During his session with the media on Thursday afternoon, Rob Manfred revealed that his current five-year term as MLB commissioner will be his last. The 65-year-old plans to step down when that term expires in January 2029, 14 years after he first assumed the job from Bud Selig back in 2015.
Rob Manfred said his tenure as Major League Baseball commissioner will end in early 2029.
— Jeff Passan (@JeffPassan) February 15, 2024
“You can only have so much fun in one lifetime,” Manfred said. “I have been open with them (the owners) about the fact that this is going to be my last term.”
It’s unclear whether Manfred will opt for retirement or simply find a new role in or out of baseball. A labor lawyer by trade, he began working with the league office during collective bargaining negotiations back in 1987. He came aboard on a full-time basis in 1998, and had a hand in some of the most consequential league policy of the next 10-15 years — from implementation of MLB’s first drug testing agreement to three new CBAs to leading the investigation of the Biogenesis scandal. Through it all, Manfred served Selig and league owners well, so much so that he was elected as Selig’s replacement in August of 2014.
Manfred, like most league commissioner’s, hasn’t earned a ton of fans during his tenure. But, however you feel about him, that tenure has undoubtedly tenure has been among the most eventful in the modern history of the sport. Few commissioners can say that they’ve left baseball a fundamentally different game, but Manfred can: He was instrumental in pushing through the pitch clock, pickoff limits and other pace of play rules that came into effect in the 2023 season, trimming several minutes off the average game time and drawing rave reviews from even diehard fans. He navigated MLB through a shortened season amid the Covid-19 pandemic in 2020, and is a major reason why the World Baseball Classic has grown exponentially since the league assumed control of the event in 2013.
Of course, there were many other ways in which Manfred’s monomaniacal focus on efficiency and the bottom line left him a bit less popular with the public. He’s always had a habit of coming across as tone-deaf, far more comfortable in board rooms than communicating his vision — much less his passion for the sport — in front of a microphone. He played a major role in team owners’ decision to lock out the players in the winter of 2021-22 and shepherded the Athletics from Oakland to Las Vegas (for now, anyway), ticking his foot in his mouth more than a few times along the way.
But there’s a reason that, despite those gaffes and despite his low approval rating, Manfred sailed to reelection twice. The commissioner answers to the 30 team owners, after all, and economically speaking, Manfred has richly rewarded them for their faith. Sometimes those priorities happened to overlap with fan experience, and the long-term health of the game; sometimes they very much didn’t. Manfred still has a few more years to finish writing his legacy, one that — if the fate of just about every other modern MLB commissioner is any guide — will likely end in Cooperstown one day. Right now, though, it will be that of a man who kept the short-term business of baseball thriving, come hell or high water.