by Bud Selig
I wish I had been at Marlins Park for a first-round pool in 2017 because I would have loved it. The Dominican Republic team was there, and their fans might be unparalleled in terms of making noise. They beat a United States team managed by Jim Leyland. It was such great theater—exactly as we thought it could be when the event was just a vision.
We invited sixteen teams for the first two events but added a qualifying round in 2013, and that provided a pathway for Spain, Brazil, Israel, and Colombia to get teams into the tournament. Nine other countries have fielded teams that haven’t yet qualified for the tournament. That list reads like roll call at the United Nations—Pakistan, Nicaragua, Germany, the Czech Republic, the United Kingdom, France, New Zealand, Thailand, and the Philippines.
If I had to pick one country that I’ve most enjoyed watching, I’d probably say the Netherlands. Its WBC teams are a fascinating mix of veterans from its own thriving league, which has been around since the 1920s, and professionals from its Caribbean island territories, especially Curaçao.
The Dutch pulled off one of the greatest upsets in the WBC in 2009, eliminating a powerful team from the Dominican Republic. The catcher on that team was Kenley Jansen, who would become the Dodgers’ closer in the next decade. The 2017 Netherlands team went all the way to the semifinals before losing to Puerto Rico.
One of the best things about the WBC is that it allows our fans their first look at international players who will find their way to the major leagues, like Jansen. That was certainly true for Japan’s Daisuke Matsuzaka, a pitcher who was MVP of the first two WBCs. The list of others includes Aroldis Chapman, Jose Abreu, Yoenis Céspedes, and Kenta Maeda.
I think the WBC has great significance. It took our game to places it had never been, and that will be more true as the game goes on. It’s a dramatic manifestation of what we’re trying to do internationally.
People always ask why we can’t send major leaguers to the Olympics. We’ve sent teams of minor leaguers, but from a pragmatic standpoint it doesn’t work with major leaguers.
What could we do? Just stop playing in August? Tell our fans we’ll see you in three or four weeks? I don’t think so. And there’s no way we could keep playing while many of our best players are representing their Olympic teams. We’d have serious integrity issues. You’d be punishing teams for having the players that the Olympic team wants. From a matter of sheer pragmatism, it’s not possible.
We spent a lot of time studying different ways to do the WBC and never found a way that worked better than holding it in March, when teams are in spring training. There’s always some pushback from major league teams that worry about players being hurt, but to me that’s silly. Players get hurt in spring training games, too. Players have always gotten hurt.
It’s not surprising the WBC is more popular internationally than with our fans here. We knew it would be a harder sell in the United States because we have so much baseball here when the season starts and fans are accustomed to rooting for teams like the Dodgers, Yankees, and Red Sox, not their national team.
It was great for the event when Leyland’s U.S. team won the championship in 2017, beating Puerto Rico at Dodger Stadium. One of the great plays that season was made in the second-round pool, when Adam Jones sailed over the center-field fence at Petco Park to take a home run away from Manny Machado (his Orioles teammate, playing for the Dominican Republic) in a game that sent the U.S. to Dodger Stadium for championship-round games against Japan and Puerto Rico.
Leyland was great. He was as nervous as he’d ever been managing the Tigers or the Pirates, maybe even more nervous, if that’s possible. He was chain-smoking and sweating out every detail and, in the end, as proud of his WBC gold medal as anything he’d achieved in baseball. The only thing he had on the line was his pride, but he’d tell you representing his country was the ultimate. I was really proud of him and that U.S. team.
There’s no doubt in my mind the WBC is going to grow in a major way in future years. It shows what happens when baseball’s management truly works side by side with players. We just had to stop fighting each other and work for the same goals. It’s so rewarding to see how productive the relationship can be.
Pete Rose is never far from the minds of the media and baseball fans. The question of whether he might one day be reinstated from the permanently banned list was one of the constants in my years as commissioner.
