Passan: Rob Manfred has five years to define his legacy — how will he use them?
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Jeff Passan, ESPN
Rob Manfred announced his 2029 retirement as commissioner of Major League Baseball on Thursday in the most Rob Manfred of ways. In an answer to a question about the awarding of future All-Star Games, Manfred made an offhand comment about his limited time remaining in the job. A follow-up elicited more clarity: He plans to step down upon the expiration of the new contract owners awarded him this past July.
The odd timing — and odder setting, at a general media availability in Florida — was on brand for Manfred, who took over from Bud Selig in 2015. His public handling of some of the crises of his tenure as commissioner — the Houston Astros cheating scandal, the Oakland A’s move, the 2021-22 lockout — have turned into crises themselves. Appealing to fans, of course, isn’t a prerequisite for the modern commissioner. Manfred’s job is to serve 30 billionaires, and in those team owners’ eyes, his tenure has been a success.
In his first decade as commissioner, Manfred oversaw an increase in industry revenue and a significant jump in franchise value, two factors that owners care about much more than fans do. Sometimes he can serve both, as he did with the 2023 implementation of a pitch clock, a rousing success that also coincided with a nearly 10% increase in attendance. But over the past 10 years, he has made abundantly clear the party for which he works, and the owners believed in him enough to offer an extension for his $25 million-a-year job.
Which sets up a fascinating half-decade ahead as Manfred balances his bosses’ whims and the legacy he wants to leave. How Manfred handles these remaining years will shape history’s view of him. For all of its warts, baseball is in a good, if tenuous, place. Incredible athletes populate the game. Business keeps booming. And, as ever, one misstep could jeopardize that momentum.
His most immediate order of business is figuring out how to weather the near-collapse of the company that handles local-TV broadcasts for about half the teams in the sport. It also offers Manfred his greatest opportunity yet to simultaneously satisfy fans and owners. Television blackouts have prevented tens of millions of fans from watching the sport, a Faustian bargain that traded the game’s long-term health for owners’ short-term profit. Manfred has said he wants to rid the game of blackouts and intends to do so by packaging the TV broadcasts of the affected teams and, eventually, bringing all 30 under the service’s umbrella.
Navigating such treacherous terrain takes a nimble operator, and Manfred always has been more Doberman than Dachshund. He faces immense pushback from big-money teams that own their own regional sports networks — the New York Yankees, Chicago Cubs and Boston Red Sox among them — and a package with half of MLB’s teams would be the ultimate half-measure that could deepen the game’s already-widening chasm between the haves and have-nots. Finding an elegant solution would go a long way toward future-proofing MLB.
Just as concerning, if not more so, is the prospect of another lengthy work stoppage, in service of owners trying to squeeze every last penny out of a new collective bargaining agreement in 2026. The last collective bargaining talks saw MLB lock out the players for 99 days and narrowly avoid devastating the sport. The complications of the commissionership — placating a coterie of wealthy owners with factions whose loyalties could be imperiled by the outcome of the media-rights deal — are laid bare during collective bargaining. Compounding the inherent difficulty of the economic negotiations that define every basic agreement are additional elements Manfred is seeking — all of which the MLB Players Association must approve.
Manfred said Thursday he wants two expansion cities to be named by the end of his tenure. Getting the $2 billion-plus in expansion fees for each team necessitates a deal with the union. Further, one of Manfred’s chief goals over the next half-decade — continuing to increase MLB’s reach, in part through international and special-event games — requires buy-in from a group of players who regard him with, at best, begrudging respect and, at worst, contempt.
Bettering the on-field product remains of great import, too. The pitch clock made baseball a better game, shaving about 30 minutes off every game by simply cutting out dead time. MLB’s newest innovation, a computerized zone that brings uniformity to ball-and-strike calls, could arrive as soon as 2025. Whether the league goes fully automated or implements a challenge system, change of any variety rankles a segment of baseball fans and adds another pothole on the road to retirement.
Of course, despite Manfred’s intentions now — we know now that when he signed his 2024 extension, he’d suggested to owners that this was his last term — all of this speculation might well be for naught. In December 2006, Manfred’s predecessor, Bud Selig, said he would retire when his contract expired in 2009. Barely a year after his announcement, he signed a new deal through 2012 and pegged his retirement to its conclusion. At the behest of owners, Selig reneged again, signing up for two more years before backing Manfred as his heir to one of the most powerful seats in sports.
Five years out, there is no clear successor to Manfred. Owners could coalesce around an internal candidate at the commissioner’s office. They could tab a team president. They could look externally. Two owners Thursday said it’s far too early to speculate. Too much can happen over the next half-decade.
