How the Game’s Ultimate Fan Became Such a Major Player

A prominent congressman has called for his resignation. Angry investors have sued him for fraud and racketeering. Others accuse him of breaking the rules to financially benefit himself and a crony. He’s been jeered by sports fans and mocked in late-night host David Letterman’s Top 10 list. (No. 1: Throws like a girl.)

For such a heavy hitter, baseball Commissioner Allan H. “Bud” Selig is in a terrible slump.

The 68-year-old owner of the Milwaukee Brewers is under fire from many quarters as he continues what he characterizes as his campaign to save the national pastime. But some would say the game needs to be saved from Selig. His crusade to usher in salary caps, increase revenue sharing and eliminate struggling teams once again has put him on a collision course with the powerful players union.

On Friday, the Major League Players Assn. executive board voted to set Aug. 30 as a strike date, the second potential work stoppage on Selig’s watch. The first one was a marathon affair that led to the cancellation of the 1994 World Series and a public relations nightmare--the kind Selig says he’s prepared to weather again.

“As much as I abhor the thought of a work stoppage, and it would be gut wrenching, preserving the status quo may be even more gut wrenching. There are too many clubs that can’t make it with this system,” he said. “That’s a fact.”

Not everyone believes it, though, and even those who say Selig may be right worry that his stewardship ultimately is hurting the sport.

“If baseball were a stock, it would be at an all-time low right now,” said Fay T. Vincent, the former baseball commissioner who was forced out with a push from Selig. Warren Bennis, a USC management professor who has served on advisory panels to presidents Johnson, Nixon, Carter and Reagan, said if he were feeling generous he would give Selig a grade of C-minus or D for managing the crisis: “I think he’s been a complete disaster.”

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Balk at All-Star Game

Baseball insiders say Selig has been personally wounded by such comments as well as collateral questions about his credibility and intentions. The criticism only intensified after he called a halt to last month’s nationally televised All-Star game as it was tied 7-7 in the 11th inning. The decision triggered catcalls from the crowd at Selig’s home field--Miller Park in Milwaukee--and inflamed baseball purists around the country. Cameras caught Selig throwing up his hands when the managers told him they had run out of pitchers.

Most agree the man handpicked by fellow team owners to oversee the sport has done much to help it bounce back after the 232-day strike in 1994-95. Adding wild card teams has made pennant races exciting later into the season, and promoting rivalries with interleague play has helped increase attendance. His administration initiated limited revenue sharing among owners and negotiated baseball’s richest national television contract, a $2.5-billion deal with Fox.

But Selig also has the knack of taking what should be the sport’s shining moment and overshadowing it with controversy. That’s what he did last fall, just 48 hours after one of the most exciting World Series in history, when he announced that baseball would kill off two teams through “contraction.”

“It’s painful for me to watch Bud get skewered on all these things,” said Jeff Smulyan, former owner of the Seattle Mariners. “Bud is much better one-on-one than he is standing in front of the camera. I don’t think his fundamental nature comes through that well.”

Selig wasn’t born for the limelight.

As a teenager, he was so shy he couldn’t look you in the eye, said brother Jerry. His glasses, mop of hair and habit of cupping his hand to his ear so he can hear makes him look like the history professor he once aspired to be. Friends and foes alike, however, say the rumpled manner hides a cagey insider whose love for the game can’t be matched.

He was introduced to baseball by his mother, a Russian immigrant and longtime fan who would take him to see minor-league games. His fondest memory is the 1949 trip they took to New York to watch games at Ebbets Field, the Polo Grounds and Yankee Stadium. Selig was enthralled when, on his 15th birthday, Yankee fans crooned “Happy Birthday” during the 7th-inning stretch--only to discover they were serenading Yankee Manager Casey Stengel.

Selig wanted to play the game but couldn’t hit a curve. So he became the ultimate fan.

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A Love for the Game

As a teen he ingested statistics and lore. While a student at the University of Wisconsin, his radio was tuned constantly to the play-by-play of the Chicago Cubs, Chicago White Sox and the old Milwaukee Braves. After graduation and a short stint in the Army--he served six months before being discharged because of a bleeding ulcer--he went to work at the family’s car dealership. Baseball was never far from his heart.

Married straight out of college, Selig took his two daughters on annual baseball road trips. When the Milwaukee Braves went public in 1963, he plunked down $30,000 and became the team’s largest public shareholder. And when his first wife divorced him in 1975, she all but named baseball as his mistress.

“That’s what he did, 24/7,” said Sari Selig Kramer, 44, their daughter, who carries in her wallet a snapshot of herself as a 3-year-old at a game with her dad. “He was either at the game, talking about the game.... That’s all we knew.”

His tie to the game was so visceral that Selig said he felt “raped and devastated” when the Braves left for Atlanta in 1965. He sold his stock in protest and gathered a civic group determined to bring baseball back. Selig spent the next three years unsuccessfully lobbying for an expansion team with such determination that some owners regarded him as a “leper.”

Yet he never gave up, and his group purchased the old Seattle Pilots out of bankruptcy six days before the 1970 season. The Milwaukee Brewers were born.

“What that period taught me was ... tenacity. Persistence. I kept getting up off the floor,” Selig said.

The purchase ushered Selig into the clubby world of baseball owners who once dismissed him, a conclave dominated by oversized egos and bank accounts.

He became the league’s human switchboard, its social glue. Selig made himself indispensable by volunteering for committee assignments and working the phones. Deferential, sympathetic, knee-slapping funny, Selig became a consensus builder and master politician through a combination of charm and relentlessness.

“He just grinds and grinds and never gives up,” said Peter Ueberroth, a former baseball commissioner who also ran the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics. Added Vincent, “He’s a compulsive schmoozer.”

