by Bud Selig
Owners noticed how smoothly things were running. I had been given a three-year contract when I was formally named commissioner in 1998, and had three more years added on to that deal in November 2001, when we were positioning ourselves for the historic labor negotiations that would conclude the next summer. That deal was due to run out in 2006, but in August 2004, the owners persuaded me to stay for three more years, through 2009.
Fred Wilpon of the Mets paid me a great compliment that day.
“I have been in baseball nearly twenty-five years, and in that time I have never known anyone more dedicated and more devoted to the game than Bud Selig,” Wilpon said. “Baseball is in great shape today because of Buddy.”
Revenues had grown to $4.1 billion when that first extension was announced, an increase of more than 156 percent since I stepped in for Fay Vincent in 1992, and would keep growing. I would receive two more extensions as commissioner, with the final one being announced in January 2012, after a unanimous 30–0 vote. It ran through the 2014 season, meaning I would be on the job until after my eightieth birthday.
No one believes me, but I really did mean it when I told Sue I’d have the job for only a few months, then go back to being the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers. But I arrived with a job to do and I committed myself to getting the job done. The owners appreciated the difference I was making for them, especially those like Jerry Reinsdorf who were baseball historians. They understood how I’d changed the nature of the position and how much better off baseball was with the model that I’d ultimately hand over to Rob Manfred.
At that meeting in St. Louis in 1998, I told the owners to judge me on the value of their franchises. It’s fair to say they did all right while I was in charge.
Nothing speaks to that dynamic more strongly than the strange chapter we experienced with the Dodgers under Frank McCourt, who shouldn’t have been allowed to buy the team in the first place.
The O’Malley family had owned the Dodgers since Walter O’Malley bought a controlling interest in the then-Brooklyn Dodgers in 1950. Like so many other valued ownership groups, the family decided to get out of the baseball business after our long run of failed labor deals, including the strike that caused us to end the 1994 season in August. When the O’Malleys sold the Dodgers in early ’98, they got $311 million from Rupert Murdoch’s Fox Group, at the time the most anyone had ever paid for a sports team. But Murdoch decided to sell the team himself only six years later and no one in Los Angeles stepped up to buy it.
I was shocked by the lack of interest. I didn’t know why a franchise based at Dodger Stadium, with the iconic Vin Scully calling games, wasn’t viewed as being more attractive. I’ve never figured it out. But the one person who was really banging the drum to get the team was Frank McCourt, a Boston businessman who had tried unsuccessfully to get the Red Sox from the Yawkey estate. He was into commercial real estate, especially parking lots, and we had a lot of questions about the kind of owner he’d make.
Bob Daly was running the Dodgers for Murdoch, and I really liked Bob. He was very good with everything he did in baseball. I wasn’t happy when Murdoch decided he wanted out and he didn’t want the process to drag out. We had been doing business with Fox for national telecasts since 1996, and the relationship had worked well for both sides.
McCourt offered Murdoch $371 million for the team, Dodger Stadium, and the Vero Beach spring training facilities. Bob Daly implored me to take the deal because Fox wanted to sell. I can’t say I knew McCourt, but I knew his name and his reputation. We approved the sale in 2004, as much as a favor to Fox ownership as anything, and we hoped for the best.
Big mistake.
A few years later, McCourt wound up in bankruptcy, which you would have thought would have hurt his leverage, especially with a franchise that hadn’t had interested buyers come forward in the recent past. Rob Manfred and I wound up taking a couple of trips to Delaware to meet with the bankruptcy judge there, as we worked to unravel this mess.
Then one night, right before we were anticipating holding an auction for the team, the most surprising thing happened. I got a call from McCourt saying he was selling the club to Mark Walter and Guggenheim Partners for $2.15 billion. Magic Johnson was in the new ownership group, which would be run by my old friend Stan Kasten, who had been Ted Turner’s guy in Atlanta and helped the Nationals gain footing in Washington.
