For the Good of the Game Read online

  Dedication

  To my mother and father, and

  everyone who made this journey possible

  Contents

  Cover

  Title Page

  Dedication

  Foreword

  Chapter 1

  Chapter 2

  Chapter 3

  Chapter 4

  Chapter 5

  Chapter 6

  Chapter 7

  Chapter 8

  Chapter 9

  Chapter 10

  Chapter 11

  Chapter 12

  Chapter 13

  Chapter 14

  Chapter 15

  Chapter 16

  Chapter 17

  Chapter 18

  Chapter 19

  Chapter 20

  Chapter 21

  Chapter 22

  Chapter 23

  Epilogue

  Acknowledgments

  Photo Section

  About the Authors

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  Foreword

  HISTORY AND BASEBALL—TWO of my earliest and enduring passions—are the building blocks of this heartfelt memoir by Bud Selig. I first met Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig twenty years ago when I was in Milwaukee to deliver a lecture on one of Bud’s heroes, Franklin Roosevelt. Every time we have seen each other since, there has been a happy contest between my desire to talk baseball and his to talk history. So how delighted I am to write the foreword for this memoir that serves both as a work of history and a riveting account of baseball during a fraught and transformative time.

  Bud’s love of baseball was ignited (as in my case) by a parent’s devotion to the game. He was only three when his mother, Marie, an immigrant from Ukraine, began taking him to the park where the minor league Milwaukee Brewers played. Then, during weekends and summer breaks, she arranged magical field trips to Comiskey Park, Yankee Stadium, Ebbets Field, and the Polo Grounds. An intuitive storyteller with a keen memory for the telling detail, Bud recalls a game at Yankee Stadium on his fifteenth birthday. To his glee, a big cake was rolled onto the field before the game began. Bud thought that his omnipotent mother had somehow managed to arrange the celebration just for him. In actuality, the cake marked manager Casey Stengel’s birthday.

  After Bud graduated from the University of Wisconsin and joined his father’s car dealership, baseball became not merely an avocation, but the “essence” of his life. When the Milwaukee Braves stunned the city and state by announcing a move to Atlanta, Selig and a small group of business and civic leaders fought to give Milwaukee “a second chance at baseball.” It took five years to put the money together and gain acceptance from Major League Baseball, but the group was finally able to purchase the bankrupt Seattle Pilots and bring the team to Milwaukee. In honor of the minor league team that had been Bud’s first love, they were rechristened the Milwaukee Brewers.

  The story of the realization of a new park for the Brewers—Miller Park named for the Miller Brewing Company—is one of intense political drama. After months of struggle with the governor and the legislature, the financing plan was passed by the State Assembly but lacked the votes to survive in the State Senate. The package called for a sales tax in the four-county area that included Milwaukee. After George Petak, the senator from neighboring Racine County announced his support for the legislation, his fellow legislators insisted on adding his county to the four that would be taxed. On behalf of his own county, Petak initially felt compelled to vote no. In the middle of the night, however, he reversed his vote and the bill passed 16-15. Petak knew he would face “a political firestorm,” but believed a thriving baseball team would benefit all Wisconsin and didn’t believe there was any other way to keep the team in the state. That firestorm was not long in coming. Residents in Racine County forced a recall vote and Petak was voted out of office. To this day, George Petak remains a hero to Bud Selig and to all fans of the Milwaukee Brewers.

  Watching the Brewers from the owner’s seat, Selig acknowledges, was both exhilarating and agonizing. Like so many rabid fans, Bud is superstitious. When the game was tight in the late innings, he followed a seven-minute rule. He would leave his seat and pace the hallway, hiding behind a girder. There, he could figure out what was happening by the cheers or groans. For some reason he found it less painful to hear what was happening than to actually watch the action. Unless, of course, the cheers rose in volume and then he could race back to his seat!

