The passage of time is an unavoidable conversation these days for Rob Manfred, the 66-year-old commissioner of Major League Baseball. Sitting in a conference room at his Manhattan office this month, he scurried out mid-sentence to retrieve a piece of paper, a small square with ruled interlocking lines and a dot in the middle called an Amsler grid. “So, when you’re older,” he said on his return, “your eye doctor will probably give you one of these.”
In August, sensing an issue with his right eye, Manfred looked at the grid and saw only black on one side. The next day he was in surgery to repair a detached retina. His doctor told him he was lucky: Twenty years ago, he might have permanently lost sight in the eye.
Manfred talks about the ordeal now mostly as an inconvenience. For weeks, he had to spend much of his days lying down. It’s not an optimal position to run a league that last year reached record revenues of $12.1 billion. The recovery also came with a doctor’s orders not to fly, which very nearly kept Manfred from one of the sport’s holiest days, the first game of the World Series. But vision in his eye has much improved since his surgery, and the league he oversees is at its healthiest point during a tenure that he says will end four years from now.
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