I almost dropped the phone. I may have asked Frank to repeat the price he was getting for the team. I was floored, like everyone else who heard it.
In the end, we’ve probably never had an owner who did better for himself in baseball than McCourt, whose own performance was more like that of a ham-fisted shortstop who couldn’t hit the fastball than a perennial All-Star. He didn’t just become the first owner to sell a baseball team for a billion dollars. He went straight to two billion dollars, partly on the strength of their local television rights. The sale closed in 2012, and the next year the Dodgers did a deal with Time Warner Cable that is valued at $8.35 billion over twenty-five years—or $334 million per year.
That’s not a great thing for disparity, as it is more revenue than many of our teams produce in a year, but it said a lot for the health of a game that I often described as a nightmare when I stepped in.
There was some gnashing of teeth in the front offices of National League teams about this windfall, which could heavily impact the Dodgers’ rivals in the NL West. But in terms of our corporate bottom line, you wouldn’t be wrong if you said there were twenty-nine other owners who were finally happy with something McCourt did.
23
THERE ARE TIMES you’ll never forget if you live to be a hundred. Conversations, too.
I had one of those talks with John Schuerholz on a Monday in December 2016, at the Gaylord National Harbor Hotel, outside of Washington, D.C.
I’d known John forever, maybe a little longer than forever. He had cut his teeth as a farm director and, while I was operating the Brewers and then moving into the commissioner’s office, he built two baseball powerhouses, first with the Royals in the 1980s and then with the Greg Maddux–John Smoltz–Tom Glavine Braves in Atlanta in the nineties and beyond.
He served as chairman on my fourteen-person committee for on-field matters. We talked all the time on the phone and enjoyed each other’s company when we got together.
But we’d never had a day or a conversation like this one. The day before we had found out that we had been elected to the Major League Baseball Hall of Fame by a sixteen-person panel of Hall of Fame players, executives, writers, and broadcasters.
It takes more than a day for something like that to sink in when it happens to you. Trust me. I’ll never forget the talk we had when he and I were alone. I think we were both still in shock. I started to roll off the names of iconic ballplayers and legends who had long ago gone into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.
“Babe Ruth . . . Lou Gehrig . . . Joe DiMaggio . . . Ted Williams . . . Henry Aaron . . . Mickey Mantle . . . Willie Mays . . . Jackie Robinson . . . Branch Rickey,” I said, pausing for a long while before I completed my thought.
“And you and me, John?”
We both just laughed and probably cried a little bit, too. It was really hard to comprehend that I’d been elected to Cooperstown. I’m sure it was for John, too.
When you’re a kid, you could not even have conceived of this honor. There will never be any doubt that being a baseball Hall of Famer is the greatest honor of my life.
We had traveled to the site of the winter meetings for a press conference with Jane Forbes Clark and Jeff Idelson of the Hall. I believe I flew, but I’m not sure I needed an airplane.
The phone calls that came in were wonderful. Hank Aaron called. Paul Molitor called. Many, many friends called, including guys like Herb Kohl and my other brothers at Pi Lambda Phi, whom I had known practically forever.
I thought back to the early years, after I’d replaced Fay Vincent and was trying to get baseball’s ownership on even
footing with the players union while dealing with the initially baffling, then persistent issues with steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. I thought of that horrible day when I stepped in front of television cameras at County Stadium to announce there wasn’t going to be a 1994 World Series.
Everything I did was controversial. I took daily poundings in the press and was ridiculed and mocked by Donald Fehr, Gene Orza, and Marvin Miller. It was brutal.
Who could have ever dreamed I was going to end up in the Hall of Fame?
But I persisted and wound up serving almost seventeen years as commissioner and leading baseball for twenty-three overall. These were pivotal years for the sport, and I moved it forward with clear eyes, an open mind, and a willingness to make personal sacrifices for the good of the game.
Yet me in the Hall of Fame? It stretched my imagination almost as much as it did those who had minimized me when I was getting started, who had asked what a small-town guy was doing with so much responsibility.
