BUD, RIGHT?

Batting first, a man and his dog. * Cold rain spits on a Midwestern March afternoon, soaking the two dancing custard cones on the sign above the hangout of the most powerful man in baseball. “Do you want a Strawana?” drips black letters on the marquee. “Gillie/Chili or Plain, Our Hot Dogs Taste Great.” * The parking lot, awash with the sounds of country music over a loudspeaker, fills with plumbers, electricians, working folks from this working-class Milwaukee neighborhood. Inside are six tables, four people working the counter, the wonderfully busy noises of lunch and life. * And here comes Bud, which is the proper way to address the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers and acting commissioner of major league baseball, unless you want to call him Buddy. One-fifteen, right on schedule, leaves his car running, steps inside, his food is waiting on the counter at the bottom of a white bag. * He did not call ahead. The food is waiting because he has placed exactly the same order at Gilles custard stand day after day for more than 25 years: hot dog with mustard and relish. A large Coke. Two dollars and thirty-nine cents, including tax. He grabs a handful of catsup packets, as if he thinks the counter workers don’t notice. But for more than 25 years, they have. * “I’m going back to my car, read the local rag,” Bud announces, “try to get a game on the radio.” * And just like that, he’s out the door. “We have good food, good service,” Gilles’ co-owner Pat Linscott observes after Bud departs. “And I still have no idea why the guy who runs baseball comes here.” * Allan “Bud” Selig returns to his black Lexus, places the hot dog between the two front seats. He fiddles with the radio, searches for a station broadcasting a spring training game, any spring training game. Nothing. He sighs, spreads a newspaper out on his lap, reads while he eats. * “I remember the time he stayed in his car for a few minutes, so I brought out his food,” day manager Jill Pierce recalls. “He was on the phone with somebody in New York. He made New York wait while he took his hot dog.” * Fifteen minutes after he arrives, Selig gulps down the last bite of dog, pats his belly underneath the newspaper and smiles. “One of the really nice parts of my day,” he says. * And off he drives, into a world where baseball has finally found its footing, with happy players and renewed fans and plentiful marketing opportunities, with the excitement of a new playoff system and interleague play, a world that Selig helped make possible through passion and resiliency. * And off he drives, into the dark clouds of criticism about a lack of strong leadership, indecisiveness, even his Jewish heritage, criticism that has led to hate mail and threats of death. * And off he drives, to who knows where. As baseball enters a new era, perhaps the only person still fighting demons is the man who brought it there. * Under Selig’s “interim” command--which has lasted nearly five years since baseball’s owners dumped Fay Vincent for his perceived inability to govern the sport--baseball finally instituted revenue sharing between teams, the first step in keeping America’s small-town sport alive in smaller towns; adopted a playoff system that adds two teams to each league and doubles the excitement nationwide; and inaugurated interleague play that will allow, for the first time, the Dodgers and Angels to compete in a regular season game. Finally, well-known companies like Pepsi are putting money--like $50 million--into baseball sponsorships.

Selig, 62, has kept baseball alive in his hometown of Milwaukee despite losing money and receiving offers from other cities to move the team. He never threatened to leave like many other owners in similar situations, and he is overseeing the building of a new stadium that will probably keep the team there forever. Yet Roger Quindell, a Milwaukee county supervisor, calls him a “clown” and a “moron.” Even Selig’s friend Bob Costas, the NBC broadcaster and baseball traditionalist who has become an unofficial spokesman for fans, says his tenure has been “an unmitigated disaster. I like Bud. He is a decent and honorable man. He has baseball’s best interests at heart. But he has as much business being commissioner as I have playing power forward for the Lakers.”

Some say Selig is charming, others say cunning. Some say he is a good man put in a bad position, others that he was given a chance to be a national hero but somehow managed to blow it. Last season Brewer fans gave him a 10-minute standing ovation. Yet Vincent once called him “a small-town schlepper.”

