Baseball Stew: Bud Selig wasn’t baseball’s best commissioner ever
Not too long ago Harold Reynolds chimed in with his take on departing baseball commissioner Bud Selig, calling him the best commissioner of all-time. I think he stated Selig was “without doubt number one,” or words to that effect. Now, if Reynolds based such an evaluation on how much money players and owners are now raking in, I might not take issue with his comment. However, that short sighted method of determining Selig’s status as a commissioner is flawed. Furthermore, too many other negatives have taken place on Selig’s watch for me to rank him very high on my list of best commissioners of all time.
First of all, merely looking at money matters ignores facts such as this: while players and owners may roll around in piles of money like Scrooge McDuck in his spacious money bin, fans who help pay their salaries aren’t exactly paying five bucks anymore for a box seat at a big league game. Every season studies reveal it costs a family a ton of money to take in a ball game lately.
It’s also impossible to overlook the abhorrent PED scandal, even though that’s exactly what Selig seems to have done. The authors of the book Bloodsport wrote this about the 1998 battle between the bulked up Sammy Sosa and Mark McGwire to claim a new record for the most homers in a season: “no one embraced the rivalry more than Selig,” and they stated the commissioner “didn’t overanalyze the phenomenon.” Instead, he saw only a bright side to the unnatural power surge, delighted that a new version of Home Run Derby was boosting attendance which had suffered after the 1994 strike which led to the cancellation of that year’s World Series.
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Selig should have been suspicious about the binge; he should have done his job and policed the sport. After all, according to Bloodsport, suspicions about PED use began around 1989. The head football coach of Michigan, Bo Shembechler, informed an FBI agent “that a number of his rivals, particularly Michigan State, were rife with steroids.” Following that, an FBI agent was said to have provided MLB with “definitive proof that one of the game’s biggest stars was juicing. The result was deafening silence.”
Let’s take a look at just a few other issues concerning Selig (see a Call to the Pen archive article, “Baseball Stew: Is MLB Commissioner Bud Selig Really a Baseball Purist” for more on some of his innovations which upset traditionalists such as myself). Admittedly he inherited the problem of games dragging on and on ad infinitum, but he has had an eon to work on this matter, one which he now leaves behind for the new commissioner to cope with.
Two-and-a-half hour long games were fine, and that was, in fact, the average length of games back in the 1970s. However, games of that duration are almost extinct today. The actual average time per game during the 2014 regular season was 3:08. That’s bad, especially in our age of short attention spans, but watch out when, say, the Yankees and Red Sox meet up or, more glaringly, when virtually any two teams play in the postseason. It’s not rare to find such games lasting four hours or a lot more and we’re not talking extra inning games, either.
Then there’s interleague play, an artificial means to give a booster shot to the weakening attendance bicep of baseball. It’s run its course which, to me, proves it wasn’t needed in the first place— it was merely a fad.
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Further, due to the scheduling of interleague play early on a National League team such as the Mets had to play the mighty Yankees as their “natural rival,” while another team in the Mets division, say the Braves, might have avoided the Yanks and played, for example, the Orioles back in the days before they had become strong contenders.
Remember, at first teams only played against teams from the other league which were in the same geographic division— for example, in the earlier scenario there were the Mets and Braves of the NL East going up against the Yankees and O’s of the AL East. Often, then, one team gained an edge because they would have to play a weaker team than one of their competitors in their same division. In a tight pennant race such an edge could be crucial.
Why did Selig seem to frequently think baseball needed changes (and then make ones which ruffled purists)? What was wrong with a balanced schedule in which every team played other teams the same amount of times? Did expansion and inter leagueplay make that impossible? Maybe my thinking is locked in the past, but my logic about a balanced schedule in the days prior to interleague play is irrefutably fair to all clubs.
In short, baseball doesn’t need quick fixes and Selig, with all of his alterations to the game, falls short of being the greatest commissioner ever.
One last note: Be sure to check out each link below. We’re giving away a few copies of the 2014 Official World Series DVD.