No one takes any pleasure in seeing a guy who was a great player limit himself with a seemingly never-ending run of bad judgment. Pete is never far from a microphone, either, so he’s made a cottage industry not just out of being the Hit King but also of criticizing me and everyone else in baseball. It’s sad.
When Rose was suspended, Bart Giamatti left provisions for him to apply for reinstatement. The commissioner is judge and jury in that process, so I’ve always had Rose’s backers trying to persuade me to his side, saying he’s paid a high enough price for ignoring the cardinal rule of not betting on baseball.
The first time I was ever in a major league clubhouse was in May 1958, and I can still remember that right by the door was a huge sign, signed by Ford C. Frick. It said if you gamble you’re suspended for life. You grew up understanding that was a no-no.
Most people understand. Even when I’ve been in Cincinnati, there were more people than you’d think who understood. But some people say he bet on his team to win, what’s wrong with that?
What about the days he didn’t? Did he try as hard to win those games as the games he bet on? You can’t rationalize that kind of behavior. If we lose our integrity we have nothing left, and I knew that.
People said I wasn’t open to reinstating Rose because I was so close to Bart. Well, I was close to Bart. Close enough to remember Bart telling Pete to reconfigure his life.
Has he ever reconfigured his life? I’ll ask you.
Rose knew I was close to Robin Yount, so after I took over for Fay Vincent he was always calling Robin to ask him if he could help him with me. But it was another group of Hall of Famers who tried the hardest to help Rose.
Mike Schmidt, Joe Morgan, and Johnny Bench were all former teammates of Pete’s and at least somewhat sympathetic to him. They asked if they could bring him to Milwaukee to meet with me. Of course they could.
I didn’t feel any pressure from them when they came to Milwaukee in December 2002. They were his teammates. They just felt they wanted to bring him and I was to make my own judgment.
Schmidt seemed the most interested in helping Pete, based on my conversations with him. Morgan felt sorry for Pete and wanted to help him. I had the idea that Bench could barely be in a room with him, but this time he came along as a favor to Schmidt as much as anything.
They got to my office and those three guys were dressed beautifully. Then there was Pete, and he wasn’t dressed well at all. He was wearing one of those sweatsuits you’d always see him in, looking like he was about to go to the gym, not an important meeting.
We talked, all of us, and then the other three left the room. It was just Pete and me.
He told me how unfair his suspension was. He was very nice, not nasty. He was trying to put his best foot forward. I explained my position, and he kept telling me how close I was to Bart. Well, I was, but that was irrelevant at this point.
Then he told me he never gambled on baseball. Remember, I had read the Dowd report, which contained betting slips with his name on them. Now he was telling me a different story, not to be confused with the facts. It was a full denial.
Huh? Not even his best friends thought he was really railroaded out of baseball. He was just a compulsive liar, his own worst enemy.
I didn’t like his presentation, so it sure didn’t make me more inclined to let him back into baseball. As it turns out, things he later admitted to he didn’t admit to that day. I always had the uncomfortable feeling that whatever you did with Pete, the truth would ultimately come out and you’d be embarrassed.
That was the only time I met with Pe
te as commissioner. I was never close to reinstating him. Some people thought I was at different points in time, but that’s not right.
I’ll admit I was annoyed when Rose released a book on the same day that Paul Molitor and Dennis Eckersley were elected into the Hall of Fame by the baseball writers. That book contained the first admissions from Pete that he had bet on baseball—not very long after he’d denied it to my face. The Rose story stole headlines from Molitor and Eckersley, who deserved the spotlight.
What a bad sense of timing. That wasn’t real smart. But look, he wasn’t going to get reinstated either way.
He was a great player, make no mistake about it. He gave you everything he had, obviously. There was a reason they called him Charlie Hustle. I had great respect for him as a player.
But baseball is a social institution. It brings certain responsibilities for those who work in it, and Rose didn’t fulfill those responsibilities. He thrilled us as a player but then he hurt the game.
