Forget the Yankees — Rob Manfred was the biggest winner on Opening Night

It’s not often that we can say that New York Yankees superstar Aaron Judge and Major League Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred had a similar night, but Wednesday’s 7–0 Yankees victory over the Giants proved otherwise.

Judge, the two-time defending AL MVP, and Manfred began the new season by going hitless in the final box score. Of course, only one of them actually stepped into the batter’s box, and Judge finished the night 0-for-5 with four strikeouts. Not that it mattered, though, with the Yankees using a five-run second inning and Max Fried’s stellar pitching outing to start the season 1–0.

Manfred, meanwhile, didn’t need to don a uniform and put on some eye black to properly enjoy Opening Night. He instead spent the night celebrating a fresh start and MLB’s successful Netflix debut — and while social media users had mixed opinions on the broadcast itself, Manfred emerged as arguably the event’s biggest winner.

Rob Manfred should be thrilled with how Netflix’s MLB debut turned out

The most important thing about Wednesday’s Yankees–Giants game is that Netflix never crashed or had any sort of outages. In fact, the broadcast had no true technical issues from the second that pregame coverage began at 7 p.m. ET. Although some viewers flagged lighting problems, that may have stemmed more from the game starting at roughly 5:25 p.m. local time.

Surviving a streaming-only broadcast with no glitches is always a win, whether it’s a sporting event or a concert. Netflix had already proved it could handle NFL broadcasts, though that only goes so far. Just because you have experience at one job doesn’t mean that you’re automatically guaranteed to succeed at another.

Remember, this wasn’t some random Sunday morning game between the Pirates and Reds. Manfred put his faith in Netflix to air Opening Night — featuring one of the sport’s marquee faces in Judge — without any significant problems. There were few if any reports on social media about buffering or lag, though I ran into a couple of instances where the picture quality briefly dropped.

That’s not to say that Netflix had a perfect first MLB broadcast, though

Just because Netflix didn’t have a worldwide outage doesn’t mean Wednesday’s broadcast was … ugh … a home run. Viewers and social media users widely agreed that the overall product, ranging from the scorebug to Netflix relying heavily on promoting its own programming, took away from the experience. I personally gave the broadcast a C+, largely because I found the presentation to be abysmal.

Manfred’s midgame interview with broadcasters Matt Vasgersian, CC Sabathia, and Hunter Pence drew backlash on social media, partly because the trio didn’t ask Manfred questions about the ongoing labor situation. Instead, Manfred reflected on attending a Yankees game in 1968 and seeing his favorite player, Mickey Mantle, hit two home runs.

Criticizing Netflix for devoting the Manfred interview to asking him about Opening Day is unfair, because that wasn’t the right environment to discuss the possibility of a lockout. Vasgersian, Sabathia, and Pence were there to relay the action in front of them. If Netflix wanted a candid interview with Manfred, then it would have either had him appear live on set during the pregame show or done a separate interview with him that could air during the pregame.

Instead, Netflix opted to inform its audience about the likes of “Little Brother,” “Free Bert,” and other key parts of its library. Who wants to talk about a salary cap when you can hear all about yet another “Stranger Things” show?

In the end, all turned out well for Manfred and Major League Baseball. Let’s see how NBC, which has an Opening Day doubleheader on Thursday, produces a better product than Netflix did, at least as it relates to covering the on-field action.

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