Blanchette: Commissioner not focused on big picture

SEATTLE – Rob Manfred, the new potentate of Major League Baseball (another subsidiary of One Game at a Time, Inc.), blew into town Wednesday and held a closed-door Q-and-A with the Seattle Mariners to hear their concerns and quibbles with the state of the game. Presumably he was not asked if he could hit left-handed pitching and, if so, what uniform number did he want. Having met with other MLB factotums during spring training, Manfred joked that the Mariners “lead the league in one category and that’s number of questions. I didn’t think I was going to get out of there.” If he’s actually going to take suggestions from the workforce, it makes you wonder why he’s keeping retired weird uncle Bud Selig around as a consultant at $6 million a year. Then again, that’s more bang for the buck than baseball is getting from, say, Brian Wilson. Manfred’s getting-to-know-you tour reveals him to be far more difficult to openly mock than Selig and easier on the ears, even if the talking points and tenor are pretty much the same: Baseball’s great, even if the paying customers are spending more time looking at their iPhones than what’s happening on the field. “After getting elected commissioner,” Manfred said, “the second-luckiest thing was the state of the game when I got here.” Then he ticked off the major plusses: competitive balance (21 MLB teams have been in the playoffs in the last five years), popularity (the 10 best-attended MLB seasons have been in the last decade), the Safeco videoscreen hydro races. OK, making up that last one. Yes, the season stretches on nearly until November now. The customer demographic suggests baseball is still losing the 18-34 crowd to, well, almost everything. National TV ratings are slipping even as local ratings gain, turning the game into a regional amusement. The sport is climbing into bed with a gambling enterprise even as it keeps Pete Rose at arm’s length. Josh Hamilton, A-Rod, sewage backups at O.co Stadium – man, what a smell. But he’s right. Attendance is still right up there – more than 100 million a year, if you throw in the minor leagues – and almost anyone can get to the postseason (hear that, Mariners?). So for the time being, Manfred is occupying himself holding a stopwatch to the proceedings, enforcing off-season initiatives to shave seconds off the between-innings slowdowns and batter’s box ballet that last year drove the average game time over the 3-hour mark. The rulesmakers eschewed the easy fix of banning Velcro on batting gloves, but instead insist that, among other things, hitters now keep a pivot foot in the box between pitches. Let’s hope the umps are more stringent about calling traveling than hoop refs. Manfred said he had no target time average in mind, only that he wants everyone to “look at what’s gone on on the field and say … the game is just a little crisper.” Of course, everybody wouldn’t care that much about the crispness if it was a little more crackle and pop extending their evenings. For some reason – maybe because it’s bad PR, and a commissioner is above all a PR guy – Manfred seems altogether less concerned with the pronounced decline in offense that has everyone else far more bothered than having to postpone bedtime a few minutes. Surely he knows that runs are down to 4.07 per game, a 33-year low. Aggregate batting average in 2014: .251, the worst since 1972. Strikeouts surged to an all-time high for the seventh straight season. Power pitchers, throwing an assortment of nasty cutters and split-fingers harder than ever, rule. Managers, armed with defensive analytics never imagined 20 years ago, employ all manner of shifts and overloads. On day four of this MLB season, there were five shutouts. “Our athletes are great athletes,” Manfred said. “It’s not clear to me that they’re not going to make adjustments and turn what we’re seeing right now into something that’s an aberration.” What a very Selig thing to say. Except Selig had to deal with the twin Armageddons of rampant PED use and labor unrest that stopped the game in its tracks. Manfred, by his own admission, inherits a sport at a time of social peace and measurable (if not absolute) popularity. To diddle around with timekeeping and ignore the mounting offensive impotence hardly seems like bold new leadership. Then again, he’s not the only one missing the red flags. “You have phases where pitching dominates the game, and phases where hitting dominates,” M’s manager Lloyd McClendon said. “I kind of like it. I’m old-fashioned. I like a 2-1 ballgame – where the Mariners win.” OK, Lloyd, get on that. So the Mariners can lead the league in something besides grilling the commish.