One of the interested observers at Tuesday night’s game between the Toronto Blue Jays and the Boston Red Sox was Rob Manfred, commissioner of Major League Baseball.
Good thing the team took care of all those rips in the Rogers Centre roof caused by the recent ice storm that forced the postponement of the game of April 16 against the Kansas City Royals out of safety concerns.
When the commissioner comes to town, you always want to put your best foot forward.
Manfred said the visit was planned more than a month ago. He said it had nothing to do with the attack that unfolded in Toronto on Monday when 10 people died and 14 were injured after the driver of a van plowed into pedestrians on Yonge Street in north Toronto.
“I want to say to the citizens of Toronto and to the Blue Jays fans that all of us at Major League Baseball were devastated by the tragedy,” Manford said.
He added: “I hope that maybe our game [on Tuesday night] will be a little bit of a beginning of a healing process that will be important for the city.”
Manfred was treated to a pretty decent game with Curtis Granderson launching a walkoff home run off Boston reliever Craig Kimbrel in the bottom of the 10th that vaulted Toronto to a 4-3 victory.
The Blue Jays led 3-1 heading into the top of the ninth, but closer Roberto Osuna could not lock it down, allowing two runs, including a bases-loaded two-out single by Brock Holt that tied it up.
Speaking with members of the media before the game, Manfred addressed several of the hot-button issues that have surfaced so far during the early part of the season, including weather concerns and Facebook.
And he wasn’t pulling any punches.
This season, MLB renewed an agreement with Facebook to broadcast 25 games exclusively on the social-media platform. Facebook reportedly paid US$35-million for the rights.
On Wednesday of last week, the Blue Jays played the first of three of their scheduled Facebook appearances – a 15-5 win over the Royals. As the game was exclusive to Facebook, it was not shown on Rogers Sportsnet, the Blue Jays television rightsholders.
There was much grousing on Twitter when the game was being aired from disgruntled fans, upset that they could not find the game on regular TV. Manfred singled out Sportsnet for the cause of the confusion.
“We always want our fans to be able to find games,” he said. “We made a distinct effort through the club [the Blue Jays] and through baseball, and frankly didn’t get a lot of help from the rightsholder in terms of publicizing where that game was going to be.”
In trying to grow the game to a younger audience, Manfred said that the Facebook experiment is one way to achieve that goal.
“The viewership is up dramatically from last year,” Manfred said. “Facebook is wildly enthusiastic about the success of the experiment. And from our perspective it’s really important that the demographics of the audience consuming those games on Facebook is about 20 years younger on average than our normal broadcast audience.”
Manfred said he met on Tuesday with Mark Shapiro, the Blue Jays president and chief executive officer, where the topic of possible upgrades to the aging Rogers Centre was discussed.
Manfred said he is in agreement with Shapiro that the facility could use a facelift, the exact nature of which he did not want to speculate.
“I do know that there’s limited sort of premium seating in this facility,” he said. “I think in a market as robust as Toronto, if it were my club I’d probably want a lot more than you have.”
Bad weather over the first month of the baseball season is always a concern. But this year, as of Sunday, there have already been 26 weather-related postponements. That’s a league record for the first month of the season.
And it has been a factor in league attendance being down about 10 per cent so far across the board. But there is little that MLB can do about it, Manfred said.
“In terms of flexibility to address the weather issues, I know people think it’s easy to have clubs play only in warm-weather sites,” he said. “First of all, we only have 14 warm-weather and domed sites, not quite a big enough number to do that. But more importantly, no teams are going to want to start the season on the road for a couple of weeks. In fact, the basic [contract] agreement prohibits it, a trip that long.”
Manfred also pointed out that warm-weather markets don’t want that many home games early in the season, that it is more difficult to sell tickets until school lets out in late June.
Raptors guard Kyle Lowry says the arresting officer in Monday’s Toronto van attack did an “amazing” job not using his firearm to take the suspect into custody. Alek Minassian was arrested after a brief sidewalk standoff.
The Canadian Press