Rob Manfred Quotations

Forbes has never had access to financial information from major league baseball or the individual clubs.

We like to keep them fairly low-keyed. You're not going to see a lot of publicity.

We are disappointed obviously that the union decided today to set a strike date. Our hope had been that we could get an agreement with the players without the players taking this step that causes such concern to so many of our fans. Our disappointment is magnified by the fact that as a result of compromises by both sides we made substantial progress towards a new agreement over the past weeks. A number of important issues have been resolved and we are close on many others.

We think you cannot evaluate a program based on the results of a single case, that overall, the rules that we negotiated are designed to be strict but fair with the overall goal being to deter use. To the extent that anyone disagrees with the result in a particular case, it might be the result of our desire to deter use.

The tax mechanism in the last basic agreement would not be acceptable to us this time around.

We've worked very hard on our relationship with the players association. The economics of the sport are strong and the current agreement has worked very well. Those three things are good reason to be optimistic we can get a new agreement without a dispute.

For us to make a deal, there has to be a luxury tax in it.

David Wells has once again created a distraction with a series of ill-informed and ill-conceived comments,

In all candor, I think the agreement has probably been showing positive trends sooner than we might have expected. It looks like it's working.

The players' association negotiated for a clean slate when a player is promoted from the minor leagues to the major leagues. That clean slate, however, is a two-way street. If minor-league discipline does not count in determining the severity of the penalty to be imposed for a violation of the major-league program, then such discipline cannot immunize the player from discipline under the major-league program.