| The Ups and Downs of Bud Selig’s Tenure |
| By Sally Haase September 30, 2013 Major League Baseball will be looking for a new commissioner for the 2015 season. Bud Selig announced last week that he will retire at the end of the 2014 season. Selig took over the job on an interim basis in 1992 and was promoted to full time commissioner in 1998. His tenure as commissioner has been uneven to put it simply, but Selig has done a lot of things that have been good for the game. Some were the result of stupid and embarrassing mistakes he made, but he took the time to make it right. Selig took over as commissioner in the start of the steroid era, and he either didn’t know anything about players using performance enhancing or choose to ignore it. In a roundabout way, the PED’s got fans back into the game during the chase to break Roger Maris’ single season home run record. Now we know a lot of those home runs hit in those years were not legitimate. But no effort was made to clean up the game until the past couple of years, now if you are caught using PED’s, you sit out 50 games. Sure, the home run race brought fans back to the game after the disastrous strike season of 1994, but it came at a cost later on with the game becoming more about players trying to get an edge any way possible. There was also the embarrassment of the 2001 All-Star Game. Remember, the game ended in a tie because Selig had no idea what to do and just said it would be a tie and no MVP would be named. I still say that Torii Hunter should have been given the MVP award for robbing Barry Bonds of a home run in the first inning. If Hunter doesn’t make that catch, the National League wins by one run. There could have still been an MVP of the game, but everyone was in uncharted territory and was confused as to what they should do. Selig made up for it with the League winner receiving home field advantage in the World Series and giving the All-Star game a little more excitement. It worked for a few years, now the novelty of that has worn off. Selig was hated by Minnesota Twins and Montreal Expos fans in the early 2000’s because he brought up the idea of eliminating two teams from MLB and those two teams would be the Twins and Expos. The idea was approved by all the owners but two. Can you guess the two owners who voted against contraction? In the end the Twins and Expos were still in the league and the Twins went on to dominate the American League Central, while the Expos moved to the Nation’s Capital to become the Nationals and have put together a competitive team. The invention of interleague play and the expansion of the playoffs are probably two of Selig’s best moves along with his efforts to get PED’s out of the game. The addition of interleague play gave a lot of fans to see many players in person that they never would have seen unless their home team made the World Series. Now, with 15 teams in each league, interleague play is scattered throughout the entire season instead of the two week chunks in the first half of the season. The expansion of the playoffs has made the end of the season very exciting, with at least one or two races coming down to the final game or a game 163 if necessary. The addition of a second wild card has put the importance back on winning the division because if you get the wild card, you need to play a ‘play-in’ game in order to be named a playoff team. I can’t say that I will miss Selig as a commissioner, but he has shown a lot of improvement from his rocky start in the 1990’s. He has made improvements to the game, and he has tried to make up for the mistakes he’s made with varying degrees of success. He oversaw baseball through a lot of changes in the past two decades and he was willing to change the game with the times. |
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