Selig has made plenty of mistakes. He may have prolonged the 232-day players strike in 1994-’95 that cost a World Series. He refused to intervene last season when Baltimore Oriole second baseman Roberto Alomar spit on umpire John Hirschbeck and was still allowed to compete in the playoffs by American League President Gene Budig. The popular wild-card playoff system he implemented is still criticized because, unlike the National Football League, division champions with better records than their playoff opponents are not necessarily given home field advantage.

Selig’s greatest strength--building a consensus among fellow owners--can also be his greatest weakness when quick and decisive action is needed. He went through three negotiators--two more than usual--during the last baseball strike. Most big-market owners think it is unfair that Selig’s small-market agenda should govern their interests, which decidedly do not include revenue sharing. Other owners say he is so enamored with the $1.2-million commissioner’s salary and use of chartered planes--the ultimate perks for a fan like Selig--that he forgets he is supposed to serve them instead of be served by them. But his supporters say Selig will be remembered more for the big picture. For moving an ancient, failing economic enterprise, however slowly and painfully, into a modern and successful age. For making the best of a bad hand.

Sometimes Selig can’t figure all of this out. So he drives home late after work, climbs into bed and leaves on the TV. That way, when he awakens in the middle of the night to stew, he has something to watch.

“You try to do the right thing,” he says. “And you try, and try, and try some more. If you believe in what you are doing, you never stop trying.” The only thing about Bud Selig that is beyond dispute is this passion. He is an ordinary man and a ravenous fan, perhaps baseball’s only top executive possessing those traits. He is hot dogs and sports pages. He cheers and curses in his owner’s box, discusses personnel moves with fans down the third-base line, pushed for the wild-card playoff system simply because he thought people were getting bored in September. That TV that blares all night? It is tuned to sports channel ESPN.

Just guessing, but of all the suits who have occupied the commissioner’s office, Selig is probably the only one who drives around town singing stadium songs--”Take Me Out to the Ballgame,” “God Bless America”--with his 11-year-old granddaughter. Somebody from his office put the songs on tape, and now he sings to the dashboard, feeling like he’s never left the ballpark.

Beyond the pale, contorted figure delivering more bad news from some hotel podium, beyond the figure who has been ripped to comical heights with a nickname like Bud Lite, there remains this passion. It defines him like that owlish stare behind those wire-rimmed glasses. Whatever Selig has done wrong, he has been guided by something everyone in this game agrees is very right.

Which leads to another quote from Quindell, the Milwaukee county supervisor, and the question that baseball, and its fans, must ask when deciding how to view its most curious--and still temporary--commissioner.

The quote: “The problem with Bud Selig is that baseball is his life, he appeals only to the hard-core fans, he thinks it is the purest of games, he thinks nothing else matters, he is not grounded in reality.”

The question: Is that so bad?

Batting second, a man and his nightmare.

Myth: Bud Selig killed the 1994 World Series.

Fact: The players were already on strike when Selig canceled it.

On Aug. 12, 1994, the players went on strike to avoid what they were certain would be an owner-imposed salary cap the following season. A month later Selig united the owners in their refusal to bargain away a proposed massive economic overhaul. The players would not return under such conditions, so Selig canceled the postseason, including the World Series that had been played annually since 1903. “People can think what they want, but I called the players association in early September and told them, ‘We need to know what you are doing. Are you coming back for the World Series?’ ” Selig says. “They didn’t answer, so I didn’t have a choice.”

The delineation between truth and fiction is not so clear in other areas of Selig’s tenure. Many in baseball blame him for prolonging the strike because of his unwillingness to give up his small-market-based ideas about things like the salary cap.

“The fact is, baseball has suffered needlessly because of labor conflicts with a small-market owner who has a vested interest in the outcome,” says Don Fehr, the boss of baseball’s powerful union.

