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In the Best Interests of Baseball? The Revolutionary Reign of Bud Selig

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Bud Selig has effectively been baseball's commissioner for fifteen controversy packed years (think: strike, revenue sharing, blue ribbon panel on competitive balance, luxury tax, contraction plan, steroids, eclipse by football as the national pastime...). During this period the most incisive writer on baseball's organisational and economic woes has been Andy Zimbalist. Zimbalist has also been one of Selig's harshest critics (read any of his work and you will never find the word "mis-step" far from Selig's name). So don't you want to know what happened when Selig called in Zimbalist for fireside chat?

This book not only gives us a profound insight into both sides of this story, it also does the useful job of setting it in context. There can be few positions in the world of sport where a figure is burdened with such high expectations but has so little "wiggle room", as Zimbalist puts it. The book details the historical evolution of the commissioner and ends up crediting Selig with the re-invention of the position as conciliator-in-chief.

How sports leagues manage themselves is a vital issue for the fans and for the future of the game. Reading this will get you bang up-to-date with what is going on right now.

Baseball may look pretty on the surface, but it stinks underneath, a scam perpetuated by generations of greedy, myopic owners and the stooges they make their commissioners. That's one way to describe the thesis of this 2006 book by noted sports labor scholar Andrew Zimbalist.

It's a bold thesis with more than a grain of truth behind it; a tack one might expect from a labor guy, but Zimbalist knows his facts. Too bad the book itself is such a boring, repetitive mess, done in largely by its supposed coup, Zimbalist's interview with baseball's current Dark Lord, Bud Selig, who seems to successfully schmooze Zimbalist from seeing his thesis out to its grisly end.

Did Selig fool the state of Wisconsin into building him a stadium on the public dime by falsely claiming he would make his Brewers into a competitive franchise once again? Zimbalist marshals the facts to say Selig spoke from both sides of his mouth, but he doesn't come out and say it. That collusion thing the owners did in the 1980s, cheating free agent players of open-market opportunities? Commissioner Peter Uebberoth was the bad guy there; Selig was just taking orders. That cancelled World Series? Steroids?

"Selig might have acted more aggressively, more consistently, and more persuasively than he did," Zimbalist writes. "However, arguing that his actions were short of ideal is different from arguing that his actions were wrong or devious."

Too bad none of Selig's predecessors get off so lightly. Ford Frick may have seen baseball prosper during his time as commissioner, from 1951 to 1965, but he carried water for his racist bosses and lacked vision. Bowie Kuhn (1969-84) was a sanctimonious fraud. Even Happy Chandler (1945-51), widely praised for his role in breaking baseball's color barrier, had an "unrealistic and grandiose perception of his role" that perpetuated his downfall.

None of those guys talked to Zimbalist. Selig did, and Zimbalist found him gentlemanly. So in taking on the institution of baseball, this iconoclast takes pains to speak well of the man at the center of the whole thing, the wizard behind the curtain.

Apparently Selig resented Zimbalist's book anyway, probably because baseball in its present state can bear little scrutiny, and Zimbalist, in his back-handed way, manages to shed some serious light on what's wrong with the game, like small-market teams that live off of revenue-sharing while fielding weak, cheap teams.

But that's only half of Zimbalist's scattershot book, which starts with brief, sometimes amusing, often acid takes on the tenures of each of Selig's predecessors. A core conceit of Zimbalist's book is that these were hollow men down the line, pretending to serve the game and its fans while working exclusively for the owners. It's a point he keeps making again and again, so that you notice how much plummier he gets when it comes time to talk about Selig.

Zimbalist fails to carry the lessons of Selig's predecessors to that of Selig himself, except to observe that Selig is a good consensus-builder but beholden to the greedy owners. Is Selig really part of the problem? Zimbalist doesn't say one way or another, he just closes by noting "the tasks ahead are as challenging as those that came before," an appropriately mealy-mouthed ending to a book that lacks the courage of its author's convictions.

Andrew Zimbalist appreciates better than anyone writing today that baseball is too much of a game to be a business and too much of a business to be a game. Bud Selig understands this dilemma too, and has walked the tightrope that is his lot better than anyone (except Zimbalist, in this fine book) has given him credit for. Symbolically an ombudsman for the game and the fans, Selig is nonetheless the employee of the owners and ignores that fact at his peril, as several of his predecessors found.