Bart was right. It was a stain on baseball.
Strong ownership is essential to the success of all professional sports, so it is not only appropriate but imperative for a commissioner to try to facilitate the best possible transfer of franchises. I had seen for myself the impact of weak and erratic owners and likewise the difference that can be made when the right person owns a team.
Through my years in charge, I was personally involved in most of the ownership transfers in baseball, to one degree or another. Sometimes a commissioner has to be very creative to save a team. That’s how Peter Ueberroth used Jerry Reinsdorf and the ownership committee to get George W. Bush involved in baseball. Eddie Chiles couldn’t find an acceptable buyer for the Rangers, so Reinsdorf worked hard to combine several smaller groups into one strong group, bringing together Rusty Rose, Tom Schieffer, Roland Betts, Richard Rainwater, and Bush, who then was known only as one of President George H. W. Bush’s sons. The success of the Rangers deep in the heart of football country is rooted in the ownership group Reinsdorf put together in the late-eighties.
I helped usher Drayton McLane into baseball in 1993. His family had been in trucking and had gotten itself a pretty good contract. It handled the shipping for Walmart. Drayton became close to Sam Walton, and in 1990 essentially sold his trucking business for stock in Walmart. He bought the Astros from John McMullen, who had purchased the team from its founder, Judge Roy Hofheinz, in 1979.
McLane was a strong owner. He got things done in Houston, including the construction of a new downtown stadium, now known as Minute Maid Park. It was a huge boost to that long-neglected area, which now is home to a gigantic civic center and the Houston Rockets’ arena. Drayton also guided the Astros to their first pennant, in 2005, which brought him great pride.
Through Drayton I got to know David Glass, another top Walmart executive. He would purchase a downtrodden Royals franchise from the estate of Ewing Kauffman in 2000 and patiently lead it to back-to-back World Series in 2014 and ’15, with the Royals losing a dramatic seven-game series to the Giants and then beating the Mets to trigger a parade that was one of the most joyous days ever for Kansas City. The Royals weren’t much when Glass took over. They had been a model franchise in the eighties but lost that luster when future Hall of Famer John Schuerholz was lured to Atlanta in 1990. Glass was committed to building a winner and in the end did it the right way, with scouting and player development.
One of the most controversial ownership situations I resolved was also one of the best decisions I ever made, even if it is still a sore subject to fans in Montreal. I loved Charles Bronfman, who owned the Expos when I got into baseball. But it was a bad sign for the future of the franchise when he decided he couldn’t operate the team during baseball’s economic downturn.
The Expos had produced great young players in large batches, including future Hall of Famers Andre Dawson, Tim Raines, Vladimir Guerrero, and Gary Carter. They had exciting teams but reached a point where their revenues wouldn’t allow management to keep the teams together, and a late-season fade in 1989 broke Charles’s heart.
He had long wanted some help from Montreal’s government in getting a new ballpark to replace Olympic Stadium, which had outlived its usefulness, and it wasn’t forthcoming. So Charles threw in the towel, putting the team up for sale. No one stepped up in Montreal, but Bronfman wouldn’t sell to interests looking to purchase the team and relocate it to American cities. Instead he turned the team over to one of his partners, Claude Brochu, and his group of investors. They eventually sold the franchise to New York art dealer Jeffrey Loria in 1999.
A couple of years later Loria would play into a three-headed solution that I put together to help revitalize one of our most valuable franchises, the Red Sox. The team had been in the Yawkey family since 1933, when thirty-three-year-old Tom Yawkey purchased it. He owned it until he died in 1976, and then it passed to his wife, Jean. She was in charge until her death in February 1992, at which time it began to be managed by their estate, with John Harrington the point man. John and I developed a running conversation about his need to put together a sale of the club, as the estate couldn’t hold it forever. This was a huge story in New England, and lots of potential ownership groups were floated by Dan Shaughnessy and others in the Boston media. The sale was complicated by the bulk of the revenue from the sale going to charity, not the estate itself, which brought the state’s attorney general into the proceedings and heightened public scrutiny.
