After stints at ESPN and Fox and five years with the Dodgers, Ibañez joined MLB in February 2021. getty images
Raúl Ibañez had an important meeting to attend but there were speed bumps along his path.
After catching an early flight from Miami to New York on a rainy September morning, Ibañez, MLB’s senior vice president of on-field operations, walked briskly through the commissioner’s office with a backpack slung over his shoulder and greeted nearly every person he passed. Upon approaching a block of analytics staffers, he uttered a refrain to the small group he was walking with — “hold on” — before veering to briefly chat with a few bespectacled employees seated at nearby desks.
“What I would really like to do,” MLB Commissioner Rob Manfred said, “is have a popularity contest here.”
Manfred insists Ibañez’s only real competition for the title would be CC Sabathia, another former player-turned-league executive who was hired last April as special assistant to the commissioner.
“Raúl and CC are as important as any hires that we have made in this office the entire time that I’ve been commissioner,” said Manfred, who ascended to his role in 2015.
Eleven years ago, Ibañez was an October hero for the Yankees — in Game 3 of the ALDS against Baltimore, he cemented his place in the franchise’s lore by cranking a pinch-hit solo home run to tie the score in the bottom of the ninth and then launching a walk-off homer in the 12th inning, making him the first player ever to hit a game-tying home run in the ninth and an extra-inning home run. This year, the 51-year-old Cuban American is in a starring role again, this time for the league.
Since leaving the Dodgers front office, where he served as a special assistant, to join MLB in February 2021, Ibañez has been a valuable asset for several departments — including on-field operations, marketing and corporate social responsibility — while leaning on his popularity in baseball circles to help bridge the divide between the commissioner’s office and the league’s players. He also was a resource for Morgan Sword, MLB executive vice president of baseball operations, whom Ibañez reports to, during the development of recently implemented rule changes that helped lift MLB to its most successful regular season in recent memory.
“I’ve been incredibly grateful to just be a speck during this, to play a tiny role in this great moment in our game’s history,” said Ibañez, who is based in Miami with his wife and five kids.
Ibañez’s history-making display in the 2012 ALDS stands out from a 19-year career.getty images
Two summers ago, Ibañez was in San Bernardino, Calif., where some of MLB’s top baseball minds gathered to get their first in-person look at the pitch clock, which helped lower game times by 24 minutes this season. Ibañez joined a group of league executives — including Sword, Mike Hill, Reed MacPhail and Peter Woodfork — to watch the new rule in action during a minor league game at San Manuel Stadium. Ibañez sat next to Sword in scout seats behind home plate.
“It took about an inning before he turned to me and goes, ‘We need this thing in the big leagues,’” Sword recalled.
Ibañez was brought on to provide that type of perspective. After former big-league pitcher and league executive Chris Young was hired as the general manager of the Rangers in December 2020, MLB sought a player’s voice within its top ranks.
“He was central in a lot of the decisions that we made about enforcement and education of the rules and not to mention, he and his staff [including former major leaguers Rajai Davis, Dan Otero and Gregor Blanco] also are in the clubhouses, talking to players every day, and allowing us to get the best sense possible of how everything’s going,” Sword said.
Ibañez was front and center as MLB looked to get the word out about the new rule changes. Before the start of the season, he again sat beside Sword as the two took part in dozens of interviews with local television news programs around the country. He was at Minute Maid Park in Houston on Opening Night to spend a half-inning in the booth during ESPN’s broadcast. He was on a panel at the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference in March, and again at The Atlantic Festival in September.
His key message: “We’re actually trying to change the game back. We’re turning back the clock to the game that we all grew up knowing, playing, loving and obsessing over.”
On that rainy September morning in New York, Ibañez was making his way through the league office to attend a meeting with Sword. In the latter’s office, they spent 30 minutes discussing the implications of a potential tweak to an existing on-field rule while poring over a 12-slide deck. Ibañez offered his feedback as a former player, sharing insight from his 19-year career and how things are different today while counterbalancing Sword’s perspective.
Shortly thereafter, Ibañez headed over to the executive wing, where he playfully compared his shoe game against Manfred and Chief Communications Officer Pat Courtney. Ibañez, with his black-and-white Alexander McQueens, held an edge over the other two in clean Nikes.
