Reacts: Most feel Rob Manfred doesn’t have baseball’s best interests at heart

Before we start this, sorry, I’ve been away for a couple of days. We decided to go up to Edmonton for a couple of days. It’s been a year since my wife’s mom died and she wanted to go to the grave site. It was nice to get out of town for a bit, even if it was kind of weird with all that is going on at the moment.

I’ll catch up on the OOTP sim tonight.

Welcome to SB Nation Reacts, a survey of fans across MLB. Each week, we send out questions to the most plugged in Blue Jays fans, and fans across the country. Sign up here to join Reacts.

Fans may be ready for baseball to return, but they aren’t exactly ready to return to baseball.

In the most recent SB Nation Reacts survey, fans were asked if they were MLB players, would they feel comfortable playing the 2020 season. Roughly two-thirds of responses said yes, they would play.

It is an interesting question isn’t it. If players feel the same as fans, 36% of them wouldn’t feel comfortable starting the MLB season. If 36% the players would decide not to play, there would be some interesting questions for baseball.

However, when asked if they were ready to return to the game themselves and watch a game in person, things changed dramatically. Despite being ready for games to start, only 42% of fans said they would attend a game live this year.

I agree with this, I would no feel comfortable going into a crowded stadium. I also wouldn’t feel comfortable going into any crowded place.

For now, it seems like a longshot that fans would even be allowed to attend this season. At best, plans have been discussed that would only allow severely limited amounts of fans, all spaced throughout the stadium.

While fans are overwhelmingly ready for the game to return, they don’t necessarily trust the man in charge. Less than 40% of voters have faith in MLB commissioner Rob Manfred going forward. Manfred’s popularity was in trouble before the pandemic hit, receiving heavy criticism for his handling of both the Houston Astros scandal and various comments made during the offseason.

I guess it depends on how you define ‘baseball’. If you define baseball as the owners of MLB teams, he has their interests at heart. Being fair, he has to, or he’d be fired.

If you define baseball as the sport, I think it is easy to say he doesn’t have the sport’s best interest at heart. If the choice was what’s best for the game or what’s best for the owners, he’ll go for the second thing every time.

Manfred’s popularity has taken such a hit, he’s now seen as a worse commissioner than his predecessor, Bud Selig.

Man, that’s tough. When fans think you are worse than a guy who killed a franchise, and had a World Series cancelled, you know they don’t like you.

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