After years of faulting the commissioner's decisions and indecisions, the author now gives him the high marks he deserves for restoring the game to vitality and prosperity, despite owner handwringing that would lead one to think otherwise. Zimbalist is a consummate and impeccably credentialed outsider, and this splendid book is the real deal. Those who are determined to have Selig's head on a stick will be disappointed; rational baseball fans will rejoice in this tough but fair view of a decent man in a thankless job.

As to the historical overview of the commissionership, far from being warmed-over coals, much of this comes as news even to one expected to know a thing or two about baseball, and all of it is extended with fresh perspective. There is no one I'd rather read on the double helix of baseball and business.

Bud Selig's run as CEO of baseball has damaged the game. Adding a wild card was good. Inter-league play has lost it's novelty, a labor dispute cancelled the World Series, (something Hitler or Osama could not achieve)and greed combined with feigned ignorance led to the worse drug scandle in sports history.
The next best day in MLB is when Bud steps down, and a real commissioner takes the helm, not some lackey for the owners.

Dr. Zimbalist is an accomplished writer and has a wealth of experience examining the business side of major league baseball. This book, which is an excellent companion to "May the Best Team Win," looks at the history of the business side of baseball through the commissioners that have served from Landis (actually, even earlier, as he discusses the National Commission which ruled baseball until 1921) to Selig. Along the way, Dr. Zimbalist reviews what the commissioner's role involved and how that role evolved, the manner in which each commissioner made his mark (or in the case of William Eckert, left NO mark), and concludes on how effectively each served, given the context in which that service took place. The book proceeds from a couple of important premises, one being that major league baseball alone has been blessed with an antitrust exemption, sometimes a mixed blessing to be sure; and, the second being that because baseball existed in a competitive vacuum for decades, the enterprise and its leaders never had to attend to basic business practices like marketing the industry. Plus, the reserve clause, in effect until the Seitz decision of December 1975, protected owners from dealing with labor and labor costs, all of which led to an arrogance on the part of owners that all but brought MLB to its knees post-free agency. All of this is captured in a most compelling manner, and there is some really great insight provided about Landis, Chandler, Frick, Kuhn, Ueberroth, the much-beloved Bart Giamatti and Fay Vincent, much of which is unknown to all but real baseball zealots. But the real focus of the book is Bud Selig and Dr. Zimbalist weaves a very interesting story about the reign of Mr. Selig and what it has meant to MLB. There is a great deal of information about what Mr. Selig has had to do which helps to explain how MLB has changed so dramatically since the days of Bart Giamatti and Fay Vincent. All in all, this is a terrific book and one which has enhanced my knowledge of the ecomonics and business aspects of the game, and heightened my appreciation of the accomplishments of a guy whose major strong point is working the phones and building concensus among a group of highly successful individuals who have very, very different perspectives. Kind of like herding cats, but Selig has done it well, and baseball is prospering as a result.

I got this book expecting to read a 200-page treatise on the reigh of Bud Selig, only to find that the current commish doesn't enter the book until halfway through. The first half of the book is spent on the history of the commisioner's role in baseball, beginning with Landis and covering the 8 men who came before Bud. Not that there's anything inherently wrong with recapping history pre-Selig, but I found it overly long, and much of it was a rehashing of information I already knew.

The book does pick up when Selig enters the picture. Zimbalist is very complimentary towards Selig the person, even when he doesn't agree with Selig the commissioner. He doesn't ridicule him for him mistakes, or ignore them. He goes into very detailed coverage about several Selig issues, like revenue sharing, a luxury tax, CBA negotiation, and others. Overall, I thought it was a pretty fair and well-balanced portrait.

Finally, one problem I had with this book is that it doesn't flow well. It read at times like something I'd expect from Zimbalist as an economist, and not enough like something I'd expect from him as a writer. It's not poorly written, it's just that it never grips the reader like the best baseball writing does. Of course, this might be a somewhat unfair assessment given the topic.

Overall, I'd recommend this book for anyone interested in learning more about Selig. Scattered at times but still interesting, and relatively short at less than 220 pages.

What a crushing disappointment this book is. I couldn't help but be distracted from Zimbalist's thesis by the all too numerous typos and other errors. Albert Bell, Robb Nenn, Lou Pirini just to name a few misspellings. There are factual errors as well. I don't know whether this book needed a better editor or they just didn't care. Eitherway, this book is one to avoid for the serious baseball fan.