(Roughly) Daily

In late July, before a game against the Boston Red Sox, Bryce Harper sat slumped in a chair in the Philadelphia Phillies clubhouse, a baseball bat in hand. Philadelphia was the latest stop on Rob Manfred’s leaguewide speaking tour; ahead of a CBA negotiation that virtually everyone in baseball expects to involve a 2027 work stoppage, the MLB commissioner spent the summer visiting all 30 teams, trying to get players on board with his plans to restructure the league’s economics. When the subject of a salary cap came up late in the meeting, Harper rose from his seat. He walked closer to Manfred until their noses almost touched, and told the commissioner that if Manfred wanted to talk salary cap, he could “get the fuck out of our clubhouse.”

A couple months later, at the Minnesota Lynx’s end-of-season press conference, Napheesa Collier had some words for her league’s commissioner, too. The WNBA is in the thick of labor talks these days: The league and players’ union recently agreed to extend their collective bargaining negotiating period through January. Collier’s sport is undergoing its own economic transformation. Amid a women’s basketball boom, WNBA team prices have skyrocketed, and the league’s new media rights deal is valued at a figure six times the old one. Today’s labor fight pits players who feel they’ve driven this growth against the owners who feel they’re owed for years of losses. In Collier’s telling, commissioner Cathy Engelbert is a poor steward for the moment, a leader who takes the WNBA’s talent for granted. “The league believes it succeeds despite its players, not because of them,” Collier said, adding later that “the best players in the world” had “the worst leadership in the world.” The measure she took was public and not so lurid a confrontation as Harper’s—no baseball bats involved. But the basic idea was the same: to establish whose clubhouse it really is. 

For an emblem of player-commissioner relations in the NFL today, the New York Times reporter Ken Belson writes, look to the “Roger Goodell Bro Hug.” [see the picture above] Every spring, the newest first-round picks bound across the NFL draft stage and wrap their arms around the commissioner. Sometimes they lift him off his feet. A hug Goodell shared with Baltimore Ravens draftee Malaki Starks this past April lasted 21 seconds. Speaking to Belson, an agent laments the annual show of affection for management, though he can’t help but admire the bleak triumph it signals: “You have to give kudos to the NFL for making it that way.”

Belson’s new book, Every Day Is Sunday: How Jerry Jones, Robert Kraft, and Roger Goodell Turned the NFL into a Cultural & Economic Juggernaut, is a sobering account of how the NFL made the world this way, its way, totally in its image…