Rob Manfred Can't Fix Baseball. But These 4 Changes Might.

Plus: College football insanity, fans jailed in Venezuela, and the benefits of betting

Hello and welcome to another edition of Free Agent! Grab some dip and get that chip in today, I believe in you.

This week we're going to fix baseball once and for all—if only Rob Manfred would listen to the wise subscribers to this newsletter. Then we'll talk about more college football chaos, the sad story of soccer fans who were arrested for rooting for the wrong team, and the benefits of sports betting.

But first, NFL season is right around the corner. We have an Eliminator Challenge group just for Free Agent subscribers on ESPN. Pick one different team to win each week and see how long you can go—lose once and you're out. Click here to sign up.

Locker Room Links

• "The ban on prop bets is coming."
• Only in the world of stupid stadium subsidies: $1 a year for rent, for 100 years. (Nice deal if you can get it!)
• I listened to Taylor Swift on the New Heights podcast so you don't have to: She went from not knowing what a first down was to knowing defensive schemes and top prospects in less than a year (and I give her full credit for that).
• The Spike Lee docuseries on Colin Kaepernick is canceled.
• Americans when the NFL first started playing regular season games abroad: Cool, interesting, exciting future. Europeans when soccer teams consider playing regular season games abroad: "a grim prospect."
• Nothing like high school football in the Arctic Circle.
• More wild "football" geography here. 
• Elsewhere in Reason: "What Caused the Serial Killing Spike of the 1970s and '80s?"
• At least when I do this it doesn't cost me hundreds of thousands of dollars. (He blamed it on creatine.)
  

  Ben Griffin just 4-putt from inside of 5 feet ???? pic.twitter.com/rPppY71gKG

  — Fore Play (@ForePlayPod) August 17, 2025

 

4 Ways To Fix Baseball

Let's fix baseball, because Rob Manfred can't. The MLB commissioner briefly talked Sunday about how expansion could lead to geographic realignment of divisions. I don't think he meant ditching the historical two "leagues" for an eastern and western conference (it would be an insane mistake to mess with baseball's history like that). But geographic realignment won't help much with player fatigue unless baseball also ditches the balanced schedule that has less of an emphasis on divisional games.

Baseball still has a lot of other problems, too. A few weeks ago, I put out an open-ended survey to see how readers would fix the MLB if they were in charge. Some of your ideas were crazy! Others were fun and made sense. Let's get into some of these ideas. My own take will try to juggle what fans want and what owners want.

Scheduling: Most of you wanted to see more teams (Salt Lake City, followed by Nashville and Charlotte, were the most common suggestions) but fewer games (114, 120, and 154 were all mentioned). My pitch is to expand to 32 teams, but each league only has two divisions with eight teams—an east division and a west division. Your team plays a three-game series against every team in the other league, plus three games home and three games away against the 15 other teams in their own league—that comes out to 138 games. If owners don't want to cut the regular season by 15 percent, add another three games against the seven other teams in your division and that's 159 games. For the postseason, division standings don't matter: Give the top three teams in the American League and National League a bye to the renamed "first round" (which becomes best of seven), and have the teams in fourth and fifth do a single play-in game. The team in fourth gets to host—and they start with runs on the board if they had more wins in the regular season than the team in fifth (one run for each win).

Game Rules: Your suggestions got really crazy here: "Eliminate the home run," "Add a fifth base," "Let them take steroids." I'm going to largely advocate for the status quo here, actually—baseball is back on the rise thanks to recent changes, but it's not so different that people think they're watching Calvinball. The pitch clock has helped with long game times (though I'm concerned about pitcher injuries and would increase it to 30 seconds). The ghost runner in extra innings is not an abomination; it creates drama and speeds the game up (much like the different overtime rules or shorter overtime periods in other sports). I'm neutral on the banned shift. As for changes, the softball-style double first base doesn't seem to have a downside. Baseball is weird and wonderful—and that's why it should go back to the American League having the designated hitter and the National League going without.

