Bud Selig announced that he is retiring after next season. (What is it with these sports commissioners and giving 18 months' notice? David Stern just did the same thing. Will the search process really be that long? Are we looking for someone to throw out ceremonial pitches, or to run the Large Hadron Collider?)
Anyway, assuming this retirement is legit (Bud tried to retire a few years ago but supposedly the owners twisted his arm to stay; personally I doubt it took all that much persuading), a few words about his tenure as Commissioner of Baseball are in order.
Good riddance to bad rubbish.
Prior to becoming Commissioner, Selig was owner of the Milwaukee Brewers. Selig, in conjunction with several other owners, a group known as the Midwest Mafia, engineered the infamous collusion scheme, in which team owners agreed clandestinely to not make offers to free agents. The players' union, not surprisingly, saw exactly what was going on and took baseball to court. This started in 1985; finally, in 1990, the owners settled, agreeing to pay the players' union $280 million (about $500 million in today's money).
In the wake of the 1994 strike, the owners recognized that a fundamental change had taken place. The fact of the players' union meant that whereas in the past the "best interests of baseball" was the guiding principle, and the Commissioner was the one to define those best interests, now Federal labor law was the controlling authority, and the union aggressively filed grievances and hauled the owners into court for every real or perceived violation. It culminated with the 1994 labor stalemate that cost baseball the end of the season, playoffs, and World Series. (This is about Bud Selig, but it should be noted that Marvin Miller and Donald Fehr belong in at least as low a circle of Hell as Bud does.)
In this climate, the owners decided that the even-handed approach of a Faye Vincent or Bart Giamatti was no longer called for. If the players were going to have the courts, the owners were going to have a guy in the top job who was unabashedly in it for the owners' interests.
Enter Bud.
My most vivid memories of 1998 are two. First and foremost, the Yankees burning a path through baseball en route to winning it all. Second was Bud's face on TV, seemingly every night, waving the pom poms while roided-up goons laid waste to the home run records. Over and over the grinning fool praised Sosa and McGwire for "bringing baseball back" after the debacle of 1994. Meanwhile, the Yankees just quietly (and 100% cleanly, as far as anyone can tell) just kept winning and winning and winning.
Like all owners, Bud's concern for the fans is strictly lip service. He would have you believe that exclusive windows for Fox and ESPN are somehow good for you, the fan. He shoved the World Baseball Classic down our throats, which is beloved everywhere except the United States. Apparently, selling a few more jerseys in Antwerp and Shanghai and Melbourne is somehow good for you, the fan. World Series games that no one on the East Coast can stay awake to see the end of are somehow good for you, the fan. That baseball has been passed standing still by the NFL (and college football in many places) is somehow good for you, the fan.
Then to top it all off, Bud gets religion about performance-enhancing drugs (PEDs). Apparently, what was good in 1998, what "brought the game back," was no longer good in the late 2000s. In fact, worse than "no good." More like really really evil. Like, more evil than what was once America's Game being run by a used-car salesman whose venality is his best feature.
The upshot of all this new-found religion about the evils of PEDs? Barry Bonds convicted of the Federal equivalent of jaywalking, and the Mitchell Report's star informant shown up in Federal Court for the perjuring hanger-on he had always came off as. Well done, Bud.
Enjoy your retirement, Bud, and the undoubtedly obscenely generous severance the owners are going to give you. Just please, please, please stay the hell away from baseball.
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