All I hear on the Manfred MLB Network, which Manfred runs at least indirectly, is that even when Manfred says something stupid like being open to banning the extreme fielding shift that his minions zero in on the open word and praise Manfred for being ... open. They then make sure that this is not interpreted as an indication that Selig was closed minded. The sucking up is so obvious.
Even worse is that they all buy into the painfully slow and gradual way in which even tiny changes might some day be considered. Baseball really makes us stupid. For instance they said that increasing scoring would increase the length of games because there would be more pitching changes. Think about the implication. The changing the pitcher ritual is the stumbling block. I never seems to occur to them that this absurdly slow ritual should be banished anyway. Just change players, including pitchers, on the fly as is done in football and basketball. No warm ups. Just get the heck in there.
I've been advocating for TWO hour games in all three team sports. Stop picking at dopey stuff that should have been discarded long ago and implement that time limit.
Commissioner too little, too late, if at all is not the person to get you there. Thinking that such a person is good for baseball is to condemn baseball to remain on sports death row. It's execution is just a matter of time.
The other thing his employees love about Manfred is that he wants to use technology to entice young people into playing and/or liking baseball. That ship sailed long ago. There are multiple lost generations who have no firm connection to baseball. The Manfred fans are pathetically misguided in their vague hope that there is anything that can be done to reverse this and even more so in thinking that Selig the Younger (Manfred) is the person who will do anything substantially different or more imaginative than the original Selig who can not even power on a computer.
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