  When Bud Selig was selected by his fellow owners as acting commissioner and then baseball commissioner, a post he would hold for twenty-two years, the game he loved was in drastic jeopardy. He recognized, he writes, that a sport resistant to change had to change, “if it was going to survive, much less thrive.” The gap between the big- and small-market clubs was widening at an alarming rate. The same few teams made it to the playoffs year after year, dampening the hopes and attendance of fans in dozens of other cities. In these same troubled years an unprecedented, literally unbelievable number of home runs were being hit. Something more than new workout equipment, smaller ballparks, or dilution of pitching talent because of an expanded number of teams was at play here.

  This memoir takes us through each of these significant struggles with vivid detail that enlivens the main characters involved—including the “emotional, combustible” Yankee owner, George Steinbrenner; the L.A. Dodgers’ Walter O’Malley, forever a despised figure in Brooklyn, and in Selig’s opinion, a leader more concerned with himself and the fortunes of his own team than the good of the game; the union’s “bleeping” Marvin Miller, who, Selig believes (despite the immense power he wielded in his fights with the owners), belongs in the Hall of Fame; and Henry Aaron, a giant on and off the field, and Selig’s close friend for sixty years.

  Indeed, the first chapter recounts the agony Bud experienced when Barry Bonds, a suspected steroids user, was closing in on Hank Aaron’s career home run title of 755 homers. As commissioner, he felt obligated to hopscotch around the country to witness the moment when Bonds hit the homer that would make history—albeit a contaminated milestone.

  The watershed process of dealing with steroids in baseball was long and torturous. For years, the players union adamantly refused to allow drug testing, even as the integrity of a game built upon records and statistics was put into question. After much foot-dragging, a series of events finally led to slow progress. A dramatic home run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa captured the attention of the nation but stoked fresh questions about the sudden increase in their prodigious number of home runs. A few years afterward, players and owners agreed to an anonymous drug testing program and when the tests were conducted, between 5 and 7 percent of the players tested positive. Not long after, four people associated with the game were charged in a 42-count federal indictment of running a steroid-distribution ring that provided performance-enhancing drugs to dozens of athletes. Contentious congressional hearings on steroid use commenced.

  Selig persuaded former Senate majority leader George Mitchell to conduct an investigation. Two years in the making, the Mitchell Report gained access to steroid suppliers and accused nearly a hundred players of using steroids. Polls showed that, despite the union’s refusal, 79 percent of the players wanted to be tested. Finally, a testing program with harsh punishments for transgressions was put in place. Though it came too late to preserve the record of the great Henry Aaron, baseball’s testing program soon became the strongest in any major American sport.

  Progress in creating competitive balance was hamstrung from the start by the union’s flat refusal to consider a salary cap similar to that in the NFL or the NHL. (This was the issue surrounding the longest strike in baseball history and the cancellati
on of the 1994 World Series.) Attendance and enthusiasm for the game dropped dramatically. Selig knew that major change had to take place. When he first introduced the idea that big-market teams share some of their greater revenue with small-market teams, however, emotions flared so high that it seemed nothing would get done. But over time, under Selig’s patient, yet unrelenting, and ultimately transformative leadership, the owners agreed to both revenue sharing and a luxury tax, bringing an unmatched level of parity to the game.

  For the opportunity for a greater number of teams to reach the playoffs, however, additional changes were necessary. Selig proposed that the traditional two divisions be restructured into three and that a wild card (and eventually two wild cards) be added. The proposition met with strong criticism from the media, but Selig brought all the owners around—well, almost all. The final vote was twenty-nine in favor, one opposed. The “no” vote was cast by Texas Rangers owner George W. Bush, a traditionalist who did not want to tamper with the structure of the game. While criticism from purists remains, the wild card has proved wildly popular. With the help of playoff expansion, revenue sharing, and the luxury tax, Selig proudly notes, all thirty teams played postseason baseball during his tenure, and twenty different teams reached the World Series!

