Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred reiterated on Thursday that he plans to retire when his contract is up in 2029. But the game he’s leaving behind might look different if Manfred gets his way.
In an in-studio appearance on WFAN’s “The Carton Show,” Manfred said he would like to see MLB expand from 30 to 32 teams and to realign along geographic lines.
While Manfred was short on specifics with hosts Craig Carton and Chris McMonigle, he did say it would not be his preference to have the Yankees and Mets in the same division. But it sounds as if they would be in the same league.
Manfred’s proposal, which he said would be eight divisions of four teams each, would have two leagues, one East-based and one West-based. Left unsaid is what would happen to the traditional notion of the American and National Leagues.
“You would realign,” Manfred said. “You would do it along geographic lines, which would alleviate, could alleviate, a ton of the travel burden that’s on players . . . If you realign geographically, you would look more like other sports where you play up East into the World Series and West into the World Series . . . You would try to keep the two-team cities separate.”
Of course, all of this is subject to collective bargaining with the players. Much of the more than 30-minute interview was about the prospect of a work stoppage after the 2026 season.
“People that cover the sport seem like it’s a fait accompli,” Carton said. “We get one more year of baseball, and then we’re all in trouble, right? There’s going to be a stoppage.”
Manfred downplayed that notion as “a rush to negativity by a lot of the media that covers” the sport.
“I came inside of baseball in 1998,” Manfred said. “We have always played — through five or six rounds of bargaining — we have always played 162 games. All I can tell you is that when I came in my goal was to make sure that every time we bargained, we played 162, and that’s my goal this time around. We haven’t even started the process.”
The largest issue will be — as it has been in the past — is that the owners would like to institute a salary cap to ostensibly help competitive balance (and also potentially lower the rise of player salaries) while the union is dead set against it.
No need for arbitration
The Yankees avoided arbitration with eight players before Thursday’s deadline by agreeing to 2026 contracts. The players are pitchers David Bednar, Jake Bird, Fernando Cruz, Camilo Duval and Luis Gil and infielders Jose Caballero, Jazz Chisholm Jr. and Anthony Volpe. The terms of the agreements were not announced. YES Network reported that Chisholm is the highest-paid player in the group at $10.2 million . . . The Mets agreed to contracts with six players: catchers Francisco Alvarez and Luis Torrens and pitchers Huascar Brazoban, Reed Garrett, Tylor Megill and David Peterson. The terms were not announced. According to multiple reports, Peterson’s contract is the highest at $8.1 million.
Skubal asks for $32M
Two-time AL Cy Young Award winner Tarik Skubal asked for a record $32 million in salary arbitration on Thursday while the Detroit Tigers offered the lefthander $19 million. Skubal was the most prominent of the 166 players eligible for arbitration at the start of the day who swapped figures with their teams. Those without agreements face hearings before three-person panels from Jan. 26 to Feb. 13 in Scottsdale, Arizona. — AP
Anthony Rieber covers sports media and business and professional sports (you know, games and trades and things). He has worked at Newsday since Aug. 31, 1998, and has been in his current position since Jan. 1, 2026.
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