Does Rob Manfred deserve credit for 2020 season?

Thursday’s off-day got me thinking: For the first time in my life, I will be happy there will be no more baseball to watch when the World Series ends. That could be as early as Sunday or as late as Wednesday, depending on how the rest of the World Series goes. The ongoing pandemic is the reason why.

As a member of the baseball media, full-time employment or not, I have a vested interest in the continuation of the sport. But I could never get over the morality of the situation, asking and in some cases pressuring players and coaches to leave their families during the worst pandemic since 1918, putting themselves and others at risk. It was a lot to ask.

Near the end of the regular season and throughout the playoffs, various members of the baseball media congratulated commissioner Rob Manfred for successfully pulling off a truncated season, instituting numerous supposedly temporary changes to the official rules to make it happen. After around the midpoint of August, which was after the Cardinals had a COVID-19 outbreak, the league didn’t have any more major cases and the rest of the season finished more or less smoothly.

What Manfred did was salvage some TV and advertising money that the league and its individual teams would have otherwise not earned this year. And, because he and the state of Texas allowed 10,000 fans to attend the NLCS and World Series games at Globe Life Field, he also helped earn a little bit of ticket, concession, and merchandise revenue. That’s great if you happen to be the owner of an MLB team, or a fan who badly needed to attend a baseball game in Arlington, Texas during a pandemic for some reason, but otherwise no one should be giving Manfred a round of applause.

Manfred put a lot of young men in groups of each other, away from their families. We all know that groups of young men make fantastic decisions with constant consideration of other people while exercising excellent impulse control. When the Marlins had a COVID outbreak in late July, which caused the team to have its games postponed until August 4, Derek Jeter said, “The entire traveling party got a little too comfortable. … Guys were around each other, they got relaxed, and they let their guard down. They were getting together in groups. They weren’t wearing masks as much as they should have. They weren’t social distancing.”

There were rumors at the time, none of which were confirmed, that some members of the Marlins went to a strip club, caught COVID, and spread it throughout the team. Jeter dismissed those rumors, but there’s nothing young men with money love more than a strip club. Padres outfielder Tommy Pham, in fact, was stabbed outside of a San Diego strip club earlier this month after his team was knocked out of the postseason. It is not much of a leap to believe that was how the Marlins got COVID. The Cardinals’ COVID outbreak was allegedly due to a casino trip by some of the players, also easily believable. Regardless of their motivation, Manfred put these young men in a position to fail and put everybody else at risk.

MLB’s 2020 season was by no means a shitshow, helped in part by rigorous testing. Before the season was officially under way, MLB was under pressure from critics to not take away COVID-19 tests that the general public could use amid a nationwide shortage. MLB instead retrofitted its lab in Utah, normally used for drug testing players, to process thousands of COVID-19 tests each week. While it still would have been more morally correct to retrofit the facility so the general public can utilize additional tests, it was at least a half-measure that didn’t eat into existing resources.

Thankfully, no active MLB players died from COVID-19. But Red Sox pitcher Eduardo Rodríguez was seriously affected by COVID-19, suffering a heart issue known as myocarditis – inflammation of the heart muscle. Rodríguez said the virus made him the “sickest he’s ever felt.” He told WEEI, “I felt like I was 100 years old. My body was tired all the time. Throwing up. Headaches.” Rodríguez was only cleared to begin walking on a treadmill a month ago. It is currently unclear if he will be able to get back to 100% in time to rejoin the Red Sox for the 2021 season.

Manfred also used the pandemic as cover to continue his plan to shrink the minor leagues and consolidate MLB’s power. Not only did the league shutter more than 40 low-level minor league teams, it moved Minor League Baseball’s office from St. Petersburg, Florida to New York City alongside MLB headquarters. Additionally, MLB “partnered” with several independent league teams, using the hurt the businesses have felt from the pandemic as leverage to essentially eat them up and repurpose them.

Let’s not forget that Manfred exacerbated ongoing labor tension with the MLB Players Association during negotiations for the 2020 season after the league paused operations in mid-March. While the union made concessions every step of the way, Manfred never budged an inch. Ultimately, no deal was reached and Manfred used his powers as granted by the temporary March agreement with the union to lay out the parameters of the 2020 season. The current collective bargaining agreement expires in just over 13 months.

A lot of us enjoyed the distraction that baseball provided us for three-plus months. It provided us with a sense of normalcy in are world suddenly bereft of it. But the truth is, the 2020 MLB season never should have happened in a nation that never got its COVID-19 issue under control. In fact, we’re going through a third surge in cases and a total of nearly 225,000 people in the U.S. have died of this virus. It was irresponsible, short-sighted, and greedy to put on a season. Just because Manfred got to the finish line does not mean the means by which he did so are justified. We’ still so deep in this at the moment that the 2021 season should also be in question.