Major League Baseball was upset — the league doesn’t have feelings, but you know what I mean — on Tuesday that commissioner Rob Manfred’s response to me in a news conference with the Baseball Writers Association of America that morning had gone viral.
In the course of answering a question about minor league salaries, he said that he “kind of reject[s] the premise of the question that minor league players are not paid a living wage.”
And after some pushback, he reiterated: “I reject the premise that they're not paid a living wage.”
This made instant news because it was callous — or, as critics of the commissioner might say, characteristically callous — and stood in stark contrast to the relatively recent surge of reports and first-person accounts about living conditions in the minor leagues.