By Sam Mellinger, McClatchy Newspapers –
KANSAS CITY, Mo. — Bud Selig is a former used-car salesman who now makes $18 million and has a private jet but wants to teach history full time. He is the wealthy 1 percent but pays less than $20 for a haircut. He is famous in the age of Twitter but impossible to define in 140 pages, let alone 140 characters.
The commissioner of Major League Baseball will turn 78 this month but says he won’t give up one of the country’s most stressful jobs until he’s 80.
This is a man old enough to remember World War II yet visionary enough to stake much of his reputation on the growth of online revenue more than 12 years ago. He usually looks awkward on television, cupping his right hand to his right ear and squinting into the lights when he can’t hear, but if you listen closely, you’ll hear a man fluent in 21st century technologies, priorities and talking points.
You can make a logical case that Selig is the best who’s ever done his job, and you can make a logical case that he’s the worst. How many people in how many jobs can you say that about?
In other words, Selig is one of the most influential figures of modern sports and entirely impossible to neatly explain.
“I’m proud of what we’ve done,” he says. “I’m proud to be commissioner of a sport that’s done as well as it has and is as popular as it is.”
Selig became acting commissioner in 1992 and officially got the title in 1998. He’s the longest-serving baseball commissioner since Kenesaw Mountain Landis died in 1944 after 24 years on the job, but time has done nothing to clarify a legacy that people close to Selig say he cares greatly about.
Even more than most powerful and influential men, the view of Selig changes drastically depending on where you look.
The case for Selig is clear and it is compelling. He took a limping league with outdated operating procedures and retrofit it for modern times, in the process creating a cash machine in which owning a franchise is like getting Apple stock on the ground floor.
Baseball’s union and owners wouldn’t have given each other a bag of sunflower seeds without verbal war when Selig took over, and now the game is set for 21 years of labor peace.
Baseball used to take itself much too seriously, holding on to counterproductive methods and traditions even if meant stunted growth. Then came Selig, with a long line of ideas that were initially trashed and ultimately proved to be successes in terms of both revenue and fan interest:
Interleague play. More playoff teams. Division realignment. Unbalanced schedules.
Revenue is up from $1.2 billion when Selig took over to an expected $7.5 billion this year. The upcoming TV negotiations will only increase baseball’s take. Selig’s changes are a crucial part of this. Division realignment gave the networks 18 games of Yankees vs. Red Sox and opened up more postseason opportunities for smaller markets.
You wouldn’t know it around Kansas City, but baseball’s record of parity in the last decade or so is comparable in many real ways to the NFL, NBA and NHL. Greater access to October means greater interest around the country. Baseball consistently set attendance records through the 2000s before the recession, and this year is showing another increase. The sport has a chance to sell 80 million tickets for the first time ever.
These are the talking points Selig uses when he makes his claim — over and over and over again — that we are living in baseball’s true golden age.
“My job is to create as much hope and faith in as many places as possible,” Selig says. “I think we’ve done that.”
Fans around Kansas City will disagree. For everything Selig has done, his time as commissioner has coincided almost perfectly with a black hole of incompetence for the Royals.
That golden age never showed up here.
The case against Selig is clear and it is compelling. He canceled the World Series, the first time since 1904 that baseball didn’t hold a championship round — a run that included the Depression and both World Wars.
The 1994 strike nearly killed the sport, and even the recovery is tainted, done in large part on the presumably acne-riddled backs of illegally enhanced sluggers. Testing at the big-league level required cooperation from the players union, but Selig didn’t even implement a minor-league policy until 2001 — three years after the summer of Mark McGwire and more than a decade after the first suspicions inside baseball.
No matter what, he will always be the Steroid Commissioner to some.
Baseball’s economic structure has also grown exponentially more uneven with Selig in charge. In his first season, the game’s biggest and smallest payrolls were separated by about $36 million. The Reds had the second-biggest payroll, and the Royals spent more than the Mets, Cubs, Dodgers and Red Sox.
This season, the biggest and smallest payrolls are separated by about $142 million and line up fairly consistently according to market size.
Now to be fair, this is not all Selig’s fault. In fact, he’s justifiably proud of today’s increased revenue sharing while many economist observers say Selig’s push to divide MLB Advanced Media’s revenues evenly will one day be the league’s most effective equalizer. Just like the man, his record on this subject is full of nuance.
At the very least, Selig admits that the more that markets lack in revenue, the more they must make up for it in patience. The Red Sox can spend $103 on disappointment with Daisuke Matsuzaka, but the Royals took a significant risk in spending $7.5 million on the boom-or-bust Bubba Starling.
Selig was slow to embrace instant replay, and even now won’t close loopholes that threaten to expose the sport to punch lines and anger every postseason.
Not that fans should necessarily judge a commissioner or league by revenue generation, but even baseball’s financial growth is worth putting into context: slightly behind the NFL and slightly ahead of the NBA over the same period.
And Selig could be commissioner for another two decades and canceling the 1994 World Series wouldn’t move from the top of his bio — even as he’s replayed the sequence a million times in his head and can’t find anything he could’ve done to stop it.
“I’ll never forget that night if I live to 100,” he says. “It was awful. That broke my heart, no question. But we’re now going to have 21 years of labor peace. Nobody thought that possible. Nobody, including me. And I’m proud of that.
“Maybe we had to go through some heartache to get to where we are.”
Fascinating guy, right? He is a history buff who has left an indelible mark on a 136-year-old sport but yet can’t be sure how historians will remember him.
This is, conservatively, one of the 20 most influential men in more than a century of professional baseball, but yet even people within the sport disagree on how positive that influence has been.
In the end, Selig is whatever you want to make him. He is the man who canceled the World Series and reacted too slowly to the biggest sports drug scandal in decades, or he is the man who transformed a game stuck in archaic ways to one profitably positioned for the 21st century.
He is wonderful or he is awful, visionary or destructive, depending entirely on which side you want to take.
If you think about it, that also makes him a damn good symbol of the modern sports culture he’s helped define.
