Coaches and Class, Part 3: Lessons from the Manfred Report
The conclusion of our trilogy!
If you missed it, here is Part One of our series on what coaches can teach us about class and Part Two is here.
Remember the Manfred report? If you don’t, that’s understandable. In January of last year, when baseball commissioner Rob Manfred released his report on the Astros cheating scandal, it was the biggest issue in baseball. Then Covid hit and the sport had bigger problems to deal with. The season was delayed and, when it resumed, there were no fans to boo the team. In the interim, AJ Hinch and Alex Cora, who bore the brunt of the punishment, had each been fired and re-hired. Cora didn’t even change teams.
But it’s worth remembering exactly what Cora and Hinch did. According the report, and what Hinch has said publicly since it came out, the manager had nothing to do with the sign-stealing program, and didn’t even approve of it. Cora was a more active participant, but the report repeatedly emphasizes that the scheme was primarily player-driven. It says, “a group of players… discussed that the team could improve on decoding opposing teams’ signs and communicating the signs to the batter.” It was mainly players would watch the monitors to decode the signs, and players who were banging on trash cans.
And yet it was Cora, Hinch, and the team’s General Manager, Jeff Luhnow, who were punished. On some level, this is a function of the power players have in baseball, and in all sports. In order to get players to cooperate with the investigation, Manfred had to grant them immunity for their role in the scheme. Even more than the official immunity, though, the MLB clearly did not want to suspend stars like José Altuve or Alex Bregman. Not only would that hurt the marketability of the game, but it would likely have provoked a fight with the union at a time when the league and the union already had a lot of other ongoing fights.
That kind of labor power is obviously unusual, but it’s not unusual how the blame passed on to Hinch, Cora, and Luhnow. The report said, “the Club’s General Manager and Field Manager are responsible for ensuring that the players both understand the rules and adhere to them.” That’s about as explicit a definition of the role of the professional managerial class as you will ever read. If you remember from Part 2, the PMC exist to regulate and discipline labor. And following from that, they also exist to take the fall for labor: Even though the cheating scheme was designed and implemented by the players, it was a coach, a manager, and a GM who got punished for it. This gets at the inherent tension between labor and the PMC—ownership places them in opposition to each other in order to exploit both groups.
The incident also shows how hard it is to radicalize the professional class. Despite being summarily thrown under the bus, both Hinch and Cora, hoping to get hired again, issued statements thanking and apologizing to the owner for their role in the scandal. And it worked! Both were rehired within 12 months for being loyal soldiers. On the other hand, Jeff Luhnow chose to sue the team, and so he remains on the outside. In other words, professionals are trained to respond to precarity by identifying even more strongly with the ownership class.
This seems like a pretty gloomy outlook for a possible alliance between workers and professionals. But I think the Manfred report contains hints at a way forward, especially in one curious incident it documents: AJ Hinch, explaining that he disapproved of the sign-stealing scheme designed by players, “attempted to signal his disapproval of the scheme by physically damaging the monitor on two occasions, necessitating its replacement. However, Hinch admits he did not stop it and he did not notify players… that he disapproved of it.” This is very strange behavior, if you believe it. Surely notifying the players of your disapproval is easier than destroying a video monitor. In fact, the report also says, “Players stated that if Manager A.J. Hinch told them to stop engaging in the conduct, they would have immediately stopped.” So why didn’t he just say something? And why didn’t players get the hint when he destroyed the monitor?
Of course, for anyone familiar with a certain kind of petty office politics, this kind of behavior makes some sense. When a middle manager doesn’t like something an organization is doing, but feels like it has the approval, whether tacit or explicit, of ownership, then they often resort to passive aggression and subtle attempts to undermine the project. This seems to be the most likely explanation for Hinch’s behavior. It also explains why players, who told Manfred they had misgivings about the scheme and must have sensed Hinch’s displeasure, would need an explicit order to call it off.
Indeed, Manfred in his report highlights a “very problematic” culture that “valued and rewarded results over other considerations.” There has been a lot of debate and speculation over whether the team’s owner, Jim Crane, could have really been unaware of what the players were doing, but his explicit knowledge may be beside the point. It’s entirely possible for such a culture to send the message to employees that they should be pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable to succeed, and that if they cross any lines ownership will look the other way. This could explain why Hinch felt like he had to resort to such underhanded tactics to stop the scheme, and why Luhnow could plausibly deny knowledge of the scheme despite presiding over the kind of culture Manfred blames for it.
Put crudely, the “rules” that ownership imposes on labor, and that management is meant to regulate, are often vague and inconsistent. But when there is trouble, these vague rules are used to scapegoat workers of both classes. This incident shows how that confusion is not only used to stifle the working class, but the professional class as well. Hinch was lauded for his willingness to experiment and his creativity in finding competitive advantages. Yet he was given neither the autonomy to decide how to pursue those advantages, nor clear and transparent rules on where the lines were.
By focusing on worker autonomy and empowerment, it seems possible to unite the concerns of professionals and workers. Ensuring that rules are clear and equally enforced is in the interest of players and coaches. Similarly, giving workers and managers more say in the direction of their company—more say in the “team culture” if you will— can take power away from the ownership class. You can seeds of this in recent employee activism at tech companies.
It’s not clear that this will work, but it seems more fruitful than insisting the two sides are irreconcilable. We should all be able to fight for a world where AJ Hinch doesn’t have to break any monitors…