When the question was posed to MLB commissioner Rob Manfred, a voice popped up from the back of the room.
John Middleton asked, “Should I leave the room?” The new face of the Phillies ownership group’s quick timing drew some laughs when Manfred was asked what he felt about the recent shakeup in the Phillies’ upper management structure.
“I’m a believer in the idea that change is healthy,” Manfred said, mentioning that he and the Phillies president-in-waiting worked together on negotiating a few collective bargaining agreements.
“I have enormous respect for Andy’s knowledge about the issues surrounding the game,” he later added. “I think it’s healthy for organizations to change and the owners here made a really good choice in Andy.”
Thursday afternoon, the commissioner was asked questions on a bunch of other topics by the Philadelphia media. He was on the last stop of a tour across the country visiting with all 30 major-league teams (no, he didn’t move around by win-loss record). One of the things Manfred addressed was a recent Fox Sports report that stated the Phillies are looking to extend the protective netting at Citizens Bank Park. According to the new commissioner, they haven’t gone quite that far yet.
“I’ve talked to the Phillies folks,” Manfred said. “They have no plans to move ahead immediately on this topic.”
Still, Manfred emphasized that the issue of fan safety is an important one to his office. Just this summer, there were serious incidents in Boston and Detroit where fans sitting close to the field have been struck by a shattered bat and foul ball, respectively. As fate would have it, a sharply hit Freddy Galvis foul ball hit a fan seated just beyond the current netting only a couple of hours after Manfred spoke. She appeared to walk off under her own power.
The commissioner said the issue was raised at the owners meetings in August and the league is in the process of “examining all of the relevant information.” One of the differences between baseball and hockey, which installed protective netting behind each goal in 2002, is that baseball stadiums all have different dimensions. For example, Citizens Bank Park has much less foul territory than O.co Coliseum in Oakland.
If the MLB were to rule that changes need to be made, Manfred says the league can move quickly. He is confident that industry guidelines could be set in place by next April:
“I think our goal to is to put the Commissioner’s Office in a position where we can make a complete recommendation to ownership in November and give people an opportunity to get ready to make changes for next year if in fact we decide that changes are necessary,” Manfred said.
The issue that has probably defined Manfred’s first year in office is the pace-of-play rule changes he instituted before the season. He sounded pleased by the results so far.
“I do think the players have become more comfortable with the pace-of-game guidelines on the one hand,” Manfred said. “On the other hand, I think we’re at the point of the year when if you look at time of game statistics, we slide a little bit. So we’re making a really conscious effort to keep it at the forefront of players’ minds as we moved into a difficult time of year.”
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