Baseball is fond of immortalizing players, managers and contributors to the game. They built the first Hall of Fame for professional sports (with an opening class that would rival any class of any Hall of Fame ever). There players are cast in bronze plaques for perpetuity and usually there is some sort of definitive monument near where they played. Their stats are equally everlasting catalogued for comparison until someday there is no more baseball player to compare them to.
Bud Selig started out as baseball’s prototype owner. He found a team and brought it to his home town for him and his fellow citizens to enjoy. He was in it for the right reasons. That’s probably why he was selected to fill in for Fay Vincent as an interim commissioner of baseball in 1992. Six successful years later took on the job full bore. He was not idle in reinvigorating the game. The stoic poker faced businessman had the cunning to try new ideas and lift the game when traditionalists guffawed about his refusal to stay the course. Like a good Texas Holdem poker player everything Selig appeared to be was exactly opposite of who he was.
Selig created inter-league play (well created is too strong a word as the idea for it was there since the two leagues started meeting for a World Series), but it was on his watch the regular season provided it. Then he expanded the playoffs with wildcards. Immediately, critics from all sides questioned his maneuvers.
Inter-league play will water down the World Series, it will dilute the All Star game and it will taint the tradition of the game which makes it holy to watch were the chorus of criticism. Truth be told, it didn’t water down the World Series rather it offered dramatic teases of scenarios that might manifest in October. The neighborhood rivalries that had to wait for that rare alignment of a Subway series or a I-95 series suddenly had to wait no more.
Instead of an eclipse every 20 or 30 years there was one every year. Perhaps, the All-Star game was diluted, infinitesimally, but Selig also had the gumption to put home field rights for the World Series on the line in the game. Selig for all his accountant looks was an out and out riverboat gambler, when it came to tinkering with his sport, sure traditions were lost but new ones created that better the game.
The expansion of the playoffs was met with the same type of fear of change that interleague play inspired and Selig’s victory was just as clear cut when it played out. Instead of lessening the drama of a pennant race it create more races. No longer were just a couple of teams in the thick of it come September there was an entire row of horses heading for the finish line in a tightly contested bunch.
Wild Card teams also won World Series. Fundamentalists might argue that was proof if decreased the importance of the regular season. They were quickly countered by the point that the old system kept out the best teams at the end of the year. The Wild Card allowed the teams that improved throughout the year to have a chance to play and beat the teams that started out hot but weren’t quite as good at the end.
Sure Selig also sat in charge as the Steroid era played out. Some have even said his blind eye was more an intentionally shut eye. Fans loved the long ball and they came back to the game to see McGwire, Sosa and Bonds blast them.
Selig’s strongest detractors would say Selig made a deal with the devil allowing PEDs to take over the game, ruin the record book and distort the hallowed stats that make the game timeless. Course, if he did make a deal with the devil the devil has yet to collect because even as the stars have suffered through indignities the attendance boost they returned to the game hasn’t yet left.
In all, you take the good and you take the bad and Bud Selig’s reign as commissioner may have been the best of all time in baseball. Does he deserve a statue? Undoubtedly. Some would question the placement in front of Miller Park where they’d say the athletes should be celebrated like Hank Aaron and Robin Yount are, but they forget he is a Milwaukee man through and through. There would be no Brewers if not for Bud Selig, and the game of baseball where it is today would not be there if not for Bud Selig.
