Ratto: Manfred Reaches A New Low ("Does Anyone Vet The Words And Ideas That Ooze Out Of Your Face At All? Ever?")

Rob Manfred Reaches A New Low
Ray Ratto, Defector, October 27, 2021

Most corporate lawyers choose that path by believing they are the smartest person in the room. It is a short step from that to believing that everyone else in the room is spectacularly more stupid than you. But you haven't really made it in the profession until you've reached the state of legal nirvana that Rob Manfred has achieved—namely, when you don't care if YOU are the stupidest person in the room but nobody is there to either harm you or stop you from being so out loud where everyone can hear you.

Thus, when Manfred proffered a new and fascinating framework by which the Atlanta Braves as a company exist and operate—that they're racist, their fans are racists, and they should absolutely go where the money is even if it means working in the milieu they are given—he took his role to a new and exciting place. In other words, he moved his queen off the board, chucked it into the toilet, and declared checkmate. Well done, Rob.

He was asked before Game 1 of the World Series what he thought of the team's position toward the Braves' nickname, its imagery, and the tomahawk chop, and here's how managed to catch that hand grenade and hold it until it detonated . . .

So let's break this magnificent wickiup of slander, ignorance, and arrogance, starting with:

"We don't market our game on a nationwide basis." Well, yes you do, all the time, and we can prove it. The television deals are national, the World Series in particular is nationally televised, and the MLB Network is on all the time as a national entity. Nice try, Skippy, but this is just a clumsy lie.

"Ours is an everyday game." Yeah, and what's that got to do with anything? My grocery store is an everyday operation. The family dog is an everyday game too, otherwise it would be an ex-dog. What's your point?

"You've gotta sell tickets every single day to the fans in that market." Aha! Now we're getting to the crux of it. . . . Suburban Atlanta WANTS this even though it has been a source of consternation for decades. Suburban Atlanta NEEDS this because there are two racial stereotypes in play here, and the second is that fans won't come to games unless the racist memes are in full display. That is presumably why they moved the ballpark to Cobb County, right Robbo? Because the fans there are all racist? Does anyone vet the words and ideas that ooze out of your face at all? Ever? . . .

Some comments on this column (each paragraph is a different comment):

I have never seen someone so clearly unveiled as a desperate and morally corrupt idiot as Rob Manfred (and Alex Rodriguez, honestly) in that Netflix documentary Screwball.
everyone please watch it. also fuck Rob Manfred.

The primary role of a sports commissioner is to ensure that the obscenely wealthy men who employ you never look like the dumbest guy, or the biggest asshole, in the room. That's job one at all times. Unfortunately, basically all of them are in fact genuinely colossal assholes and many are deeply, deeply stupid. At any given time, at least one of them will be in the process of taking a giant shit on the floor in full view of the public. As the commissioner, your primary qualification for the job is being cynical enough to devour that pile of shit, insist in the press that it was chocolate ice cream, and ask for seconds.

This is just Manfred screaming the quiet part at the top of his lungs, but he's also not wrong. The thing you have to understand about the Braves that every local understands is that, even when they were playing downtown at the Ted, a Braves home game is the whitest place in the city at any given time. This is not true of the other Atlanta teams. . . . But the Braves, while having Atlanta across their chest, has never been marketed as Atlanta's team, but the Team of the South. Their blackout region is basically the Confederacy. And everybody in that stadium and the marketing department knows it.

Yep - this is the absolute truth. Braves games are shockingly, wildly white. As someone very smart once said, if you're doing something in Atlanta and there are no Black people, then you're doing something wrong.

There might be more complaints from Native Americans in the Atlanta area if Jackson hadn't forcibly marched most of them halfway across the continent to take their lands for white settlement. But I'm sure these things are in no way related. A fun reminder that the impacted tribes won at the Supreme Court and were still forcibly removed. "John Marshall has made his decision, now let him enforce it." Then, in the 1890s, white politicians carved up "Indian Territory" for white settlement. Many settlers came from Texas and Arkansas and brought Jim Crow laws and the Klan with them, which set the stage for Tulsa a generation later.

and when Native Americans struck oil on the land given to them in Kansas/Oklahoma/etc., the "Bureau of Indian Affairs" appointed financial managers to them to manage the wealth derived from that oil. You'll never believe what happened next!

P.S. The "Just A Piece Of Metal" series is tied 1-1.