by Bud Selig
Under Epstein, the Red Sox broke the so-called Curse of the Bambino in 2004, winning the World Series for the first time since 1918. They did it even though they hadn’t won the division. That Red Sox team won ninety-eight games but finished behind the Yankees, qualifying for the postseason as a wild card team.
They were one of six wild card teams to win the World Series in an eighteen-year stretch between 1997 (Marlins) and 2014 (Giants). It’s funny, looking back, how much criticism I received from Bob Costas and other purists when I expanded the postseason beyond four teams. The competition created by the fight for wild card spots has changed the late-season dynamic in baseball, exactly as I hoped it would.
Commissioners are supposed to be unbiased, I know, but I’ll admit I was happy when the Red Sox pulled off their incredibly dramatic escape in the ’04 AL Championship Series, somehow beating the Yankees after being on the verge of being swept.
This was great, high-wire baseball, with one of our best rivalries thrown in for no extra cost. Terry Francona was brilliant as the Red Sox manager, as were players like Pedro Martinez and David Ortiz. It was good for almost everybody not living in St. Louis when the Red Sox swept the Cardinals in the World Series, and it’s been healthy for the sport that the Sox have just continued winning, with titles in 2007, 2013, and 2018.
A similar renaissance took place with the Cubs after they were sold. Sam Zell had purchased the Tribune Company, whose holdings included the long-suffering (but tremendously popular) Cubs, and he didn’t want to be in the baseball business. We went through a thorough, methodical process that led us to what would eventually be an $845 million sale to Tom Ricketts, a longtime Cub fan who had met his wife in the Wrigley Field bleachers while he was in grad school at Northwestern.
There had been talk that this would be a billion-dollar transaction, but nobody was complaining about the final price. The Tribune Company had purchased the team from the Wrigley family for $20.5 million in 1981.
Names of other potential buyers popped up along the way, of course, including Dallas Mavericks owner Mark Cuban. He told newspapers he was interested, but when I asked Zell he said he wasn’t a serious factor. The only other strong group that emerged was one headed by John Canning, a former partner of mine in the Brewers, but in the end Ricketts was the choice.
Like Henry, Werner, and Lucchino in Boston, the Ricketts family was committed to improving Wrigley Field. I believe the condition of the old ballpark scared off a lot of investors, but Tom saw possibilities where others saw trouble. He poured money into the park, and both it and the neighborhood around it are looking better than ever. That makes me proud.
I’m also proud Tom Ricketts considers me a mentor to him. I certainly tried. He is one of those wise people who are smart enough to know what they don’t know, and was willing to take advantage of the short commute between Chicago and Milwaukee to see me a lot after he purchased the team. We spent a long time talking about how to run a franchise as well as the right way to view the sport. He probably got tired of me telling him John Fetzer stories, but he never asked me to knock it off.
Tom moved slowly in everything he did after purchasing the team, and I really respected that. He didn’t have the impulsiveness that so many new owners do, and I believe that worked for him in major ways. He had inherited Jim Hendry, a good baseball man, as his GM and left him in place for two seasons before deciding it was time to bring in a new general manager to execute his vision of a complete rebuild.
The Cubs’ drought was even longer than the Red Sox drought, dating back to 1908. But there was a feeling Chicago fans wouldn’t stand for a rebuild, so the Cubs were constantly patching things up by signing free agents or trading prospects for veterans. It was a cycle that had led them nowhere, and Ricketts recognized it. He was bold enough to seek a change.
His timing lined up perfectly with Epstein’s timing leaving Boston, and I got involved to help him hire Theo.
It’s hard to imagine the Red Sox could allow Epstein to leave, but there was tremendous tension between ownership and the front office after the run of championships began, and it boiled to the surface in 2011, when a September collapse caused the Sox to miss the postseason. Francona and the Sox had a mutual parting of the ways and Theo seemed ready to leave, too. But he had one year left on his contract, and the Sox ownership group wouldn’t let him leave without compensation.
