Bud Selig

Businessman

• Born: July 30, 1934
• Place of Birth: Milwaukee, Wisconsin

BUSINESS EXECUTIVE

Selig brought baseball back to his hometown of Milwaukee in the early 1970s, but his contributions are often overshadowed by scandals that occurred when he was commissioner of baseball.

AREAS OF ACHIEVEMENT: Business; sports

Early Life

Allan Huber “Bud” Selig was born in July 1934, in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to Ben and Marie Selig, Jewish immigrants from Romania and Ukraine who came to the United States as children. Ben was a successful automotive salesman who owned and operated a dealership specializing in the leasing of automobiles in the greater Milwaukee area. A college graduate, Marie was a schoolteacher. Selig’s father, not known as a sports fan, attended few games, but Marie was a driving force behind developing Selig and his brother’s love for the game. She would take the children to see minor league baseball games in and around Milwaukee regularly.

While Selig was a devoted baseball fan, he also loved the classroom. After successful completion of high school, he attended and graduated from the University of Wisconsin, Madison. After getting degrees in history and political science in 1956 at age twenty-two, Selig embarked on a two-year stint in the military, and eventually he ended up back home, working for his father. The career path he chose would be a successful one. In 1958, when Selig returned home to work with his father, it was deemed a “part-time” solution until Selig found employment. However, Selig remained at Selig Executive Leasing Company, which helped propel him into roles as a baseball team owner, an interim commissioner, and eventually the commissioner of America’s greatest pastime.

Life’s Work

Selig had three passions: baseball, money, and the city of Milwaukee. He was successful in all three. His passion for baseball began to blossom at age nineteen, when the Boston Braves moved their operations to Milwaukee. Then his days at the ballpark were not limited to day trips to Chicago to watch the Cubs or watching minor league ball in his hometown. The Milwaukee Braves stayed in town for twelve years. During this time, Selig graduated from high school and college, served in the military, and returned home to help run one of the city’s successful automobile dealerships. The Milwaukee Braves made their debut in 1953 and drew nearly two million fans in their first year, a record at the time. The team finished in second place in their first year, followed by third place in 1954 and back-to-back second-place finishes in 1955 and 1956. In 1957 the team beat the New York Yankees in six games to become champions of major-league baseball. The Braves lost the 1958 rematch to the Yankees, and over the next few seasons Selig would become one of the Braves’ largest public stockholders.

When rumors swirled in 1963 about a possible move of the Braves to a larger television network and a warmer climate, Selig was the first to fight for the city of Milwaukee. In 1964, he sued to prevent the possible relocation of the team to Atlanta. He was granted an injunction, but eventually the move was allowed. Following the 1965 season, Selig saw his hometown team become the Atlanta Braves.

Selig did not give up on the game. He organized and ran Milwaukee Brewers Baseball Incorporated, a group aimed at bringing baseball back to the city. Selig’s efforts paid off when the Seattle Pilots moved to Milwaukee in 1970. Although baseball was in Milwaukee, the success the Braves organization had had in the city did not follow the Brewers. From 1970 to 1977, the Milwaukee Brewers did not have a winning season. During the first eight years as team president, Selig organized a trade for city favorite Hank Aaron, brought in Brewer all-time great Robin Yount, as well as Jim Gantner and Cecil Cooper. Selig also was prominent in creating one of baseball’s best-known mascots, Bernie Brewer.

From 1978 to 1993, the Brewers had minimal success. As the success of the team picked up in 1978, it finished in second place in the American League, but it would not gain a World Series title until 1982. The Brewers lost a seven-game series, four to three, to the St. Louis Cardinals.

During the 1985 to 1987 seasons, Selig and other Major League Baseball (MLB) team owners were involved in a collusion scandal. It involved owners refusing to sign players in order to make them remain with their current teams for less money. Over the span of three years, baseball revenues increased by 15 percent while players’ salaries decreased by nearly 17 percent. Acting commissioner Fay Vincent called the scandal “a black eye on baseball,” and it was assumed that the scandal was spearheaded by Selig. The owners had to pay the players affected more than $280 million. However, this was not a setback for Selig. He sold the ownership rights to a Los Angeles firm and turned over presidential duties to his daughter, so he could pursue the position of commissioner of baseball. When Selig’s fellow owners gave Vincent a no-confidence vote of 18–9 in 1992, he resigned. The newly appointed interim commissioner was Selig.

