The Manfraud Files

This photo of Rob Manfred working on his golf swing hours before canceling Opening Day is such a bad look … for golf

Tuesday was a dark day for baseball. After blasting through the Spring Training stop sign, the MLB and MLBPA's months-long labor dispute arrived at the deadline for saving Opening Day. It didn’t even tap the breaks. After a promising Monday session, including reports of concessions from both sides, Tuesday, in the words of commissioner Rob Manfred, was “not a particularly productive day.” After failing to arrive at a collective bargaining agreement for the 89th consecutive sunrise, Manfred announced that Opening Day and the first two series of the 2022 regular season would be canceled, describing negotiations as “deadlocked.”

Then, as if that weren’t enough to bolster Manfraud’s growing reputation as a supervillain minus the supervillian smarts, this photo of him working on his golf swing when we could have been working on saving baseball surfaced. Folks, we wish we didn’t have to show you this, but we do.

This takes "always be golfing" way past its logical extreme. Apparently it wasn’t enough for Manfred to kill one sport on Tuesday, he also had to go out on the concourse at Roger Dean Stadium and kick another one into traffic. This is why golf gets a bad name, because guys who own yachts would rather be playing it than doing the jobs they’re paid seven figures a year to do. That’s not golf’s fault, but watch it get blamed anyway.

As for Manfred, we hope he squeezes in 36 on Wednesday and gets it out of his system before talks between the MLB and MLBPA resume on Thursday. First of all, WE WANT FREAKING BASEBALL. FIGURE IT OUT. Second of all, golf has enough to worry about with a Saudi blood-money takeover looming, a PIP system that rewards the big Saudi-blood-money guy, and the slow dissolution of yesterday’s stars of the future into the also-rans of today. The last thing we need right now is to be on the hook for the failures of another sport, so do us a favor, Rob, and leave golf out of it.