Manfred’s tenure so far has seen more wins than his detractors care to acknowledge. These next five years, though, bring the opportunity to burnish that legacy. A commissioner not angling for a new contract can put aside the politics and mollifying inherent in the job and prioritize the future of the game, not the owners’ investments. He could fix an international signing system that sees 12-year-olds agreeing to deals and others lying about their ages to make them more attractive to teams. He could help repair a broken youth program that sends pitchers into professional baseball with scars already on their elbows. He could incentivize teams to spend earlier in free agency and prevent another slog of an offseason like the current one bleeding into spring training.
These are novel thoughts, and perhaps naïve ones, too, because Rob Manfred is still here due in large part to his success in making rich men richer. He is ownership’s attack dog and flak jacket. Manfred has said time and again that he is commissioner because he loves the game. As the clock ticks on the tenure of Major League Baseball’s 10th commissioner, he has the chance to prove it unequivocally.
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Elizabeth Merrill, ESPN Senior Writer
Jack Hoffman, the young Nebraska football fan who ran for a touchdown during the 2013 Cornhuskers’ spring game and became a catalyst for pediatric brain cancer fundraising, died Wednesday after a 14-year battle with cancer, according to the Team Jack Foundation. He was 19.
Hoffman was diagnosed with a cancerous glioma when he was 5. Doctors told the family that most of his golf ball-size tumor could not be removed. But his father, Andy Hoffman, did exhaustive research and found a doctor in Boston who extracted more than 90% of the tumor.
Jack’s favorite player was Nebraska running back Rex Burkhead, and before the surgery, Andy reached out to Nebraska hoping his son could meet him. Burkhead had lunch with Hoffman and raced him on the field, and the family forged an enduring friendship with the former NFL back.
In late 2011, when the Cornhuskers trailed Ohio State by three touchdowns, Burkhead fired up some of his teammates by mentioning the inspirational boy he’d just met. “Hey, Jack wouldn’t give up,” he told them, “so why should we?” Nebraska rallied, and Burkhead scored the game-winning touchdown.
A year and a half later, in April 2013, Nebraska’s coaches decided to put Jack in a spring game. Wearing an ill-fitting helmet that bounced as he ran, Jack, who was then 7, ran for a 69-yard touchdown as 60,000 fans roared. Video of the play garnered more than 10 million views on YouTube.
Hoffman went to Washington to meet President Barack Obama and won an ESPY award for the best moment in sports. Known simply as “The Run,” the moment helped Hoffman’s dad launch the Team Jack Foundation. The venture, started in tiny Atkinson, Nebraska — population 1,245 — has raised more than $14 million to aid pediatric brain cancer research.
In 2020, Andy Hoffman was diagnosed with glioblastoma multiforme, an aggressive brain cancer. He died less than a year later. In ESPN interviews with the family in September 2020, Bri Hoffman, Jack’s mom, said their hope for Jack was to keep the tumor at bay as long as they could.
“For kids and tumors,” she said, “what [doctors] told us is if you can keep it from growing until they reach like their 20s, a lot of times they just go away.”
With the help of clinical trials, and despite the seizures that could come at any time, Jack Hoffman was able to do things that seemed unimaginable in 2011. He went to homecoming and was a lineman for his high school football team in Atkinson. He went tubing, boating and fishing and played tug-of-war with his dog, Roxy. He cheered on his Nebraska Cornhuskers.
But brain scans in 2023 revealed tumor progression and he underwent a tumor resection surgery in summer 2024. Pathology results eventually revealed that his tumor had advanced to a high-grade glioma, “which is extremely rare,” according to the Team Jack website.
After receiving 30 radiation treatments, Hoffman began his freshman year at the University of Nebraska at Kearney in the pre-law program this past fall. He wanted to be a lawyer, like his dad.
In a statement Wednesday, the university called Hoffman “a valued member of our Loper community” and noted he earned a spot on the dean’s list this past semester.
“Jack was widely admired across Nebraska and beyond for his courageous spirit and dedication to raising awareness about childhood cancer through the Team Jack Foundation,” the school’s statement read. “We extend our heartfelt condolences to Jack’s family, friends and all those whose lives he touched. His connection to the UNK community was meaningful, and his impact will not be forgotten. We are grateful for the time he shared with us.”
In a CaringBridge post from December, Bri Hoffman said that it was “heartbreaking” to email Jack’s professors to let them know he couldn’t take his finals because he was too sick.
“He has worked very hard this semester,” she wrote.
In an interview with ESPN in 2020, Hoffman said he had no idea “The Run” would be such a big deal. He thought it was just going to be in front of a few people and was scared when he realized it wasn’t. But he changed into an oversize pair of old football pants, and his dad took him out onto the field. Hoffman wasn’t sure where the touchdown line was, so Andy told him to keep going until he hit the fence.
Hoffman held on to that advice when he dealt with unknowns.
“If you don’t know it,” he said, “just run until you hit the fence.”
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