“He’s just nothing but approachable and likable,” said April Brown, MLB’s senior vice president of social responsibility, who has leaned on Ibañez for several corporate social responsibility-related campaigns. “From the commissioner down to our interns, everyone has so much respect for him.”
Ibañez balances a crammed work schedule with pockets of activity aimed at orienting himself. He plays guitar. He tries to bike every morning. He practices Brazilian jiu-jitsu several times a week, a hobby he took up during his playing days to learn how to fall and roll, an important skill for an outfielder.
“I know we’re talking about baseball,” Ibañez said, “but what I found is that it’s translated elsewhere. If you’re getting choked out and then you panic or stress out, you’ll probably go to sleep or have to tap out. But if you relax your body and breathe through it, you can find little pockets of air and solve the problem. Your mind starts working better.”
It’s one more skill that Ibañez brings to MLB — a potentially vital one as he sits between the league office and the players.
After a contentious labor fight that threatened the start of the 2022 season before a new collective-bargaining agreement was ultimately reached, Manfred has prioritized improving relations with current players. Ibañez, with his respect around the league and vast baseball Rolodex, has proven an ace in those efforts.
Manfred visited with all 30 clubs each of the past two seasons in what he has referred to as a “listening tour.” Ibañez has played the leading role in arranging and executing each visit.
Ibañez, Manfred explained, would identify a player he knew in each clubhouse and reach out directly to them. From there, he’d look to assemble a group — sometimes just a few players, sometimes more than that — that would be open to constructive dialogue. Last year, the meetings usually took place outside the ballpark — in a conference room at the visiting team’s hotel, for example — so as not to imply they were mandatory for players. This year, with word spreading about Manfred’s visits, more players have opted to attend, prompting more to be conducted in clubhouses for the sake of easier logistics.
Ibañez said the meetings were the vision of Manfred, who, in turn, said they wouldn’t be possible without Ibañez, who has been beside the commissioner for the visits. (Sabathia, a teammate of Ibañez’s with the Yankees who retired in 2019 after his own 19-year career, also has attended.)
“When you have somebody like that, it’s kind of credibility by association,” Manfred said. “If I walk in with another couple of suits from New York, that’s one thing. I walk in with Raúl or Raúl and CC, that’s a different thing. It changes the dynamic in the room.”
Ibañez (far left) joined Rob Manfred and members of the Commissioner's Ambassador Program before this year's London Series.getty images
During his playing days, Ibañez was one of the league’s “most respected, most liked players in the whole league,” said former Phillies slugger Ryan Howard, who was teammates with Ibañez on Philadelphia's 2009 team that reached the World Series and now works with Ibañez on MLB’s newly formed Commissioner’s Ambassador Program, which includes 12 former players enlisted to help grow the game. A decade later, that reputation continues to follow Ibañez as he builds relationships with the game’s up-and-comers.
Before his meetings on the eighth floor of 1271 Avenue of the Americas, Ibañez was on the street level, meeting at the MLB Flagship Store with budding Marlins star pitcher Eury Pérez. He had never previously met the rookie but heard from EJ Aguado, MLB director of player marketing, that the league was hosting him.
Speaking in Spanish, the bilingual Ibañez asked about Pérez’s experience living in Miami. He mentioned that he had heard great things about him through Derek Jeter, another former teammate of Ibañez’s who was part owner of the Marlins until early last year.
“He was like, ‘Really?’” Ibañez said.
While Ibañez could spend only a few minutes with Pérez, his conversations with Aguado, who recently became a new father, tend to extend much longer. A five-minute phone discussion about the Commissioner’s Ambassador Program has often ballooned into an hourlong chat about life.
Aguado admits it’s a little weird to refer to Ibañez, with his 305 career home runs, as a co-worker. But a friend and mentor?
A little less weird, Aguado said. “Because that’s what he is.”
Ibañez could return to the dugout; he’s interviewed several times for managerial positions around the league. He could return to the broadcast booth after successful stints with ESPN and Fox. He could retreat into retirement; after all, he earned over $69 million during his playing career, according to spotrac.com.
But relationships like the one he has with Aguado, paired with a sense that he’s doing something to further the sport, have made Ibañez feel at home in the commissioner’s office.
“This game has been so good to all of us,” he said. “It’s our responsibility as caretakers of the game to continue to serve it and the growth of it.”
