Notes: Rob Manfred’s new plan, Rays’ sale and stadium

Rob Manfred has a new way of explaining the salary cap issue, and signs point toward Tampa being the new home of the Rays… maybe.

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Let’s pick up where we left off with last week’s flurry of news, shall we?

If Manfred can’t convince the MLBPA of a salary cap, he’ll convince the players

A salary cap is a non-starter for the Major League Baseball Players Association. The league’s owners can bring up their desire for one as often as they’d like — and for some of them, that’s turning out to be more often than it used to be — but the PA has a standing “never going to happen don’t even ask about it” policy when it comes to salary caps.

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Notes: Dodgers and ICE, Fenway workers authorize a strike

The Dodgers finally speak up on what’s going on in their city, and Fenway’s workers authorized a strike.

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It’s like Lenin used to say: there are decades where nothing happens, and then there are weeks where for some reason a whole bunch of stories I can cover in this space happen one after the other. Let’s get to a couple of those today and hit the rest next time around.

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Rafael Devers’ crime was speaking his mind

Rafael Devers could have been reasoned with, but the Red Sox never bothered with any of that, and now they don’t have to.

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The Red Sox have traded Rafael Devers, their highest-paid player, and they didn’t even wait for the smoke to clear to start telling the press that they did it because they felt like Devers wasn’t a team player. His refusal to move to first base after Triston Casas’ season-ending injury was a poor portent, you see, and it was time to move on, as the player on the 10-year, $313 million deal had certain responsibilities they felt he was not fulfilling.

What of the responsibilities the Sox had to Devers, though? Per Devers himself, the team had promised him that, as part of his signing a contract with a franchise that had traded Mookie Betts to clear salary and had let Xander Bogaerts walk after yet another insulting offer for a homegrown player on the way out, that third base was his position now and into the future. After Devers spoke to ownership over the winter about their need to bring in some help — “I’m not saying the team is not OK right now, but they need to be conscious of what our weaknesses are and what we need right now” — they went out and signed free agent Alex Bregman… to put him at third base. Without consulting Devers on it.

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Rob Manfred is denying there are plans for a lockout, again

Rob Manfred is contradicting the words of Rob Manfred once again.

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For some reason, people keep asking MLB commissioner Rob Manfred about the looming threat of a lockout after the expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement. It’s so weird how this happens after you use an interview at the New York Times (by way of the Athletic) to say that there will be a lockout after the expiration of the current collective bargaining agreement, but that’s just how the media works, am I right?

Manfred has spent the first half of 2025 pretending he didn’t say that lockouts should be considered the new normal, as just part of the process of negotiating a new CBA, that he didn’t liken them to “using a .22, as opposed to a shotgun or a nuclear weapon.” In February, Sportico relayed that Manfred had “tampered down his rhetoric” by saying that, “I’m not going to speculate how we’re going to negotiate with the PA. We’re a year away. I owe it to the owners to coalesce around our bargaining approach. And quite frankly I owe it to our fans not to get into this too early. It’s bad enough when you’re doing it and bargaining, and everyone is worried about it. We’re just not there yet.” Attempt number one at putting the cat back in the bag, basically.

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MLB’s investment in Athletes Unlimited intrigues

MLB has made a significant investment in professional softball, which could end up being great news for the sport.

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Obviously, it’s a rarity in this space when MLB’s business activities are brought up and not immediately ripped apart for some deserved transgression. So hey, let’s enjoy something happening where I’m leaning far more toward, “huh, neat” than “what’s their goal, here?” with eyes narrowed.

I’m speaking of, as the headline already alerted you to, Major League Baseball’s significant investment in the Athletes Unlimited Softball League, or AUSL. Last summer, I wrote about the AUSL for Baseball Prospectus, in a piece titled “Athletes Unlimited and a New Model for Pro Sports.” Here’s a bit of that to get you up to speed on the league and my thoughts on it:

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It’s not just the Rockies

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Saying that the Rockies have taken up all the oxygen in the room when it comes to 2025’s losing teams is probably pushing things a little far, but it is, at least, fair to say that they’re at the center of that particular attention economy. How could they not be, considering that, heading into Tuesday’s action against the Cubs, they’re sitting at 9-45, the worst-ever modern (i.e. 1901 and beyond) start through 54 games of an MLB season? Given that the 2024 White Sox set the modern loss record with 121 defeats, and Colorado is currently on pace for 135 of them?