When Selig finally helped push through a three-year labor contract last winter, there was no salary cap, but rather a combination of revenue sharing and a tax on high-spending teams. After 232 days of war, followed by two seasons of uncertainty, less-prosperous teams like Pittsburgh and Montreal stood to gain just $7 million a year, maximum. That’s the cost of about two average players. Costly arbitration was still intact. Expensive free agency still belonged to the players. This year the Pirates have a payroll of $13 million, barely more than the $11-million salary that the Chicago White Sox are paying Albert Belle.

“If the owners were going to spoil for a fight, at least win the fight,” says NBC’s Costas. “What they got out of all of this wasn’t worth one day of a strike.”

“The union started this thing, and no one man could fix it,” says Jerry Reinsdorf, owner of the White Sox. “We hired Bud because he could build a consensus, but that has been historically impossible with 28 guys with different agendas.”

But it is fact that when Selig took over, baseball’s TV revenue was half of what had been promised by owners, there were five small-market teams for sale with no prospective buyers, and some owners were losing as much as $8 million a year on their franchises. Baseball players were the least popular among major-sport athletes. Attendance was down, the fans were aging and big-time sponsors were nonexistent.

“Baseball was suffering from three decades of sheer neglect,” Selig says. “The sport had been using the Scarlett O’Hara repression mechanism--’I’ll think about it tomorrow.’ ”

Today, an independent survey shows that the average baseball fan base increased 20% last year alone; the number of fans who consider themselves “hard-core” jumped 30%, and three-fourths agree with the statement “baseball is back.” Ticket sales are up nearly 10% nationwide, and even union boss Fehr says, “This is a real pleasant time.”

“It’s only half of a joke that Bud Selig is looking increasingly like Harry Truman,” says John Moores, owner of the San Diego Padres. “When Truman left office, his stock was not too high, but in later years, it looked pretty darn good. A lot of commissioners have just passed through, but Bud has made a difference. You wouldn’t think that, but look closely, and you’ll see it’s true. It’s a great story waiting to be told.”

It is a story that many--including its protagonist--hope will soon end. Selig says he doesn’t want to be named the permanent commissioner, and few owners want another owner to have the job. Selig could do without the criticism and and the unsigned letters that arrive at his office, letters he’s hesitant to show his wife. “They say, ‘You dumb Jew,’ and things like that,” Selig says. “I guess there are people like that everywhere. You just have to go on.” Even if that sometimes means being trailed by police en route to Gilles after death threats.

There are also practical reasons to name a commissioner who’s not also an owner. “Baseball needs a full-time commissioner to restore public confidence in the game,” says Peter O’Malley, the Dodger owner whose well-documented frustration with baseball’s leadership may be one reason he’s selling the team. The scramble to find another commissioner, in any event, has begun. Which Selig claims is just fine with this small-town fan who never much liked the league’s New York City home anyway.

“I remember once we got stuck in one of those midtown tunnels [in New York], and Buddy throws a little tantrum, raving about not being able to move,” says Sue, his second wife of 20 years. “I finally said, ‘Buddy, fine, get out and walk.’ ” She laughs at the memory. “What can you say? Buddy is Milwaukee.”

Batting third, a man and his mess.

To walk into the executive offices of the Milwaukee Brewers is to step into a time when baseball was run with handshakes and hearts, white shirts and cigars. The floor of the tiny lobby is covered in weathered tile and Brewers blue carpet. There are Parade magazines on a coffee table, a hand-carved Brewers clock on the wall.

Static fills the air from a tiny transistor radio on the desk of a tiny receptionist named Betty Grant. The radio is broadcasting a Brewers exhibition game from Arizona. Grant is tracking the innings with a scratch pad and pencil. She’s been with the team since Selig bought it for Milwaukee 27 years ago.

You are ushered into a short, narrow hallway, no longer than two car lengths. It ends in an office no bigger than a couple of closets. Since Sept. 9, 1992, this has been the home of baseball’s highest official.

“Selig!” George Steinbrenner had shouted. “This place is a dump!” For once, the New York Yankees owner was not guilty of overstatement.

