The most powerful union in sports meets its match

Visitors entering the 30th-floor lobby of Major League Baseball’s old headquarters on Park Avenue in New York a few years back would immediately encounter 30 mannequins, one for each of the league’s teams. The display was impressive, but some players who visited the offices couldn’t help but notice what each mannequin was missing: its head.

- Ben Reiter

“Why should the Angels jersey not have a face when you have Mike Trout or Shohei Ohtani?” asks Andrew Miller, referring, respectively, to one of the greatest offensive players of all time and the Japanese star seen by many as the second coming of Babe Ruth. An MLB spokesperson says the installation was intended to show offthe uniforms for the benefit of merchandisers and licensees. But for Miller, the display was symbolic of how the league sees its players. “There’s not a whole lot of respect coming from them toward us at times,” says Miller, a 36-year-old reliever and one of the eight players on the executive subcommittee of the Major League Baseball Players Association. “It’s almost like they dehumanize who the players are and what they bring. We just become chess pieces.”

Baseball’s commissioner, Rob Manfred, is a Harvard-trained labor lawyer who’s served as the league’s chief negotiator for several collective bargaining agreements starting in 2002. Despite his adversarial history, Manfred promised a new era of labor relations when he took the top job in 2015. “I am a player guy—all the time,” he told espn.com that year.

He isn’t. Some fans still believe a commissioner is an impartial figure, tirelessly working for the good of the sport. But Manfred’s central mandate is to continuously increase the revenue, profitability, and value of the league’s 30 franchises—while privately working on behalf of his 30 billionaire (or near enough) bosses, the teams’ owners. Like every professional sports commissioner, he’s an owner guy—all the time.