  The commissioner’s battle over instant replay provides yet another instance of the difficult birth of innovation. Traditionalists (at first including Bud himself) worried about losing the human element of the game, the dramatic confrontations between umpires and managers that roused the crowd. But as technology advanced, Selig increasingly came to believe it was wrong to put all the responsibility for close calls on the umpires who would inevitably miss a number of calls. He understood the anguish umpires felt when they blew a call. He cites umpire Don Denkinger’s mistaken call at first base during the 1985 World Series that led to a rally by Kansas City and death threats from St. Louis Cardinals fans. A missed call by second base umpire Jim Joyce cost Tiger pitcher Armando Galarraga a perfect game, leaving a shadow on Joyce’s career. Selig was finally convinced that the new technology could play a positive role. After a committee studied the situation, an instant replay system was put in place, one that has now expanded to include calls on the bases as well as catches in the outfield.

  That something good can come from a fiasco is illustrated by the infamous 2002 All-Star Game that had to be halted after the eleventh inning. Although the game was tied at 7–7, both teams had run out of pitchers. For a number of years, Selig observes, the All-Star Game had lost its allure. Players no longer considered selection to the All-Star team the surpassing honor it had once been. Some players even chose not to participate, preferring to enjoy the break; others would play an inning or two, take a quick shower and then depart the clubhouse before the game ended. How different this atmosphere, Bud notes, from the 1950 All-Star Game he had attended at Comiskey Park where Ted Williams broke his arm early in the game but insisted on playing until the top of the ninth! The eleventh inning stoppage of the 2002 game created an ugly scene. A chorus of catcalls began as fans threw beer bottles onto the field. This embarrassing moment led to MLB’s declaration that henceforth, the winner of the All-Star Game would have home-field advantage in the World Series, hopefully restoring a greater import to the game.

  Bud’s love for baseball and his gift for storytelling shines through every page of this tender and lively memoir which comes full circle when he is elected to the Hall of Fame. His description of the tension he endured while waiting for the call is pure Bud Selig—unpretentious, emotional, authentic. He had been told that the panel in charge of electing executives to the Hall of Fame had included his name on the ballot. The final decision would be made on December 4, 2016 in Washington, D.C., by a sixteen-person panel of Hall of Fame players, executives, writers, and broadcasters. If Bud were elected, the chairman would call at 4:15. Surrounded by his family in Milwaukee, Bud waited. The phone did not ring at 4:15. What seemed an eternity was in all likelihood two minutes later. Bud heard the longed-for words: “You’ve been elected to the Hall of Fame on the first ballot. Congratulations!” He experienced true joy, he relates, surpassed only by the ceremony at Cooperstown, where he signed his name on the wall behind which his plaque would hang, thereby joining the pantheon he had revered all his life.

  —Doris Kearns Goodwin

  1

  THIS WASN’T THE Bataan Death March. Nobody was going to die or be forced into hard labor.

  But the summer of 2007 was unpleasant for me, and when I look back, that’s putting it mildly. It was one of the few times in my life I wasn’t excited about going to ballparks, and if you know me that’s all you need to know.

  As Barry Bonds closed in on the all-time home run record, I flew around the country and spent my nights in places like the Four Seasons and the Westin St. Francis. I was never far from my next Diet Coke. As far as personal hardship goes, about all there was to worry about was a wait to get on a treadmill in the fitness room before getting a bite and heading out to the ballpark.

  There was no way I was going to complain to anyone. Not a scintilla of a chance. But everyone who knew me knew I was unhappy.

  They could see it on my face, in my lack of enthusiasm. I was surrounded by people I enjoyed, but even amid good company I felt alone with my thoughts. I was tired, and I’ll admit it, I was haunted by regret. My mind raced as I searched for ways I could have avoided these long days and nights.

  Bonds was on the verge of breaking Henry Aaron’s record for career home runs, and I was doing what a commissioner of a sports league is supposed to do. I was hopscotching around the country to be in attendance when the self-absorbed slugger hit the record homer.