Many major league owners have offices with windows overlooking their fields. “You’d have to be Clark Kent to see my field from here,” says Selig, whose office has one small window overlooking the stadium parking lot, a window accessible only by a footstool Selig uses when he wants to gauge the size of the crowd. The office has no closet. Or washroom. Or computer, although that is the fault of the commissioner, who has no idea how to work one. “I brought him to my office once to show him an important Web site,” says Wendy Selig-Prieb, the team’s vice president and the owner’s daughter. “He said, ‘What’s a Web site?’ I said, ‘Dad . . . .’ ”

Among other things, Selig works with a pencil, of which he has a dozen, lifted from radio stations and hotels and metal works factories. He is continually lining them up on his desk, neatly, by size.

The walls are filled with a telegram from the late Vince Lombardi, photos of his granddaughter swinging a bat. The floor is crammed with old newspapers, baseball cards . . . and an autographed birdhouse. Don’t ask. “His office looks like one of those places where they make automobiles,” says Bob Uecker, the longtime Brewer broadcaster. Guests have restrained their gasps when Selig, upon putting his feet on the desk, has unwittingly revealed holes in his shoes. Or socks that didn’t match. There has not been a more unlikely looking multimillionaire since Bill Gates. Although compared to his fellow owners, he’s not very rich. In a 1993 survey by Sports Illustrated, Selig ranked 84th of 93 major sports owners with a net worth of $25 million. Jerry Jones of the Dallas Cowboys, the only owner who gets more publicity, is worth 10 times that much.

How could 27 other rich and tailored owners pick this man to be their commissioner? How could they pick anyone else? The office, the desk, the appearance are all because Selig is more concerned with one thing: the game.

“He spends the day on the phone, pacing up and down, sometimes getting loud, always talking baseball,” says longtime secretary Lori Keck, whose resume includes a stint as secretary for Lombardi. “They were equally dynamic,” she says, “though with Lombardi it was just a little louder.”

It was this passion that persuaded baseball owners to make Selig temporary commissioner after they forced Vincent out for his inability to gain a consensus among owners in the wake of rising salaries and the impending collapse of smaller clubs like the Padres and Pirates. Vincent was also accused of attempting to pit owner against owner and caring more about serving the media. Selig had the opposite image: a common man with common needs, everyone’s friend. And he represented the type of market--seventh smallest in the league--that needed to be saved. He was the sort of owner--friendly, unassuming--who could gain a consensus. Most important, he loved the game enough to take a fall for it. In other words, a willing scapegoat. Considering he was the first owner-commissioner in baseball history, he knew he wouldn’t be able to brush his teeth without being charged with conflict of interest.

“I questioned Bud’s sense for taking that job,” says Moores, the Padres owner. “The odds were stacked against him.”

Imagine that. A former car dealer taking over a position previously held by, among others, a judge (Kenesaw Mountain Landis), a university president (Bart Giamatti), an Olympic organizer (Peter V. Ueberroth) and lawyers (Bowie Kuhn and Vincent).

Selig loved those odds. They were similar to the ones he had faced in the 1960s as a thirtysomething punk trying to convince the baseball lords to bring a team to Milwaukee. They were the same odds he had faced in turning a struggling Brewers into a World Series participant in 1982. “I love baseball. I wanted to have a chance to do what was best for it,” Selig says. “Besides, I didn’t think I would have the job that long.”

The night he accepted the commissioner’s job, he flew home to Milwaukee, got off the plane, told his wife, “by the way, I’ve taken on a little more responsibility, a couple of months, nothing more.” Then they rushed to County Stadium, where Brewer Robin Yount was attempting to collect his landmark 3,000th career hit. Selig fretted that he was going to miss the first part of the game. It began to rain, and the game was delayed. Shortly after Selig arrived, Yount got the hit.

In the first hours that baseball was again run by a fan, the fan leaped from his seat and punched his fist through the mist and howled into the night.

Batting fourth, a man and his barber.