The Red Sox might have been able to keep Epstein by giving him the title of president of baseball operations and letting him report directly to Henry, but that was a nonstarter, killing any chance at a contract extension. Ricketts received permission to talk to Epstein, but the Red Sox were being difficult about letting Epstein out of his deal. They wanted to receive some of the Cubs’ top prospects as compensation.
Talks were stalled, going nowhere, so I gave the teams a weekend to work out a deal. Ricketts was prepared to wait a year on Epstein if necessary, but that would have been a horrible year for everyone. It was pointless. Both teams needed to get on with their futures. I finally persuaded Henry, Werner, and Lucchino to do what was good for baseball, which was for Theo to come to Chicago. They agreed to a deal that involved some minor compensation, and Ricketts had his man.
Theo was thrilled and so thankful. He wanted to come to Milwaukee to thank me in person, but I told him it wasn’t necessary. He had more important things to do, and wouldn’t you know he got right to work and did a wonderful job?
The Cubs endured 101 losses in 2012, their first with a hundred losses since 1966, but by 2015 they had become a perennial postseason team. They recovered from a three-games-to-one deficit to beat Cleveland in the 2016 World Series, winning game 7 in ten dramatic innings, after the best rain delay in their history.
An estimated five million people attended the Cubs’ parade and celebration in Chicago, and championship merchandise sales shattered records. I was so happy for Tom Ricketts and the baseball fans in Chicago. Wrigley Field hasn’t just been preserved but has become a place for joyous gatherings, which is exactly what a ballpark should always be.
22
ONE OF THE lessons I learned from my father was that something is only good or bad in comparison to something else. That was one of his favorite sayings.
Major League Baseball was always being compared to the NFL, and it never really seemed fair to me. I think Bowie Kuhn had it right about baseball always being held to a higher standard. Sometimes it seems like we never get credit for doing things right even when we are doing really good work.
Our work in getting a strong policy to limit the use of performance-enhancing drugs by our players is a prime example. We have the toughest testing program in sports, and we had to go through hell to get it. You can ask all the experts, reporters who cover steroid issues, like ESPN’s T. J. Quinn, or even the guys at the World Anti-Doping Association.
After the 1998 home run race exposed the steroid issue for baseball, I began meeting annually with team doctors and the professional athletic trainers working for clubs. I love those guys and really looked forward to those meetings. Every time we met, they would ask me why steroids weren’t a bigger issue for the NFL. We used to sit there and get killed by the media and fans, and then Paul Tagliabue, the NFL commissioner, and Gene Upshaw, head of the football union, would say they had a great drug program and everybody believed them. End of story.
Despite all the issues with brain injuries, despite teams moving around willy-nilly, and despite a steroid policy that has far fewer teeth to it than the one in baseball, the NFL still can’t do much wrong with the public. If it sounds like I’m jealous, I’m really not.
The problem with PEDs is a broad one, impacting all sports. But really the only times anyone seems to care is when a baseball player or Olympic athlete tests positive.
Look at how many chances the public was willing to give Lance Armstrong. There are probably still some people who believe he got railroaded, even though there’s no question he built his career by getting around th
e testing rules as long as he could.
Bowie was right. Baseball is held to a higher standard. That’s fine with me, too.
Our game is better. We should be held to a higher standard, even when it stings.
Our drug testing program isn’t the only place where we’ve passed the NFL and become the industry standard. I’m also very proud of the replay system we put in place, although I will admit it took a long time to convince me we should let technology override umpires and the human element that has made baseball so intriguing.
I always worried about disturbing the game. Older fans remember the confrontations that managers like Billy Martin, Earl Weaver, and Leo Durocher had with umpires. Crowds enjoyed it, I think, except maybe when it was a big call that went against their team. The umpires didn’t enjoy that. Bill Haller certainly didn’t with Earl, as you may remember.
