If you're old like me, you remember the early days of the internet involved having to type www.majorleaguebaseball.com to get official content. It would take some mysterious deal between the two parties to eventually transfer the domain name, by which time Manfred was coincidentally now on Baseball's payroll.

Never forget that Rob Manfred has been annoying baseball fans far longer than he's been the commissioner.

21 comments

  1. Stuff like this happens in the world and then they tell us to mind our business and go to work.

  6. I definitely remember getting internet at home for the first time and being weirded out by the lawfirm [mlb.com](http://mlb.com) took me to. I had no idea Manfred was involved. Thanks, I didn’t know I could despise that man any more.

  8. No really what is the big conspiracy here? Manfred isn’t a baseball guy, he’s a lawyer. We’ve known this. And yes, that’s exactly what the owners want.

  9. Wanna visit nissan dot com? It’s someone’s personal website they refuse to let go I think.

  11. We’ll give you the domain, but you have to take our biggest asshole off our hands and make him commissioner. Here’s the kicker, he hates baseball.

  12. what is your point?  you think there is some major conspiracy lmfao?  it’s not about what you know or even who you know.  it’s how you know them.  welcome to the real world.

  13. Speaking as a semi-old timer, the Internet in the 90s was nothing like it is today, & most organizations did not appreciate what it had to offer.

    There were a ton of URL’s that were/are owned/set up by smaller companies based on their names or trades that the bigger-name companies fought to change in the early 00s, once they appreciated its ability to drive revenues. Nissan.com has been owned by a small computer company in North Carolina for 20+ years, & Nissan the car company hasn’t been able to get them to budge, as an example.

    It’s understandable that Major League Baseball was slow to register their domain, having acquired their website in 1995, because baseball has always been slow to pick up trends. It’s also understandable for Morgan Lewis to have gone with the shorter URL in ’94, when every bit of data was expensive-ish. With the National League & American League being joined as a single legal entity in 2000 (previously, they were separate, for MAJOR historical reasons), it made sense for them to make a push for the more recognizable URL…and having personal connections meant it could be resolved amicably & logically, rather than in court.

    This was 15 years before Manfred was made Commissioner, & Morgan Lewis is one of the largest & most prestigious law firms in the world, so top company lawyers have a really good chance of having worked there (I’ve personally worked with 3 General Counsels that previously worked for them).

    There’s a wide array of things Manfred has done wrong (there are also a lot of things he’s done right), but this in particular isn’t some mysterious backdoor conspiracy.

  17. I keep hearing on Reddit how Manfred is annoying me but most of what I see is just baseballs popularity rising and more fun to watch. And teams are making more money than ever before

  18. Did Morgan Lewis intentionally take mlb.com instead of another plausible website after realizing that they had a legitimate claim to it and that it was worth a lot to MLB? Sure

    Did they then give it to MLB for cheap in return for business? Sure

    I’m just not sure what part of this is particularly shady or objectionable. They could have sold it to MLB for 500k and then reduced their fees by that much. But in business usually free and 5million is a more appealing set of numbers than 500k and 4.5million.

  21. I think calling Major League Baseball “MLB” is a pretty recent development. Started around the time the internet started getting big, as an analog to NFL, NBA, NHL, but if you read stuff written before then, no one called the league MLB.

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