“Would you look at that frame?” yells Tony LoCoco. “That’s the work of your mister big-shot commissioner.” In a corner of his two-chair barbershop with the black checkered floor, there is a framed black-and-white picture of Tony’s first shop. Down the middle of the glass runs an ugly crack. It has been that way for a while. It will stay that way, according to LoCoco, until Bud Selig “stops being such a cheapskate.”

It happened during one of Selig’s weekly visits. Tony is not sure which one; Selig has been coming into Tony’s shop for 40 years, every Friday, 10 a.m., shampoo and cut. And every Friday, before Tony began working the afternoon shift, Selig and Tony would needle each other. It is Selig’s favorite, and only, pastime. Friends, writers, ballplayers, anyone. “That guy loves nothing better than to hassle you, like you were both standing on a street corner somewhere,” Tony says.

On this particular Friday, Selig began shadowboxing in front of Tony, as if he were going to hit him. Tony ducked. Selig lost his balance. His fist went smack into the glass. “So I locked the door and pounded him,” LoCoco says. “Then I tell him he has to pay. Haven’t seen a penny from him since.”

“My barber,” Selig says, “has long since lost his mind.”

“This guy,” says Tony, “would rather be with the little people.” Even if they wouldn’t always rather be with him. There was the time, when the owners were locking the players out of spring training in yet another labor dispute, that LoCoco hung a sign on the door reading, “Milwaukee Brewer Baseball Owners Locked Out.” Just as Selig arrived, he locked the door. Selig was furious, stomping around outside for 15 minutes before Tony finally let him in.

Then there was the time Selig was doing business with Steinbrenner on LoCoco’s phone during a haircut. “The call kept dragging on and on, and all I can think of is, this guy is costing me money,” LoCoco recalls. So he grabbed the phone from Selig and shouted to Steinbrenner, “Call him at the office!” Then he hung up. Steinbrenner called back and asked Tony whether he ever wanted to manage. The following Friday at 10 a.m., Selig was back at the front door again.

“Please, please,” says Sal, Tony’s son. “Do not judge our work by his hair. There is only so much you can do.”

Batting fifth, a man and his ringer.

Bud Selig remembers his first trip to Boston’s Fenway Park, a treat for the young son of a Milwaukee car dealer, for a baseball-on-the-kitchen-radio dreamer from the city’s middle-class west side.

His mother, Marie, a strong-willed Russian immigrant who taught him the sport, stepped to the ticket window shortly before the game. “We’re sold out,” shouted a voice as a wooden partition slammed in her face. “You don’t understand,” she shouted back. “I have brought my son all the way to Milwaukee for this game. We have to get in!” The voice never replied, and Selig and his mom spent the game walking around outside the field.

“She was a determined woman, a disciplined woman,” he says. From his father, Ben, he learned about business. From his mother, about passion.

Sen. Herb Kohl (D-Wis.), who grew up one street away from Selig in a neighborhood of brick homes, crooked chimneys and no driveways, remembers that passion. It was a championship baseball game at Sherman Elementary School. Selig was captain of one team, Kohl was captain of the other.

“Bud shows up with a pitcher we have never seen before,” recalls Kohl. “I say, ‘Who is this guy?’ He says, ‘Forget about it, let’s just play.’ ” So they played. Selig’s ringer threw a no-hitter and gave his team the championship. “Bud was the first owner to use a replacement player,” observes Kohl, who owns the Milwaukee Bucks.

Selig later used his wiles at the University of Wisconsin, where he dragooned his fraternity brothers into accompanying him on the 90-minute drive to Milwaukee to watch the new major league team there, the Braves. Selig even convinced one of the brothers, named James, that his parents, who were season-ticket holders, would not see them cutting class. “I told James, ‘Hey, there’s 40,000 people in the stands.’ But sure enough, as soon as we get seated, we hear this big booming voice. ‘James!’ It was his dad.”

