Bud Selig
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Bud Selig is the Brewers' former owner, Major League Baseball's current Commissioner-for-Life, and a former poster to pre-registration Baseball Primer when he was off duty.
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Bud as owner
In the 1960s, Bud was a car dealer in Milwaukee and local civic booster. When the expansion Pilots went bankrupt in 1969-70 and needed an owner, Bud saw a business opportunity and organized a coalition of local businessmen to buy the franchise and move it to Milwaukee.
In the 1970s and 1980s he was perceived as a good guy among baseball owners and the baseball media, a folksy contrast to the borderline psychotic behavior of George Steinbrenner and Charlie Finley. Although his Brewers were never consistent winners, they competed well enough periodically in the American League, getting to the World Series in 1982.
After that appearance, increasing revenue disparity between large market and small markets, which resulted in rising player salaries, made it more difficult for small-market owners like Bud to keep up with the titans. He made it his mission to install a salary cap in baseball over the MLB Players Association's objections, and made friends with other like-minded owners such as the White Sox' Jerry Reinsdorf.
In the 1990s the Selig group saw an opportunity to break the players union, but thought the baseball commissioner at the time, Fay Vincent, was being too soft on the players. He organized a consensus amongst the owners (some call it a palace coup) and forced Vincent to resign, naming himself temporary acting commissioner until a replacement could be selected. (In Vincent's book The Last Commissioner Vincent claims that Selig had always had designs on the Commissioner's post for himself.)
That replacement was never selected.
Bud as commissioner
1994 Strike
A 1994 players' strike resulted in Commissioner Selig canceling the World Series that year, which was not entirely unwelcome to him and his hard-line group, who immediately constructed a plan for MLB to declare a labor impasse and play 1995 with replacement players and a salary cap.
Only an unfavorable decision from the National Labor Relations Board forced Bud to take back the striking players and play without a cap, a situation which persisted until after the 1996 season, when an agreement that included limited revenue sharing was reached.
Accomplishments
In his term, Selig re-defined the role of the baseball commissioner. He did the following:
- centralized all baseball functions in his office (after destroying the separate offices of the American and National Leagues)
- created an office for the direct supervision of umpires (after breaking the umpires' union in 1999)
- introduced interleague play and the unbalanced schedule
- expanded playoffs to include 2 "Wild Card" teams, one from each league.
- increased TV presence nationally and internationally, particularly in Japan
- approved two new expansion franchises (the Diamondbacks and Devil Rays), moving his Brewers to the National League to accommodate them
- built a centralized collection of team web sites at MLB.com offering baseball news, audio and video
- introduced a new method for determining home-field advantage at the World Series (famously inspired by a tie at the 2002 All-Star Game in Milwaukee)
- advocated a wave of new, expensive MLB ballparks across America, mostly financed with public money
- bought the Expos with league money and made a failed effort to contract them, eventually relocating them to Washington after getting the DC government to provide the majority funding for a new, expensive ballpark
- negotiated a new labor agreement in 2002 that included increased revenue sharing and a luxury tax (averting a planned players' strike)
- instituted a new testing program for performance enhancing drugs
Selig shamelessly took full credit for all of this, especially the new stadiums, which he promoted as allowing small markets like Pittsburgh, Milwaukee, and Cincinnati to compete with the big boys. He vowed to help them complete the job by instituting "cost certainty" (i.e., a salary cap).
Criticisms
All of these efforts have detractors, mostly pointing out how these changes harm baseball, or directly or indirectly benefit Bud's former team.
- Selig's team, the Brewers, was being nominally run by his daughter in escrow, and performed horribly throughout the 1990s and 2000s. Many observers speculate that the escrow deal was a sham, and that Bud was simply distracted by his MLB work from properly managing the Brew Crew.
- Having money from revenue sharing flowing into small-market teams gives those owners a disincentive to invest in their ballclub, rather preferring to collect checks from the likes of the Yankees and Red Sox. Despite increased local revenue from TV and game attendance, these teams often reduced player payroll in order to get more revenue sharing money.
- The small-market clubs whose ballparks were supposed to help them compete haven't actually competed, and the large-market clubs have not been really restrained from adding payroll. Two notable small-market franchises who have yet to get approval for new ballparks, the Twins and Athletics, have regularly gotten to the postseason despite limited payrolls. Selig memorably labeled the A's success an "aberration."
- International and Internet revenue is shared equally among all teams. Small market teams who have little to no appeal outside their hometowns get a portion of the global revenue generated by the Yankees, Red Sox, and Mariners. Although "fair," this serves this as another disincentive for investment.
- The commissioner's office held a slush fund whose contents were unaccountable and possibly used to enrich himself and his family.
- Interleague play, besides being non-traditional, has made the All-Star Game and World Series anti-climactic. Having the World Series home field being determined by the winner of the All-Star Game is a futile, gimmicky gesture to attract fans to the All-Star Game.
- Moving the Brewers to the NL allowed MLB to schedule 9-10 home games a year in Milwaukee with the high-drawing Cubs as a cheap way to goose attendance.
As of this writing, Bud has said he plans to retire in 2007 or 2008, presumably when a cap or some more severe form of luxury tax on payrolls is in effect.
Bud's history on BBTF
On Baseball Think Factory, as on the old rec.sport.baseball and in Baseball Prospectus, Bud is not highly thought of as a baseball executive or as a person. He has been uniformly ridiculed, lampooned, given insulting nicknames, and his verbal tics have been impersonated to elaborate lengths.
On Old Primer, "Bud Selig" or one of his noms-de-Primer was a dependable advocate for caps of all shapes, types, and sizes, but his favorite was the salary cap. His catchphrase, often adapted by anonymous Primates: "This never would have happened if baseball had a salary cap!"
Bud disappeared from BBTF when the site went to registration in early 2004. Given Bud's track record when he's actually doing his job, the site is thought to have done baseball a service by keeping him distracted.
As a service, he reads multiple online newspapers every day and gave out his bselig username and password for all Primates to use. He also created a page on MySpace (http://www.myspace.com/bselig) for all Primates to enjoy.
Stories
According to the website bitterwaitress.com:
- The baseball commissioner was with some old guy I didn't recognize and two younger women dressed very nicely. He was very polite and ordered for everyone. However when the two women left for the bathroom he said the crudest, most sexually explicit things. I could hear all of it. I am too disgusted to repeat it but he basically was describing exactly what he wanted to do with his tongue to one of the women. And he went on and on. I was offended, I refrained from making a specific comment but I looked at him and he knew that I had heard everything. Then he said to me, "you shouldn't be standing so close. Don't you have better things to do." He left me 20% but then had the nerve to come up to me afterward and act like I had accepted a bribe. He pointed to the tip and said, "I left you extra because I know you'll keep your mouth shut." Then he smiled. What a jerk.
Nicknames
These alternatives to the commissioner's given name have been seen on Primer/BTF over the years.
- Budzilla
- Seligula
- R. Budd Selig (coined by Repoz in honor of R. Budd Dwyer...for, much like Selig...R. Budd Dwyer was rather proficient at shooting himself in public)
- Beelzebud (coined by the definitely immoral Eric Enders?)
- the Bewigged Satan (coined by fra paolo for his toupee-clad shenanigans involving the Expos)
- Bug SeaSlug (coined by John Murphy in early 2002)
- Zelig (coined by Jeff Angus in 2005 to honor Woody Allen's fictional creation (http://us.imdb.com/title/tt0086637/))
- Osama bud Selig (origin unknown)
- Bud Lite (origin unknown) for his inabilty to play hardball with the owners and his lack of proactiveness in the face of a growing steriod scandal.
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