Streaming: Most fans never watch a regional sports network when live sports aren't on. Regional sports networks seem to be dying out. Teams should offer fans a paid local streaming option—if people are watching on cable, it's easier to switch the channel to something else anyway. If a game is on national TV (or national streaming), make the feed available on a premium version of the paid local streaming option. MLB shouldn't force change here if teams are happy with their current arrangements, but MLB should be ready to assist with any technological needs related to apps, streaming, etc. Keep it as simple as possible and design it so old fans who grew up listening to baseball on the radio can figure it out.

Robo Umpire: Readers were in favor of robot umpires, but my head and my gut differ on this one. My gut hates change and wants MLB to only use the automated balls and strikes (ABS) system to grade and improve umpires (basically what Max Scherzer said on the Starkville podcast in spring training). My head thinks sports fans want rules enforced as accurately as possible (if they can't be biased in favor of their team). ABS still has a half-inch margin of error—what is the average umpire's margin? I don't like it, but if they're more accurate, robo umps are the way to go for balls and strikes—and I bet AI umps for everything else are a decade away unless the umpires union can stop it.

What's in a Playoff?

The NCAA must be delighted that "week zero" college football games start this weekend, because yet again, the sport is mired in negative news. People are busier yelling about the College Football Playoff format than they are about the upcoming season. Everyone's whining because they think Michigan cheated in 2023 but didn't get punished harshly enough (thankfully, the long precedent of punishing current athletes for their program's years-old issues is dead). And apparently we're not going to get a proper RedZone show.

Maybe the NCAA prefers the playoff format debates to having employment status and unionization in the news. There's no going back down now, but it's a shame they skipped over an eight-team playoff, which is so clearly the right number for getting in all the strongest teams with a valid claim on the title, plus an outlier or two from the dark horse conferences. But insanity rules the NCAA, not good sense.

Eight is great. Twenty-plus teams is silly and I'm ashamed of the Big Ten, my favorite conference, for putting it out there. The 10th- through 20th-best teams in the country don't deserve a shot at the national championship, or that championship will start to mean less and less.

Jailed Fans

Communism and socialism corrupt everything they touch—even sports. My colleague César Báez has a heartbreaking story out of Venezuela.

"Fans of Deportivo Táchira wanted to see their team play in the league final," he writes. "The mafia state made sure most never made it."

As it turns out, the other team had some strong political connections: They're owned by Col. Alexander Granko Arteaga, who specializes in torture centers and forced disappearances as a senior officer in Venezuela's military intelligence unit. "Granko's team shares its name with Venezuela's oldest public university but has no affiliation with the school and never received permission to use the name. The university has objected, but Granko is a powerful man—powerful enough to ignore them and even install his talentless 16-year-old son as a regular starter."

But it wasn't just sporting hijinks—a bus full of Deportivo Táchira fans was still stopped for hours on their way home, and most of the fans were briefly detained. Five men still are.

Granko's power-hungry message to opposing fans is quite clear: Root for your team at your own risk.

Betting's Benefits

Everyone who's seen media reports about sports betting legalization knows the negatives. But what about the positives?

A new paper by Seton Hall University Professor Kurt W. Rotthoff actually tries to quantify the benefits of legalization. Combined with the costs, he wrote that "the impact of legalized sports betting is positive." To reach that conclusion, he looked at increased tax revenue, better scrutiny over game fixing and player harassment, as well as additional resources for addicted gamblers. Plus, when it comes to those studies that say betting legalization is causing terrible things, Rotthoff wrote that there is "a lack of evidence of a causal connection…calling into question the utility of the studies."

Rotthoff's conclusion expresses a sentiment I've always shared: "Sports betting is a form of entertainment that is not all that dissimilar to other forms of entertainment."

Replay of the Week

Rob Manfred definitely can't fix this.

FROM A ROBBED HOMER TO A 2-RUN BLAST FROM WILYER ABREU!

SHOUTOUT THE BULLPEN WALL! pic.twitter.com/KTZ34FFsvv

— Tyler Milliken (@tylermilliken_) August 17, 2025

That's all for this week. Enjoy watching the real game of the weekend, Sam Houston vs. Western Kentucky in football (Saturday, 7 p.m., CBS Sports Network).