Selig saw for the first time a town swept up with a major-league feeling, the self-esteem that people get from hearing a town’s name throughout the country, throughout a season. “I saw that major-league baseball was good for a city.”

The Braves advanced to the World Series in 1957 and 1958, winning the championship in the former year, drawing more than 2 million fans to County Stadium annually. But then the Braves were sold to a Chicago group that longed to move it to a better television market in Atlanta. Citing dwindling attendance--even though the Braves were still outdrawing many teams--the owners moved the team after the 1965 season. And a novice car salesman at his father’s Ford dealership made himself a promise. “I had to bring baseball back,” Selig recalls. “It was too important to me, to this town.”

Batting sixth, a man and his dream.

Among the many things in Bud Selig’s life that fall under the heading of Go Figure, there is this: He was a successful and respected car salesman whose life changed because of a lemon. It belonged to Don McMahon, then a pitcher for the Milwaukee Braves. A dealer who sold the car to McMahon met Selig at a Ford seminar in Detroit and asked him for a favor. He loved the idea of being involved with a baseball player, and agreed. Soon he was supplying many of the Milwaukee Braves with cars and making the business contacts that would help him bring baseball back to town once the Braves left.

Not that anybody ever believed he could do it. Selig was a 31-year-old kid in horn-rimmed glasses who had been discharged from the Army because of a bleeding ulcer, a kid who seemingly knew nothing more than his father’s showroom. “Bud was not looked upon as a man of great wealth,” says Ben Barkin, a Milwaukee publicist. “But everyone saw a guy who just loved baseball.”

Selig would phone Barkin at all hours of the night, asking him to persuade local business tycoons to join him at an owners meeting to plead Milwaukee’s case. For five years, Selig attended several of those meetings a year, pacing the rich carpet of expensive hotels, banging on thick doors, ignored by everyone. “Baseball owners treated me like a leper,” he says.

Bob Wolf, the longtime Milwaukee baseball writer who followed Selig’s quest, remembers the time Selig attempted to enter a World Series hospitality room to schmooze. “They wouldn’t even let him in,” Wolf recalls. “Told him he didn’t have the right credentials. It was like that everywhere.”

Selig was undaunted. He contracted with the Chicago White Sox to play a few games in County Stadium and begged Lombardi to flash the phone number of the ticket office during a Green Bay Packers football game. Lombardi was so impressed with Selig’s persistence, he left the number on the scoreboard the entire game.

In 1968, Selig was certain that Milwaukee would be awarded an expansion franchise. Walter O’Malley even mouthed the letter M when announcing the winners. But he was saying, “Montreal,” not “Milwaukee.”

“I saw the M and thought we had it,” says Selig. He spent the night walking the Chicago streets.

“None of us had the patience of Bud,” Barkin says. “But more than patience, it was courage. He kept looking and looking and looking.” He found his team two years later in Seattle, where the Pilots’ debt-ridden owners escaped the furious city by declaring bankruptcy and selling to Selig.

A judge awarded him the team in April 1970, a week before the start of the regular season. Rechristened the Brewers, the team had sold no tickets and would have to wear Seattle uniforms. When Selig heard the news around midnight, he was so happy he rushed out of his house and walked the streets, this time in celebration. His then-wife would later divorce him, claiming in one deposition that he was married only to baseball.

Batting seventh, a man and his bartender.

Warren Abramson is a man you would not know. He is 71, battling various ailments and weak knees, long since retired from his lifelong job of repairing Milwaukee streets.

He is also the bartender and manager of the Brewers’ executive dining room. Been with the Brewers since their inception. And Bud Selig will not let him quit. “They once carried me out of work because they thought I’d had a heart attack,” Abramson says. “So I tell the doctor, ‘I’ve had enough.’ The doctor calls Bud. He says, ‘No way. You are never leaving.’ ”

Selig, who hired Abramson on a handshake 27 years ago because he liked the way he tended bar at a Milwaukee Symphony event, knows that Abramson’s wife died 10 years ago. Selig knows because he sent the entire Brewer office to her funeral, stunning Abramson even today. “Imagine my wife, her funeral, standing room only,” he says.