While players are first reviewed by ten-year members of the Baseball Writers Association of America (BBWAA), with 75 percent approval required for elections, there are a variety of paths to the Hall of Fame. The rules are adjusted from time to time to find ways to make the best judgments, but one thing never changes—it is really, really hard to get inducted.
That’s the way it should be, too.
Voters are often criticized over the deserving candidates who haven’t yet been elected. Everybody has their short list of guys they’d like to see in. Mine starts with Ted Simmons, the catcher who was so great for the Cardinals and the Brewers, but it is understandable why opinions are so split.
In my view, the Hall of Fame is another way in which baseball is superior to other sports. They all honor the greats in their game, but it’s how you define great that makes the difference. It seems like there are ten or twelve NFL players elected every summer and almost as many for basketball’s Hall.
I’m not knocking them, but I want to be honest. There are few automatics with baseball’s Hall of Fame. I was nervous about whether I would make the cut.
The only path for executives is with what used to be called the Veterans Committee. That group has been overhauled into a trio of committees that vote by era. I was included on a ballot for the Today’s Game committee, along with Schuerholz and eight others (George Steinbrenner, Lou Piniella, Harold Baines, Will Clark, Albert Belle, Orel Hershiser, Mark McGwire, and Davey Johnson).
A sixteen-person panel met over a weekend in Washington, D.C., debating the merits of the ten candidates. It is a really thoughtful way to consider executives, umpires, and players who have been passed over by the BBWAA.
I knew it would take twelve votes for me to be elected, with word coming down on Sunday, December 4. My family gathered together in Milwaukee to await the vote.
I had been told that Jane Forbes Clark, the chairperson of the Hall, would call sometime between 4:15 in the afternoon, Milwaukee time, and 4:45 P.M. if I had been elected. I had been through the process as commissioner for almost twenty-three years, so I knew the drill.
While I was the commissioner, I’d always get the courtesy of receiving the first call from Jane. She’d call me to tell me who had gotten in before she’d notify those who had been elected. But now I was in a completely different position. It was an agonizing wait, as I’d heard from so many others.
I didn’t have to wait too long, but I’ll admit that when the phone didn’t ring at 4:15 I began to think it might not be my time. I think it was 4:17 when it rang, and Jane was on the other end of the line.
“You’ve been elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot,” Jane said. “Congratulations.”
Talk about achieving something beyond your wildest dreams. This was that for me.
Adding to my excitement, the BBWAA elected a large class that year. When results of the writers’ voting was announced in early January, Ivan Rodriguez was elected in his first time on the ballot and both Tim Raines and Jeff Bagwell got beyond 75 percent after slow climbs upward in voting.
Suddenly Schuerholtz and I were in a five-person class, which was great. I was more than happy to share my excitement—and my nervousness—with these men.
Abner Doubleday was a two-star general in the Union army in the Civil War, amazingly enough fighting at both Fort Sumter and Gettysburg. But that’s not what he’s known for, of course. He’s been widely believed to have played a major role in inventing baseball in a cow pasture outside Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.
Some baseball historians consider this a myth, however, pointing to Alexander Cartwright of the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball Club or even a handful of others. It’s a point of unending debate, like the designated hitter rule. But credit Stephen C. Clark for bringing the baseball world to Doubleday country in upstate New York.
The fabulous Otesaga Resort Hotel was opened by the Clark family in 1909, along the banks of Lake Otsego, which really is as pretty as a picture. Business dropped off during the Great Depression, and Clark settled on Cooperstown’s ties to Doubleday and baseball as a way to bring people to the sleepy village.
Clark founded the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1936, inducting the first class of Hall of Famers in 1939, after completing construction on the building. It was an instant success, with some of baseball’s legends making the long trip by train and automobile to be honored. That eleven-man group included Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, Walter Johnson, and Cy Young.
