That’s the opener to Murray Chass’ excellent analysis of yesterday’s commissioner vote. An analysis which should be the blueprint for how one approaches issues relating to baseball’s owners and the game’s governance.
Chass takes issues — MAJOR issue — with the narrative which holds that Jerry Reinsdorf’s propping up of Tom Werner as a protest candidate in the commissioner race was somehow a “success.” He does so my noting just how awful and corrosive a force Reinsdorf has been for the game of baseball in his more than three-decades at the helm of the White Sox. And how his Werner gambit was a cynical little cherry on top of that crap sundae. But it was a failed gambit and, Chass argues, Reinsdorf’s final act of consequence in the game as a power broker.
Along the way Chass provides an excellent tick-tock of yesterday’s vote, talking about who voted for and against Manfred and why and how the situation developed. It’s must-reading if you’re interested in all of this.
And it is no surprise that it came from Murray Chass. While he has his issues as a baseball analyst — and while he and I have our many differences, occasionally on a personal level — there is no one better when it comes to talking about the dynamics of leadership in Major League Baseball and the issues which surround it. Chass has had the Lords of the Realm’s number for nearly 40 years and rarely is he wrong about their motivations. Unlike so many others who write on the topic, he has both institutional knowledge of baseball’s power structure and, given how baseball’s leaders have behaved for the past century or so, the good sense not to be reverent of these men or to give them the benefit of the doubt they have never, ever earned. There’s a tendency among many to treat people of high station otherwise. I’m glad Chass doesn’t.
Anyway, a great read. Go check it out.