As a small-market owner, Selig schmoozed with an agenda.

With no personal fortune to fall back on, he was forced to run the Brewers with ruthless cost cutting, earning him the nickname “Budget Bud.” Although the team turned a profit, Selig said he soon realized that teams such as his were hobbled by a growing revenue gap with the big teams. The culprit: free agency.

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Poised to Take Control

Owners despised the salary-bidding wars but believed they were forced to join them to stay alive at the turnstiles. An attempt to break the cycle culminated when owners, directed by Ueberroth, secretly agreed to shun each other’s free agents after the 1985 season. They were fined a collective $280 million in 1987 for collusion.

Vincent said Selig was a “ringleader” in the collusion effort, a charge Selig adamantly denies. But what is clear is that in 1992, amid fears that Vincent was too labor friendly to take on the powerful Major League Players Assn., Selig helped engineer a boardroom coup that forced Vincent’s resignation.

“People say I underestimated him. I certainly did,” Vincent said.

In September 1992, Selig replaced Vincent as interim commissioner, an appointment that broke tradition. Since the Black Sox scandal gave birth to the commissioner’s post in 1921, owners have taken pains to select people from outside their ranks to give the post at least the appearance of independence.

Selig’s leadership was cemented when he was elected permanent commissioner in 1998. Unlike the salary cap Selig wants to impose on players, his pay has grown from the $1 million a year he was paid when he started as commissioner to the roughly $6 million a year that baseball officials confirm he will be paid by the time his term expires in 2006.

Through the interim years, Selig remained president and the largest shareholder of the Brewers. After his permanent appointment, he put his shares in a blind trust and handed the job of running the team over to his daughter Wendy Selig-Prieb.

Still, his financial ties and tenure as a small-market owner have fueled charges of conflict of interest and cronyism as Selig proceeds--with the unanimous vote of owners--to dramatically rework the economics of the game. Some opponents wonder whether Selig can be trusted.

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Contraction Reaction

When Selig announced last fall that two teams had to go for the good of the game, and word leaked out that one of them was Minnesota, many smelled a conspiracy to generate greater television revenue and boost attendance for the lowly Brewers, roughly 200 miles away. Worse, critics felt it could be a payoff for Selig friend and Twins’ owner Carl Pohlad by offering to buy him out for an estimated $50 million over the club’s estimated market price.

The heat became particularly intense after it was revealed that Selig received a $3-million short-term loan from Pohlad’s bank to help the Brewers after the 1994-95 strike. The deal raised questions about whether Selig had violated a prohibition on owners from lending money to each other without league permission. Selig insists the loan was proper.

“Frankly, I’ve borrowed very little money in my lifetime,” Selig said. “He [Pohlad] was a friend. He was a banker.”

Other owners didn’t seem to care. But it only inflamed controversy and criticism of Selig that started two days after the Arizona Diamondbacks beat the New York Yankees in a seven-game World Series. His announcement that baseball would have to cut two financially struggling teams pierced a euphoria that was all the more poignant because of the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.

The furor was followed by allegations from the Massachusetts attorney general that Selig has steered the sale of the Boston Red Sox to baseball insiders as part of a grand scheme to cut another team. Selig denied influencing the sale, which owners approved for $90 million less than the highest bid.

Minority owners of the Montreal Expos, the second team targeted for elimination, sued Selig and other top baseball officials last month, alleging fraud, conspiracy and racketeering. They claim Selig and others conspired with majority owner Jeffrey Loria to drive down the value of the franchise to facilitate the league’s February purchase of it for $120 million as part of their plan to perhaps one day shut it down.

Selig created another row last month when he predicted that two teams would fail to make their payroll. When that failed to materialize, league officials backpedaled and downplayed the statement.

Stanford economist Roger Noll, an expert on baseball labor issues, said Selig’s verbal brinksmanship has been part of a plan to prompt a strike: “He’s doing a good job planning a train wreck,” Noll said.

The commissioner underwent his worst public flogging during congressional hearings on a bill that would strip baseball’s cherished antitrust exemption for any teams that are eliminated or moved. Selig used the January hearings to release figures purporting to show that all but two of the 30 teams were losing money.

Seizing on Selig’s loan from Pohlad, the bill’s author, Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), called for the commissioner’s resignation. Conyers also cast doubt on Selig’s figures about financial woes.

“What you see is not what you get with him,” Conyers said at the time.

Selig says he’s taking the long view, leaving it to the “next generation” to decided whether he’s done the right thing for the sport. For now, he’s trying to shrug off the flak. After all, what do you expect when you’re making long-overdue changes to one of America’s most cherished institutions?

“My dad always taught me that the path of least resistance is generally the worst one,” he said. “It doesn’t solve the problem. These [baseball’s financial woes] are problems that should have been solved 10, 20, 30 years ago.”

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(BEGIN TEXT OF INFOBOX)

Selig Is Pitching Some Changes

Major league baseball commissioner Bud Selig says changes are necessary to make the game more competitive and profitable.

His proposals include:

* Increased revenue sharing. Baseball’s 30 major league ballclubs share 20% of their $2.8 billion in local revenue. Selig wants to increase it to 50%.

* Luxury tax. Institute a 50% tax on portions of team payrolls exceeding $98 million. Under that proposal, the Dodgers and six other teams would have been taxed. The money would subsidize low-revenue teams.

* Payroll minimums. Establish a $45-million minimum payroll so owners would be forced to spend on players instead of pocketing shared revenue as profits.

* Contraction. Eliminate financially struggling teams.

* A worldwide draft. Prevent costly bidding wars for foreign players by including them in the sport’s draft, which allows teams to take turns picking talent.

Source: major league baseball

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Next: A look at why Dodger Blue bleeds red ink.