But I always wind up with a smile on my face when I watch the tape of Weaver and Haller going back and forth after Haller called a balk on Mike Flanagan. I wasn’t sure I wanted to eliminate that drama—and sometimes comedic relief—from the game, especially when I watched what was happening in the NFL.
The NFL first experimented with instant replay in 1976, put it in for the ’86 season, and killed it in ’91. Owners didn’t approve it again until the ’99 season. I didn’t want that to happen in baseball. We weren’t going to jump into it until we knew we had a system that would work.
Shortly after the NFL first implemented replay, Peter Ueberroth was getting pressure to use television cameras to help umpires on tough calls. He never seriously considered it.
“The umpires making split-second decisions is part of the flavor of the game,” Ueberroth said. “We don’t want to lose that flavor. You can make a dish so bland that it’s not worth sitting down at the table.”
I was worried about that, too, but at some point MLB’s technology became so advanced, it seemed wrong to continue to put all the responsibility for calls on umpires, who are never going to be perfect. Don Denkinger made a famous mistake in the 1985 World Series that hung over him for the rest of his career. Rich Garcia, like Denkinger an excellent umpire with a great track record, was in the right spot on the field but still made the wrong call when a twelve-year-old Yankee fan named Jeffrey Maier reached over the fence to grab a long fly from Derek Jeter, with the Orioles’ Tony Tarasco waiting to catch it.
It was getting harder and harder to know if balls were home runs, in part because of the way ballparks were being built, each with its own unique lines. Brad Ausmus hit a homer in the 2005 National League Championship Series that banged off the left-field wall, just above a yellow line, but in an area of Minute Maid Park that’s a real patchwork quilt. Umps got the call right, I think, but no one could blame them if they had missed it.
No longer could we go with the spirit of Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem. He was once shown a newspaper photo of a blown call and replied, “Gentlemen, he was out because I said he was out.”
We decided it was time to use replay but only in a limited way, on home run calls—whether it was fair or foul, whether the ball cleared the boundary. That was all I was willing to do initially. We experimented with it late in the 2008 season and then put it in play for the postseason and beyond, and it was a success.
It was about this time that I created a fourteen-man committee for on-field matters to study ways that we could improve the game. I included some of the best managers in the game on that committee, with active managers Tony La Russa, Jim Leyland, and Mike Scioscia joining Joe Torre and Frank Robinson, and they took the job very seriously. All of the managers were in favor of expanding replay to consider calls on the bases and catches in the outfield. Tony was especially passionate and, eventually, persuasive. I didn’t lead those guys to their recommendation; they overcame my resistance to change.
I was a willing listener. Tony was really the one who kept after me. The more we would talk, the more I would like it. That’s where our expanded replay came from.
I don’t think this was responsible for anything we did, but I remember being really impacted by the game in 2010 when Jim Joyce, a great umpire, missed a call that cost the Tigers’ Armando Galarraga a perfect game. That was both a horrible moment and a great one at the same time. Everybody involved handled the situation so beautifully, especially Joyce and Galarraga. They even got together to write a book about it a few years later.
I like Joyce. He’s a nice guy. I knew he felt so bad about that call. He told me so himself the next time I saw him. I’m sure he would have liked to have replay. The umpires have been great about it. There might have been a few who resented it at the start, but I think everybody understands what we were doing when we expanded it for the 2014 season, giving managers their own challenges.
I remember that first April we put it in place. I had spent the weekend in Phoenix and was coming back to Milwaukee. I walked into my house at about seven o’clock and the phone was ringing. I debated whether to answer it, but I did. It was Tony. He said, “Did you see the games today?”
He said there were at least five or six instances where replay really worked well. He was so happy because he had been the one, more than anyone else, who helped me finally pull the trigger. With all the changes I made, I wasn’t sure about this one. I guess my conservative instincts took over. I give that committee credit. They were really for it.
Now there’s talk about using cameras to call balls and strikes, with an electronic eye. I know exactly how that could work because my wife Sue watches a lot of tennis. I see how quick and accurate those reviews are. But I can’t imagine taking the discretion away from a home plate umpire. There’s still something to be said for the human element. It just wouldn’t be right if they were buzzing the umpire’s left ear for a strike and right ear for a ball, or however it would work.