Selig did not begin quietly. In 1993, he suspended Cincinnati Reds owner Marge Schott for making repeated racial slurs deemed public embarrassments to professional baseball. Selig also reinstated his longtime friend George Steinbrenner, the owner of the New York Yankees, who had been caught attempting to pay a bookie more than forty thousand dollars to find some negative news on Steinbrenner’s overpaid, under-producing superstar Dave Winfield.

From August 12, 1994, to April 2, 1995, major-league baseball ceased. A work stoppage, the eighth in baseball history, canceled the postseason and the World Series, the first time since 1904. The baseball strike of 1994 had a long-term effect on the game. It lasted 232 days, during which players and owners argued over the legality of the new proposals by baseball. At issue were player pensions, salaries, salary cap, and the use of replacement players and umpires. Several managers, such as Sparky Anderson of the Detroit Tigers, were suspended for refusal to manage “scabs,” or replacement players, and other organizations, such as the Baltimore Orioles, used legal action to block the use of replacement players in their parks. Baseball finally returned to a shortened season in 1995, although not all the fans were happy. Demonstrations at nearly all the parks on opening day and the weeks and months to follow included booing, critical signs, pickets, the burning of merchandise, and banners on planes, trains, and city buses, voicing the disapproval of baseball fans. Selig, who was part of the collusion the 1980s, became part of the largest work stoppage in baseball history for refusing to work with the players’ union in the 1990s.

On July 9, 1998, the thirty MLB owners unanimously elected Selig commissioner. As commissioner, he presided over several structural changes to the way MLB baseball is played. These included an unbalanced schedule, interleague play between American League (AL) and National League (NL) teams during the regular season; a lengthened Wild Card postseason format, restoration of the rulebook strike zone, and administrative consolidation of the AL and NL, among others. Selig’s tenure is also noted for several milestones. As commissioner, Selig led work on a labor agreement between the MLB clubs and the MLB Players Association in August 2002. The agreement helped the league avoid a strike or lockout, while also providing the clubs with economic concessions. In October 2006 the clubs and the Players Association successfully closed a five-year collective bargaining agreement, leading to an extended period without work stoppages.

In 2002, tied 7–7 in the eleventh inning in the All-Star game, both squads ran out of pitchers. Selig, fearing injury to the pitchers, ordered the game a tie in his hometown of Milwaukee. This did little to garner any support from baseball fans who were already angry at Selig for refusing to reinstate Cincinnati Reds great Pete Rose, banned for gambling, to baseball the same year.

In 2006, Selig was accused of ignoring one of the great travesties in baseball history: the continued use of steroids and other illegal performance enhancers in the league. In response, Selig asked former US senator George Mitchell to investigate. Mitchell did so, and released Report to the Commissioner of Baseball of an Independent Investigation into the Illegal Use of Steroids and Other Performance-Enhancing Substances by Players in Major League Baseball (2007). The Mitchell Report, as it was called informally, accused about seventy MLB players in the league of using illegal performance enhancers. Those named included some of the most prominent players in the sport, including Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, and Andy Pettitte. The report also offered nineteen suggestions for ways the league could move forward. Selig vowed to implement as many of them as he could, and more.

Selig retired as baseball commissioner in January 2015. In February 2016, Arizona State University announced that Selig would join its law school’s sports and business program as a teacher, founding president of the program's advisory board, and leader of the Bud Selig Speaker Series on Sports in America. Selig has also taught at Marquette University Law School and the University of Wisconsin.

Significance

Although Selig helped to bring baseball into the modern era with interleague play and wild-card play for postseason formats, and his leadership helped bring about decades of labor peace between the MLB clubs and the players’ association, his negative actions as commissioner threatened to overshadow his positive attempts to improve the game. It was argued Selig knew and often encouraged players to hit home runs and to boost performance. As balls flew out of the park and pitchers won twenty-plus games and struck out players with one-hundred-mile-per-hour fastballs, baseball was regaining glory from the dark 1994 strike days and producing billions of dollars in profit, although tainted to the core. During his reign, Selig was part of the largest criminal investigation into the use of drugs in baseball, larger than the cocaine problems of major-league baseball in the 1980s, and he was ordered on numerous occasions to testify in front of Congress regarding these allegations.

Bibliography

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McCalvy, Adam. "'He's a Hero': Selig Remembers Life, Legacy of Late Billy Bean." MLB, 10 Aug. 2024, www.mlb.com/news/bud-selig-remembers-billy-bean. Accessed 2 Sept. 2024.

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Zimbalist, Andrew. In the Best Interests of Baseball: The Revolutionary Reign of Bud Selig. Hoboken: Wiley, 2007. Print.