. It’s probably going to happen.’ You don’t just say those things.”
Harper and Manfred apparently eventually shook hands, though Harper ignored calls from the commissioner the next day.
Perhaps the most poignant moment of this tense exchange came when Harper broached a very sensitive topic. Remember how NHL was the first league to lose a whole season over a work stoppage?
Harper thinks that may be in the cards for MLB too, noting that a salary cap might force the players’ hands and that they “are not scared to lose 162 games,” which would be a full MLB season.
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