I can’t see it. But there was a time when I couldn’t see instant replay at all, and now it’s not only a part of the game but it’s working very well.
The business grew healthier with each passing year following the labor deal of 2002. We continued to grow the game, not simply facing one crisis after another, and everyone involved in the major leagues benefited.
Both attendance and revenue grew on an annual basis and so did player salaries, rising from an average of about $2.3 million in 2002 to a little more than $3.8 million in 2014, my last season as commissioner.
That’s more than 65 percent growth, remarkable in any such stretch but truly stunning when you consider America suffered through a financial crisis that led to a major recession from December 2007 through the summer of 2009. It was the worst economic downturn since the Great Depression, and while it impacted many owners and almost all of our fans, it only slowed down our growth a little.
Derek Jeter and Albert Pujols, two of my favorite players, seemed to turn in strong work every season. We always had great story lines, like the brilliance of Ichiro Suzuki, a six-time batting champ in Japan before he arrived as both Rookie of the Year and MVP for the 2001 Mariners; Josh Hamilton gaining control over his personal demons to lead the Rangers to back-to-back World Series; and the resurgence of the Cardinals under Tony La Russa. Mike Trout hit .220 when he got to the Angels in 2011 but then turned into a modern Joe DiMaggio the next season. He hasn’t slowed down yet, bless him.
Joe Torre and George Steinbrenner thrived in a partnership that lasted twelve seasons, with the Yankees winning four championships and six American League pennants. The Yankees would win the World Series again in 2009 under Joe Girardi, with the rivalry between them and the Red Sox hotter than ever, but there was more competitive balance and late-season drama in baseball than in any period in history.
Twelve different teams had won a championship in the last eighteen years through 2018, when the Red Sox won their fourth in fifteen seasons, and twenty-six of the thirty had gone to the postseason within the last eight years. All thirty teams played postseason baseball from 1992 through 2018, with twenty-two reaching the World
Series.
This was the kind of competitive balance that I dreamed of when I sat through those horrific meetings over revenue sharing in Kohler, Wisconsin. It was a far cry from the sport I had grown up with, when the Yankees won fourteen of sixteen pennants and nine championships from 1949 through ’64.
In fact, we had more drama on one day in 2011 than in most of those seasons when the Yankees were dominating.
If I had to pick the wildest day of my tenure, I might go to September 28, 2011, when the 162nd game of the season decided two wild card races. It would make the short list for sure.
Four of the fifteen games played that day were essentially win-or-go-home affairs, and an improbable comeback by the Rays over the Yankees—they scored six runs in the eighth, tied the game with a homer by Dan Johnson in the ninth, and finally won in the twelfth—knocked the Red Sox out of the playoffs. The Phillies, meanwhile, were busy gutting the Braves in thirteen innings, which allowed the Cardinals to slip into the postseason.
La Russa’s team would have been eliminated if Chris Carpenter hadn’t won in Houston that day but somehow wound up holding a World Series parade through the streets of St. Louis.
The Rangers had been set to celebrate a championship in six games, which would have brought redemption from a loss to the Giants in the 2010 Series, but Nelson Cruz allowed a ninth-inning drive by David Freese to get over his head. Hamilton gave Texas another lead with a tenth-inning home run, but the Cardinals tied the game in the tenth and won in the eleventh, setting up the decisive—and anticlimactic—game 7.
We expanded the playoffs the following November, adding a second wild card team in each league. If you didn’t win your division, you’d have to beat the other wild card team to reach the division series, guaranteeing the postseason would begin with must-win games.
It can be a cruel format—just ask the Pirates, who were beaten by the Cubs’ Jake Arrieta in 2015 and the Giants’ Madison Bumgarner in ’16—but it really rewards the teams that win divisions, giving them something to play for in September when there are two or more strong teams in the same division.