Selig also knows that Abramson’s children have all left town and the granddaughter that he helped raise recently left the house. Selig knows because he helped the granddaughter pay for college.

“I think Bud knows that this job, it’s all I got,” Abramson says. So Selig won’t let him leave. Even though Abramson doesn’t move so well anymore, or mix drinks so fast anymore, Selig celebrates his presence every day with needling and jokes.

“I remember once we were going at it, and I told Bud to take off his glasses because I didn’t want to break them,” Abramson says. “Sure enough, Bud takes them off, and we keep going at it.”

Selig threw Abramson a surprise 70th birthday party at his country club. The bartender is still talking about it. “It was quite a place, all his big-shot friends were there,” he remembers. “It was order off the menu, anything you want.”

When Abramson returned to work, Selig was waiting for him, delivered a nudge, a couple of playful punches, a headlock, just enough to remind him that being a 71-year-old bartender is no different than being baseball commissioner: You never stop trying.

Batting eighth, a man and his mom.

Ten years ago, Marie Selig started forgetting things at her weekly bridge game. She started forgetting people. The woman who taught Selig everything about baseball soon didn’t remember her son. When she could no longer live in her house with the help of an aide, she was placed in a home. Alzheimer’s disease finally engulfed her, removing all hope.

But Bud still hoped. At least once a week he would stop by the home, sit at her side, talk baseball, no response, read the sports pages, no response, sit there some more. “He was as devoted a son as you could imagine,” says Wendy, his daughter. Only when Marie died in 1995--19 years after his father died of heart failure--did Selig give up.

He has been the same way with his baseball team. He has always enjoyed it more than most owners, shouting through the press box during big plays, cursing and banging chairs during bad ones, bantering with the media, wolfing down hot dogs. When it became obvious to him that the economics of the game required the Brewers to play in a stadium that produced more revenue, he said he would build the new stadium himself. When that became financially impossible, he went to local governments for help.

After much slinging of mud, after votes that eventually cost the Republicans a majority in the state senate, that help is on the way in the form of a $250-million stadium that will be largely funded from a sales tax in a five-county area.

But, typical of Selig’s struggles, the very city he has tried to unite has become divided on the stadium issue.

“He said he would build it himself, then suddenly comes to us for public money and says he will only do the stadium the way he wants to do it,” says Quindell, the county supervisor. “He has an arrogant attitude and lack of understanding how things work.”

Tim Sheehy, president of the Metropolitan Milwaukee Assn. of Commerce, says, “In terms of wanting the club to succeed for Milwaukee, Bud Selig is a wonderful owner.”

Brewer fans agree with Sheehy. During a rough spot in negotiations for the new stadium last year a district board voted down a financing plan that, it seemed, would effectively kill the project and force the team to move. That night, a distraught Selig walked into the County Stadium bleachers midway through a game to greet some friends. Fans spotted him, waved, shouted, and soon the entire stadium was standing and cheering. Joined by hardened sportswriters in the press box, the fans continued to cheer for 10 minutes, causing umpires to delay the game. Then the baseball commissioner returned to his office, shut the door and wept.

Batting ninth, a man and his ditch.

Bud Selig is a worried owner. Always a worried owner. Construction on the new Miller Park has already started behind the aging County Stadium. Twice a day, Selig drives to the site, talks to the construction workers.

One morning he brings them Brewers caps and shirts. On Selig’s second visit that day, a worker who had been in a portable toilet runs up to him: Could he also have a cap and shirt? The major league baseball commissioner returns to his office, picks up the stuff and brings it to the man. The worker looks at him in disbelief.

Twice a day Selig schmoozes with the hard hats, then does the only logical thing a die-hard fan would do. He cheers for the ditch.

“Deeper,” he shouts to the giant hole. “Deeper.”