  Like Shoeless Joe Jackson and Pete Rose, Barry had brought scandal to the game I’d fallen in love with as a boy and now led as baseball’s ninth commissioner. I wasn’t going to sing his praises, as I’d done for Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa when they smashed Roger Maris’s single-season homer record in 1998, but I didn’t want to be conspicuous by my absence, either.

  So in a stretch of sixteen days I watched Bonds and the San Francisco Giants play nine times. It was not one of the highlights of my life.

  The Bonds Watch started for me at Miller Park in Milwaukee, where at least I could watch from my own suite and sleep in my own bed. The next stops were San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego, where I was just waiting for Barry to put me out of my misery. He could have done it quicker, but one of the beauties of baseball is you can’t orchestrate it.

  In the end, the game rewards perseverance; it does not serve up a whole lot of convenience to anyone who makes it their life’s work.

  After watching Barry go homerless in a series against the Braves at AT&T Park in San Francisco, I traveled cross-country to induct Cal Ripken Jr. and Tony Gwynn into the Hall of Fame. Then I flew home from Cooperstown for a quick rest before moving on to L.A. and Dodger Stadium.

  I had hit the road when Barry was two homers shy of Henry, not wanting to take anything for granted. I could have spared myself many nights on the road, because he homered only once in a stretch of thirty-seven at-bats, getting to 754.

  Bonds was stuck there—in a slump, actually—and I had business back home, so I flew to Milwaukee for a quick pit stop after leaving Dodger Stadium. That meant another cross-country flight, this time to San Diego to watch the Giants play the Padres at Petco Park.

  Along the way, I had a lot of time to think about the differences between Barry Bonds, who simply wasn’t likable, and Henry Aaron, who had been such a giant on the field and now was the same way off the field, carrying himself with as much poise as humility. I have called myself a friend of Henry’s since 1958 and burst with pride every time I speak about him.

  Henry was one of the greatest hitters to ever play the game. He was still a Brave when he broke Babe Ruth’s record, but I brought him back to Milwaukee to finish his career as the Brewers’ designated hitter. It took Aaron twenty-three seasons to get to 755 home runs,
never hitting more than forty-seven in a season.

  But it wasn’t my friendship with Henry that troubled me as I waited for Bonds to hit the 755th and 756th home runs of his career. It was the way Barry had piled up homers in the second half of his career, at a rate that seemed impossible to Henry and players from baseball’s other generations.

  We had been caught off guard when McGwire and Sosa passed Maris, but this was almost a decade later. Of course, by then we knew what was going on. This was an age when sluggers found extra power through chemistry, and, of course, Barry was one of the leading men in baseball’s steroids narrative.

  There is plenty of blame to spread around in this sad chapter, and I’ll accept my share of the responsibility. We didn’t get the genie back in the bottle in time to protect Aaron’s legacy.

  Henry knows we tried, but I’ll always wish we had been successful in implementing testing for performance-enhancing drugs sooner than we eventually were, as part of labor negotiations in 2002.

  If you weren’t lucky enough to see Henry Aaron hit when he was in his prime, you missed one of the real delights of my life. You just never saw line drives like the ones Henry hit.

  One day I was at a game and Sam “Toothpick” Jones was pitching for the Cubs. I later found out Henry didn’t like Toothpick. I was attending the University of Wisconsin at the time. Herb Kohl, my childhood friend and roommate at Wisconsin, and I went to County Stadium to see the Braves play the Cubs. We had seats behind home plate, and I’ll never forget what Henry did that day. He hit a line drive past Toothpick’s head. I’m thinking it’s a single to center, but it just kept rising, not dying, and wound up in Perini’s Woods, beyond the center-field fence. Improbably, he’d hit it so hard that the ball, which had looked like it was low enough to take off the pitcher’s head, just kept going and going and going. I couldn’t believe my eyes. But that was Henry.

  Years later, after I got involved in baseball, I asked Warren Spahn about Henry. He was never shy with opinions or anything else, which I think is part of what made him a great pitcher. I asked Spahn how he’d compare Aaron and Willie Mays.