ATLANTA — Rob Manfred won’t boycott the Mets’ new general manager.
The baseball commissioner divulged Thursday, at the conclusion of Major League Baseball’s owners meeting, that he has spoken with Brodie Van Wagenen since the Mets hired him to run their baseball operations and the two men made their peace over Van Wagenen’s inflammatory comments earlier this year when he still worked as a player representative for CAA.
“Brodie called me right after he accepted the job,” Manfred said during a news conference. “We had a really good conversation. I think that he understands the concerns that a comment like that raises amongst our group. But I have every confidence that he’s going to conduct himself in a way that will make him a really productive member of the baseball family.”
On Feb. 2, with the 2017-18 free-agent market moving at a snail’s pace, Van Wagenen tweeted an explosive statement. It read, regarding the lack of signings, “A boycott of Spring Training may be a starting point, if behavior doesn’t change” and also contended that the owners’ behavior “feels coordinated, rightly or wrongly.”
The words from such a prominent agent set off a tornado in the baseball industry, and two days later, the Players Association awkwardly, publicly shot down the notion that it was considering a spring-training boycott, which would have represented an egregious violation of the game’s Basic Agreement.
That’s probably why, when first asked about Van Wagenen’s past fire-and-brimstone tweet and whether that created worries for his professional pivot, Manfred smiled and asked, “Do you think I’d get away with amnesia on that one?”
The commissioner couldn’t and didn’t, choosing to forgive instead of forget.
“When you come up this side of the business that I came up, where conflict is something that happens periodically, episodically, in those moments, people say things,” said Manfred, who ran the game’s labor negotiations while Bud Selig served as commissioner. “Certainly, if you look back, I bet you can find one or two intemperate Rob Manfred comments along the way.”
Credit: NY Post</>
via USAHint.com
No comments:
Post a Comment