This wasn’t just the franchise being sold. It was also Fenway Park and 80 percent of the New England Sports Network—not that many of the new groups were interested in Fenway. They felt it was dilapidated and looked to join baseball’s building boom with a new stadium.
The only group that told me it was committed to preserving Fenway Park was headed by a longtime friend of mine, Tom Werner, who had owned the Padres from 1990 through ’94. His group included Larry Lucchino, who had been the visionary behind Camden Yards and had a keen sense of baseball history, understanding the intrinsic value of a cathedral like Fenway.
Werner and Lucchino had been on different sides in Kohler, when we held our ugly battle over revenue sharing, and understood how the game was changing. They were an intriguing partnership in the early stages of a process in which a lot of people were expressing interest in the team but few of them actually had the resources to make it work. But I felt Boston needed a truly powerful ownership group, especially given the stadium work it would face, which was why I did something nobody saw coming.
I orchestrated one of the greatest triple plays in baseball history.
In November 2001, I allowed John Henry, who owned the struggling Florida Marlins, to become the lead investor in the Werner-Lucchino group. That put the process into overdrive, and on December 20 we announced the following: the Red Sox were being sold to the Henry-Werner-Lucchino group; Loria was essentially exchanging his ownership position in the Expos for one with the Marlins; and Major League Baseball was taking over the Expos, with the possibility that they’d soon become the first team to relocate since the Washington Senators moved to Texas in 1972.
It really was impossible for the Expos to stay in business without a new stadium, and there were no reasons to be hopeful we’d solve that problem. In the meantime, we’d do the best we could in Montreal, hiring Omar Minaya to be the general manager and Frank Robinson as manager.
They were both great for the three seasons we operated in Montreal before we moved the team to Washington for the 2006 season, while we were in the final stages of negotiations that would lead to the team being sold to Ted Lerner for $450 million.
Major League Baseball had suffered through ten franchise shifts from 1953 through ’72, but this was the only one during my tenure. I’m asked how I could allow this to happen given my feelings when the Braves left Milwaukee. Well, there’s an enormous difference. The Braves could have stayed in Milwaukee. We had put together an ownership group that could have purchased the team, and we had a workable stadium in p
lace. The Braves’ ownership was simply looking for greener pastures. This was the opposite situation.
We looked for viable solutions in Montreal and couldn’t find them. There was no stadium and no ownership group. Moving was our last option, and it brought none of us joy to eventually use it.
On the other hand, I was thrilled to have Henry and Werner in charge of the Red Sox, in large part because they understood firsthand the difficulties that small-market teams face. I also knew Lucchino would work hard to put the luster back on Fenway Park, and he did. He utilized the imagination of Janet Marie Smith, who had played a huge role in executing Larry’s vision for Camden Yards. I certainly wouldn’t have ever pictured putting seats on top of the Green Monster in left field, but they did it, and it is a wonderful addition to the park.
Shaughnessy, who is a lifelong friend of mine, screamed in the Boston Globe that the Red Sox sale was “a bag job” that screwed worthy prospective buyers who were local. I favor local ownership. I always have. But in this case the creative solution, the one I engineered, was the right one.
Henry’s group poured more than $280 million of its money into improving Fenway and continues to give Boston a run of historic teams. John tried to hire Billy Beane away from the Oakland A’s to be his first general manager but couldn’t convince him to leave the West Coast. That probably turned out for the best, as his second choice was Theo Epstein, a Brookline native who was only twenty-eight when he took over the team he had followed passionately. Theo is one of my favorite executives in the game. He’s incredibly bright, but he’s also a great people person. He really treats everyone well, including players and low-level staffers. His love for the game can’t be questioned, and he’s one of the hardest workers anywhere.