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Brandon Hyde suffers for Orioles’ organizational sins

The Orioles didn’t struck when they should have the way they should have, and it’s becoming their defining feature under Mike Elias.

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There’s a common theme to 2025’s worst MLB teams, and it’s that they were pretty clearly going to have rough seasons. And yet, none of them did the things that would keep this from occurring. Three of those four squads have also fired their managers already — the Orioles being the latest thanks to getting rid of Brandon Hyde, following the Rockies and Pirates doing so a little earlier in May — because that’s one way to pretend you’re Doing Something about losses that have been brought about by an organizational-wide philosophy.

You can argue that the Orioles weren’t expected to be quite as bad in 2025 as they’ve been — they’re 15-30, on pace for 108 losses — but this is just arguing a matter of degrees. The O’s made it so that a whole lot of things had to go right for them to compete in 2025 like they did even a year ago when they won 91 games and lost in the Wild Card round, and none of those things have gone right. Instead, they’ve just hit the worst-case scenario in a few instances, but all within the realm of plausibility without the need for hindsight.

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Pirates, Rockies shuffle some deck chairs

Firing the managers will fix everything, sure.

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On Thursday, the Pirates fired manager Derek Shelton. On Sunday, the Rockies fired their manager, Bud Black. The Pirates had just lost seven games in a row and sat in last place in the NL Central, while the Rockies were one day removed from a 21-0 loss to the Padres, at home, that pushed their run differential to -134, twice as low as the next-worst team, the Marlins.

The Pirates made it seem like firing Shelton would be a move that would turn things around for them sooner than any other possible move, as if it was Shelton’s fault that they were the way they were, and simply elevating Don Kelly from bench coach to manager would undo that damage. The Rockies, similarly, let go of Black because what else are you going to do when you’re on pace for the worst season in modern history (and then some)?

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What we’re missing by focusing on the Pete Rose Decision

The stories have focused heavily on the Pete Rose part of the meeting with Trump, but there’s much more going on here.

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MLB commissioner Rob Manfred recently met with United States president Donald Trump, and the reports that came out of that meeting — and what subsequent time with the media has mostly focused on — is what this means for Pete Rose. Will he remain banned, will the ban be lifted, if the ban is lifted will he be able to enter the Hall of Fame? It’s not that none of this matters — because it does, reinstating Rose and undoing the idea of “permanent ineligibility” for gambling on sports is a terrible idea in a vacuum but even more so now when sports gambling is as ubiquitous in society as it is today — but there’s a more significant issue that’s been brushed aside a bit because of its existence.

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On MLB’s potential MLB.tv, MLB Network plans

The latest in MLB’s ongoing cable replacement saga.

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Sports broadcasting is in a state of flux, and not just when it comes to Major League Baseball games. For decades now, cable has been at the forefront, and it has paid dividends for leagues to align themselves with cable companies, literally, thanks to the carriage fees that every customer — sports-watching or not — were saddled with. With cable subscriptions trending down, though, and streaming and cable alternatives having taken hold, a new future is needed, to provide new revenue streams. Or, at least, ones that aren’t headed in the wrong direction.

This, in a general sense, is old news with MLB — I wrote about their problems with the regional sports network (RSN) model and the kinds of complaints and negotiating tactics that the Players Association would have to deal with from management back in 2021 for Baseball Prospectus, and it wasn’t necessarily new then, either. It’s reared its head in some new ways of late, however, such as with the end of the ESPN/MLB partnership looming, and MLB’s pretty open desire to switch to a different revenue-sharing model that’s more akin to that of the NFL.

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