Bud Selig

Bud Selig ran baseball for more than two decades, through the worst labor war in its history and the long boom that followed, and changed the shape of the sport more than any commissioner since the man who invented the job. He brought the game back to Milwaukee, then steered it from the cancelled 1994 World Series to record revenues and lasting peace. He added the Wild Card, interleague play, and drug testing, and he carried the blame for the steroid years and the credit for cleaning them up. The Today's Game Era Committee elected him to the Hall of Fame in 2017.

The Car Dealer Who Loved Baseball

Selig was born Allan Huber Selig on July 30, 1934, in Milwaukee, the son of an immigrant who built the largest Ford dealership in Wisconsin and a schoolteacher mother who took him to ballgames. He grew up on the Milwaukee Braves and studied history at the University of Wisconsin, then went into the family car business, where he made the money that let him chase the only thing he loved more. When the Braves abandoned Milwaukee for Atlanta after the 1965 season, Selig made it his mission to get the city another team, and he spent five years trying.

Bringing the Game Back to Milwaukee

The chance came out of a bankruptcy court. In the spring of 1970, Selig bought the failing Seattle Pilots for 10.8 million dollars, moved them to Milwaukee, and renamed them the Brewers, and County Stadium had baseball again within days. He owned and ran the franchise for the next 28 years, a small-market operator who fought the economics of the game from the inside. His Brewers reached the World Series in 1982 and lost it in seven games to St. Louis, the closest he came as an owner, and the experience taught him how the money worked and how it did not.

From Owner to Commissioner

By the early 1990s Selig had become the most powerful owner in the sport, and in September 1992 he led the faction that forced Commissioner Fay Vincent to resign under a no-confidence vote. He took over as chairman of the owners' council and acting commissioner, a temporary job that lasted six years, until the owners formally named him the ninth Commissioner of Baseball in 1998, the first owner ever elected to the post. He placed his Brewers in a trust and handed the team to his daughter to run, and he stayed in the office until 2015, a tenure second in length only to Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

The Year Without a World Series

The defining crisis came first. In August 1994 the players walked out over the owners' push for a salary cap, and the strike dragged on for 232 days, the longest work stoppage in the sport's history. It wiped out the end of the season and forced Selig to cancel the World Series, the first autumn without one since 1904, a wound that fans did not soon forgive. Owners tried to open 1995 with replacement players before a federal judge stopped them, and the real season finally started in late April. Selig wore the blame for the lost Series, and he never pretended otherwise.

The Reforms That Reshaped the Game

Out of the wreckage came the changes that defined his commissionership. Selig had already split each league into three divisions and added a Wild Card, used for the first time in 1995, and he followed with interleague play in 1997, a second Wild Card in 2012, revenue sharing, and a luxury tax meant to keep the big markets from buying every pennant. He launched the World Baseball Classic in 2006, brought instant replay to the umpires, and moved the bankrupt Expos to Washington in 2005. When the 2002 All-Star Game ended in a 7-7 tie in his own Milwaukee ballpark, he gave the game's outcome real stakes the next year by tying it to World Series home-field advantage.

The Steroid Reckoning

The hardest part of his record is the one he was slowest to confront. Performance-enhancing drugs spread through the game in the 1990s while the sport looked away, and Selig drew heavy criticism for acting only after the home run records had been rewritten on chemistry. He commissioned former Senator George Mitchell to investigate in 2006, and the report that followed in 2007 named 89 players and spread the blame across owners, the union, and the commissioner's office alike. Selig answered it by building what became the toughest drug-testing program in American team sports, the credit and the criticism both fairly his.

A Sport Transformed

For all the turbulence, the game Selig handed off was far richer than the one he inherited. Annual revenue grew from about 1.2 billion dollars when he took over to roughly 9 billion when he left, 22 new ballparks opened on his watch, and the sport went more than two decades without another work stoppage. "I learned that the best interests of the game are the most important thing," he said. "They transcend my best interests, your best interests and everybody else's." The Today's Game Era Committee elected him in 2016 and Cooperstown inducted him on his 83rd birthday in 2017, alongside the Braves executive John Schuerholz, and the car dealer who saved Milwaukee baseball took his place among the men who built the game.