Power Ranking The Major Sport Commissioners

Carl6/16/2020 3:46 PM

This blog is exactly what the title suggest. It's a power rankings of the major sport commissioners which is immensely relevant based on the fact that a lot of you are really mad that there will be no baseball. Granted most of you usually don't care about baseball on a daily basis much less on June 16th so I'm really surprised with the toxicity but whatever. I'm a baseball guy. I'm actually pissed off about this so I won't stop anyone from joining me. But that's a different blog. For now I want to focus on the overall bigger picture of good commissioning or whatever you fucking call it.

I'm kinda thinking about majoring in Commissioning with a "Business" minor

However these guys got here is irrelevant. Fact is they're here and we're dealing with it indefinitely. Everyone calling for Rob Manfred's job should check the history books because I think there's been like 6 commissioners of anything in my lifetime which is a good segue to the broader responsibilities of being a commissioner and the reason there's no turnover:

You basically work for the owners. I mean technically you work for the league. But the league is made of the teams and the teams own all the leverage and hire the commissioner through their league voting powers which are as colluded as you'd expect from a group of Scrooge McDucks. PS Jeffrey Epstein didn't kill himself. So when you think about the function of the commissioner first, you have to understand that that they generally work for the owners where leverage rests with teams.

The exception to that would be Adam Silver because it's more about the individual superstar and thus there's more incentive for fair bargaining and generally being good people. I 100% contented that if it were easier to fuck NBA players, they would. But owners can't because NBA players have so much power to the fanbase. These inherent external forces make one hell of a negotiating table that we're seeing play out in real-time as Adam Silver strives to get the NBA up and running.

It's no secret Silver runs the smoothest league and has the best relations with players, fans and owners. But how much of that is actually a credit to him and not a product of the sport? Honestly I have zero clue and that's kind of the point. It doesn't really matter in the eye of the public. The fact Rob Manfred has a shit storm pile of fuckface owners and the most historically rigid pro-labor force in a room together isn't my problem. And through the months of this negotiating process it doesn't seem like anyone really cares to understand that it's objectively a lose-lose position.

The owners need to compromise and they won't. Manfred's responsible for making them compromise but they're responsible for employing him. It's like Kevin Spacey calling the FEMA director in House of Cards and telling him to cut funding. He says I CANT CUT THE FUNDING MISTER PRESIDENT. Kevin Spacey says fine I'll get a younger, more inexperienced man in here who can do the job. It's an uncomfortable exchange for a lot of reasons but analogous here because that's basically the owners talking to Manfred.

But like I said leagues don't historically fire commissioners. They step down like Supreme Court justices, passing the baton to a handpicked successor. This isn't a job dictated by free-market forces or competitive balance. Once you get a commissioner job, you're a fucking commissioner folks.

So am I crazy for thinking maybe Rob has more liberties to tell the owners to fuck off? Are we getting the entire story?

Absolutely Not - common sense

Anytime an overwhelming majority of humans agree about something like the way people think Rob Manfred sucks, we're wrong. Don't believe me? Watch the Big Short one time and tell me otherwise3 weeks ago you'd have publicly executed me for sneezing in public and I'm pretty sure you don't have an MD and this isn't late 18th century France. Point is you don't know shit and neither do I other than these owners are a bunch of fucking pussies. Whether it's Rob Manfred's fault or not is over your skis. My hunch is you don't get to the position he's in without a working brain, and working brain people don't say "there's 100% going to be a season" then back off the comments in the next news cycle without a good reason. The reason's more likely outside his individual control and laying in the polluted hands of a bunch of dirty rotten filthy greedy undeserving assholes. But Manfred is the one who has to go on TV and explain their psychosis. Like that time you got into an official relationship with someone because the sex was good but then found out they were off the rails fucking crazy but you're still really horny. That's not entrapment but you're entrapped and it's hard to get away. That's Rob Manfred right now. Laying regretful pipe on his college girlfriend because she boxed him in with emotions. If you've been in that situation before then show some empathy.