Major League Baseball Commissioner Rob Manfred made some ridiculously idiotic remarks last week regarding the looming relocation of the A’s from Oakland to Las Vegas. Manfred knows how tone deaf and inappropriate the comments were, because he’s now trying to act as if he didn’t say them, at least not in the way he said them.
For those who missed it (or who expunged the nonsense from their brains), here’s what he said: “I feel sorry for the fans in Oakland. I do not like the outcome. I understand why they feel the way they do. I think the real question is, what is it Oakland was prepared to do? There is no Oakland offer, OK? They never got to a point where they had a plan to build a stadium at any site. . . . The community has to provide support. At some point you come to the realization it’s just not going to happen.”
Speaking in London in advance of a Cubs-Cardinals game to be played there, Manfred was asked whether he regrets anything he said about A’s fans. And, like most of his ilk who will never admit they were ever wrong about anything they ever said or did, Manfred refused to give a millimeter of ground.
“My comment about Oakland was that I feel sorry for the fans, that it was my initial . . . preference that we find a solution in Oakland,” Manfred said, via Meghan Montemurro of TheAthletic.com. “The comment I made about the fans on a particular night [when they filled the stadium with a reverse boycott] was taken out of context of those two larger remarks. I feel sorry for the fans. We hate to move. We did everything we could possibly do to keep the club in Oakland. And unfortunately one night doesn’t change a decade of inaction.”
Good lord, Manfred can’t even do “out of context” right.
Here’s a tip. If you’re going to insult everyone’s intelligence by trying to dismiss your own words by conflating the accurate isolation of key quotes with the unfair editing of a broader comment, just stop there. Manfred kept going, thereby reiterating the most problematic points he made last week: (1) support for a team includes paying for its stadium; and (2) Oakland didn’t try to keep the A’s in town — even though Oakland strongly disagrees with that.
Regardless of whether Manfred tried to take it back, he still believes it. All Commissioners and owners do. They think they’re entitled to have someone else pay for their stadiums, even if they can afford to pay for their own stadiums. And they’ll gladly mix the notion of support in the form of showing up for games with support in the form of paying for the place where the games are played.
As long as there are cities without teams that will offer free money to teams in cities that won’t, this dynamic will continue. The best outcome would be the creation of a national mood and consensus that there will be no taxpayer money for sports arenas, anywhere. If/when that ever happens, the owners will have to spend some of their own billions to build the buildings where their teams will play.
Of course, that won’t ever happen. Nothing legitimizes a city more than luring professional sports teams there. Those that don’t have them will keep trying to get them, even if it means coming up with taxpayer money to do so.
As long as the taxpayers don’t have to vote on it. That’s the one undeniable reality of modern stadium politics. If the general public votes on whether to pay for a stadium, that vote will fail. But if the politicians can finagle it without a vote, they’ll defy the will of their constituents and cough up cash for those who don’t need it.
