Bill Madden: MLB commish Rob Manfred has a serious ownership problem

NEW YORK — In a couple of recent interviews marking Opening Day, MLB commissioner Rob Manfred candidly admitted that baseball is facing a “massive” disparity problem that became further illustrated last winter with the Mets’ $765 million investment on Juan Soto and the Dodgers’ shocking heavily deferred spending spree that merely widened the gap between the large and small market teams. But make no mistake, while payroll disparity in baseball is real and getting worse, Manfred can’t help but concede it is exasperated by his equally real owner problem.

It had to be a baseball first on Opening Day when at least three owners, Jerry Reinsdorf in Chicago, Bob Nutting in Pittsburgh and Stu Sternberg in Tampa were booed lustily by the hometown fans and greeted with “Sell the Team” chants and banners. Look around Mr. Commissioner, nearly 17% of your fan bases — we’ll throw in those of Bruce Sherman’s Marlins and Dick Monfort’s Rockies — are fed up with the ownership of their teams and are clamoring for baseball to liberate them.

In the case of some of them — certainly Sherman in Miami, who grossly overpaid ($1.2 billion) to buy the Marlins in 2017, Sternberg in Tampa and Nutting in Pittsburgh — they simply aren’t wealthy enough to own baseball teams. Which is why they’re perfectly content to finish out of the playoffs with the lowest payrolls in baseball but still make a nice a profit every year thanks to $60-some million in revenue sharing and another $60 million from the central fund.

In terms of the 89-year-old Reinsdorf, whose White Sox, as a large market club are revenue sharing payors, the demise of his franchise can largely be attributed to his steadfast resistance to change and fierce loyalty to his employees. While he deserves major credit for the 2005 World Series team that ended an 88-year span without a championship on Chicago’s south side, that was a veteran club with players mostly obtained from other organizations and there was no foundation of young players from within to replace them. Kenny Williams, Reinsdorf’s GM/VP of baseball ops from 2000 until 2023, oversaw the draft throughout — and from 2000 until 2010 when they drafted Chris Sale No. 1, the White Sox didn’t hit on a single No. 1 pick.

Things hit rock bottom last year when the Sox lost a record 121 games, but Reinsdorf chose not to go outside the organization for a “new look” GM and instead promoted Chris Getz, one of Williams’ deputies. So far, Getz has done nothing to improve the club. This year’s Sox may be even worse than last year’s, and in his three major trades he got almost nothing back for Michael Kopech from the Dodgers, or Dylan Cease from the Padres, while his four-prospect return from the Red Sox for Garrett Crochet also does not initially look promising.

One of the problems Manfred is having with his owners is that nobody seems to want to buy baseball teams (at least the small or middle market ones) right now. The Lerner family, which owns the Nationals, recently took them off the market when nobody stepped up with an offer to their satisfaction, and in February Chicago billionaire Justin Ishbia withdrew from bidding on the Twins to increase his minority share of the White Sox.

Meanwhile, in Pittsburgh, the Pirates are heading for their sixth straight losing season under the leadership of GM Ben Cherington and manager Derek Shelton, but Nutting doesn’t seem to care. He would do himself a favor by bringing in a baseball savvy guy like Buck Showalter and, if nothing else, just pick his brain on what they’re doing wrong in Pittsburgh.

It’s been reported that Manfred is fed up with Sternberg and is pushing him to sell the Rays (preferably to Tampa interests) after he backed out of the proposed $1.37 billion St. Petersburg stadium deal. Things are almost as bad further south in Miami where Sherman has saddled the Marlins with the lowest payroll in baseball ($67 million) as they play with a Triple A-caliber lineup to the fewest fans (average 13,093) of any team in baseball not in a minor league ballpark. Just two years ago, GM Kim Ng traded the Marlins into the postseason with inspired deals for Luis Arraez and Jake Burger and Sherman’s response was to push her aside and replace her with Peter Bendix, an over-his-shoes analytics nerd from the Rays, who traded both Arraez and Burger for a bunch of low level non prospects. This is what you call ownership malpractice.

Lastly there’s the Rockies who are embarking on their seventh straight losing season since being swept in the 2018 NLDS — all of which can be attributed not to penny pinching but rather the incompetence of owner Monfort. To wit: Alienating their star player Nolan Arenado then trading him to the Cardinals and throwing in $50 million; bidding against themselves to sign oft-injured Kris Bryant for seven years, $182 million. We could go on, but what’s really mystifying is how did Monfort wind up being named chairman of the owners’ negotiating committee for the upcoming CBA?