COMMENTARY : BASEBALL ‘94: GOING, GOING . . . GONE : Baseball’s Unlikely Leader Is Also Its Goat

It is axiomatic in baseball that the game survives in spite of the people who run it.

But this time? Can baseball survive even this?

No playoffs. No World Series. Most likely no spring training next season. Possibly no next season.

That’s a heavy load for the grand old game to shoulder. There are those predicting that major league baseball, as we know it, will stagger under that burden--stagger, collapse and die.

Time will tell, of course, but there is no disputing that baseball today stands at the edge of the abyss.

And who has led it there?

It was that little old Milwaukee elf, Bud Selig.

Bud Selig, head of the Brewers, acting commissioner of baseball, the man so obsessed with evening out baseball-market inequities that he apparently is willing to tear down the game to save it.

Wait a minute. Bud Selig? Milwaukee?

Milwaukee has a lot going for it but much of the country is wondering, as Dodger pitcher Orel Hershiser so succinctly put it the other day, “How is it that the center of power is in Milwaukee and not New York or Los Angeles?”

Fair question. How did car dealer Joe Schmo from Milwaukee--the rumpled-looking guy in front of you in line at the bank, your pretty smart but kind of nerdy neighbor--emerge as baseball’s Mr. Big? Aren’t commissioners supposed to be suave, glib-tongued guys with impressive tans and quick, plausible answers to any and all questions?

Ask Selig a question about baseball and he scrunches his face into a grimace before launching into a lecture on fiscal responsibility, economic realities and financial inequities. He pleads poverty at the drop of a bat, then mutters when independent studies show the Brewers to be in modest good health. He is thin-skinned and he whines a lot.

But he is the power these days. And he wouldn’t be if his fellow owners didn’t approve of where he is leading them. And he is leading them where he honestly thinks baseball has to go. He may be misguided, but he is sincere. Because if there is one thing he loves, it is baseball.

He is happiest at the ballpark, fouling the press box with his cheap, plastic-tipped cigarillos, trading insults with sportswriters, acting more like the punch-press operators out in the bleachers than a major league owner.

He loves his city, he loves his ballclub, he loves his players. There isn’t much question that what went down Wednesday tore him up inside. He will miss the World Series as much as--maybe more than--baseball’s most rabid fans.

But Selig is also a businessman, which means he is bottom-line conscious. In his case, extremely bottom-line conscious. He is also given to obsessions, and that’s partly why he is the power in baseball.

If you ask Selig to do something, and he agrees to do it, you can rest assured that he will do it thoroughly and to the best of his considerable ability. The man works like crazy and tough jobs don’t discourage him.

Getting baseball back in Milwaukee after the Braves had carpet-bagged down to Atlanta was a tough job. It took five years of being ignored and shunted aside by baseball but he swallowed it all, kept on plugging and, when the Seattle Pilots went bankrupt after a year, had another ballclub for his town.

And when baseball began asking him to do things beyond the scope of his own club, he showed the same tenacity. They asked him to find a commissioner to succeed Bowie Kuhn. He gave them Peter Ueberroth, the hottest name in the sports-business world at the time. It wasn’t his fault that Ueberroth led them down the garden path to that collusion mess.

When Ueberroth left, he gave them Bart Giamatti, the scholar who threw gambler Pete Rose out of baseball.

When Giamatti died unexpectedly, he gave them Fay Vincent, Giamatti’s good friend and deputy.

And when Vincent proved too strong for the owners’ tastes, Selig canned him and gave them himself.

He serves on more baseball boards and committees than any other owner. He has been doing, and is willing to continue doing, the things baseball wants, the things other owners don’t want to mess with, the things he believes will be best for baseball.

That’s why the center of baseball’s power is in Milwaukee, and not New York or Los Angeles.

Certainly, there is an apparent conflict. He represents the low end on baseball’s money ladder. The New York Yankees will be the New York Yankees as long as there is baseball--oops, forgot, there is no baseball--but the Milwaukee Brewers enjoy no such security.

Baseball might have done better to pick an owner with a little less at stake to lead the troops through a labor dispute. But baseball didn’t do that. Baseball picked Selig. And baseball has backed his every play, so evidently his work is appreciated.

But how ironic it is that Selig, the man who saved baseball for Milwaukee, now stands to go down as the man who wrecked it for the rest of the country.

How ironic and how sad. For Selig. For baseball. For everybody who cares.