Manfred gets five-year contract extension as MLB boss

Washington (AFP) – Major League Baseball owners unanimously voted Thursday to extend commissioner Rob Manfred’s contract for five years through the 2024 season, the same day the league announced a television contract extension.

Bill DeWitt, chairman of the St. Louis Cardinals and MLB’s finance committee, announced Manfred’s extension at a meeting of club owners in Atlanta.

Manfred replaced Bud Selig as the major league commissioner in January 2015 after a prior stint as MLB chief operating officer. He first joined the league in 1998 as a vice president for labor relations and economics.

Manfred, 60, reached a deal with the players union for a five-year collective bargaining agreement through 2021, the sport having gone without a labor shutdown since a stalemate that wiped out the 1994 World Series and shortened the 1995 campaign.

Manfred has pushed for global expansion of the sport and began study of the potential for adding new teams.

The Tampa Bay Rays played a 2016 exhibition game in Cuba, the first major league appearance on the Communist island nation since 1999, and MLB played regular-season games in Mexico and Puerto Rico this past season.

Next June, the World Series champion Boston Red Sox and their arch rivals, the New York Yankees, witll play a series in London, the first MLB regular-season games every played in Europe.

Manfred’s tenure through the end of the 2024 season puts him level with NBA commissioner Adam Silver and NFL commissioner Roger Goodell, whose contracts are also set to end in 2024.

The new deal with Fox, a telecast partner with MLB for more than 20 years, will stretch the agreement for “baseball’s marquee events for the next decade,” according to Fox.

Variety reported fees are believed to be jumping between 30 and 50 percent during the new contract with the overall cost as much as $5.1 billion and annual fees rising from $525 million a year in the current eight-year deal that was to expire in 2021 to $675 million annually early in the new deal, sources told the magazine’s website.