Believe me, I was just as thrilled as any of them when induction day came on July 30, 2017. I had been to Cooperstown dozens of times before, enjoying every trip. That included one about three months before the induction.
I was invited up for an orientation visit, with the Hall of Fame staff walking me through what I could expect in July. I also met with reporters that day, and a writer from a local paper reminded me that in the past I had been booed by fans who wanted Pete Rose in the Hall. He asked if I thought I’d get booed this time by the Montreal fans there to honor Raines.
I told him that it was certainly possible. If it happened, it would be the result of having to make tough decisions. We had exhausted all options before moving the Expos to Washington, D.C., and in the time since, Montreal had yet to fix its stadium problem or identify a strong ownership group there. Having seen the Braves move from Milwaukee to Atlanta, I certainly understood the fans’ pain.
But I was determined that baseball would make progress under my leadership, and the franchise’s move to Washington had worked well for the sport. It would be great for Montreal to eventually get a second chance, as we got in Milwaukee, but we never really had a chance to consider one on my watch.
While I was on that orientation visit, I took part in a tradition that most visitors to the Hall never know about. I was shown where my plaque would hang and then given a Sharpie to sign the wall. My autograph is now buried forever beneath the plaque.
Every moment of that orientation visit brought me pure joy. It was the best day I’d ever had in Cooperstown, and I knew it would be nothing compared to the upcoming weekend in July.
I was nervous when induction weekend arrived. How could I not be? I spent forever writing my speech, ultimately going through thirty-two different drafts.
The ending was always the same. I went with words that had come to me when I was honored at the New York writers’ dinner in January 2015, the evening of my last night as commissioner. The New York chapter of the Baseball Writers Association of America presented me with their William J. Slocum Award for long and meritorious service.
That was almost as emotional for me as the day in Cooperstown. I had a prepared speech, but at the end I ad-libbed a finish that came to me as I stood at the podium.
“What you’ve seen in my career is the story of a little boy’s dreams that came true,” I said.
That was really the best way I could put it, and I knew I’d said it well when Sandy Koufax came over to me afterward and said I had brought tears to
his eyes. He was a hero of mine, of course, but we shared the same love for baseball. That’s what is so great about all the Hall of Famers.
They care about the game the same way I care about the game. It was so great to be in the company of Henry Aaron, Frank Robinson, Koufax, and all the greats that weekend.
There was a Hall of Fame party for us on Friday night, which was wonderful. All of the returning Hall of Famers were there, along with writers who had won the Spink Award and broadcasters who had won the Frick Award. That meant Bob Uecker was there, which always makes a room better.
Robin Yount came over to talk. “When we met in 1974, who could have imagined that Bob Uecker, you, and me would be in the Hall of Fame together?” he said, and he got very emotional. I never see him when I don’t think about that night in 1982 at County Stadium, when he chased me out into the concourse to tell me he was playing the game no matter what the doctors and trainers said.
Remember what he said? He said he was playing because that’s what ballplayers do. Well, these Hall of Famers were cut from the same cloth as Robin.
Henry, my friend of nearly sixty years, was there. He had been more nervous than I was about whether I would get in. Frank Robinson, whom I had known for more than forty years and who had been with me through much of my commissionership, was there. It was a great night and a great feeling.
On Saturday night, the Braves and Brewers got together to throw a party for John Schuerholz and me. That was great, but there were times I was almost overwhelmed. The whole experience was beginning to hit me.
I slept well Saturday night—I’ve never had a problem sleeping—and was excited when I got up. It was a gorgeous day in upstate New York and, as a bonus, it was my eighty-third birthday. I’d never received a gift like this.
I wasn’t alone much that day, but when I was, my thoughts turned to my mother and father and all the people who had helped me along the way. I knew I would mention John Fetzer, Carl Pohlad, and George Steinbrenner in my speech, but I felt bad that I couldn’t mention everyone. How could I? I had gone through three or four generations of baseball people. I trust they all know how important they are to me.