For the Good of the Game Read online

  They’re both really great players, he said. You start with that. It’s like DiMaggio and Williams, Cobb and Hornsby. I guess when you get to that class there are different levels of greatness.

  “Bud, there’s only two things Willie can do that Hank can’t,” Spahn said to me.

  “What’s that?”

  “Make a basket catch and run out from under his cap.”

  Think about that. Henry wasn’t as celebrated as Mays in his prime, but he played the game with the same kind of excellence. I’m not saying this to take anything away from Willie Mays—or the great Willie Mays, as they called him. He was a wonderful player. But Henry is right at that level and didn’t get the credit when he played.

  I’m not sure why. Maybe it was because Hank played in Milwaukee and Atlanta, not New York and San Francisco. I always felt that during that time people didn’t fully appreciate Henry’s greatness.

  When he broke Babe Ruth’s record, that was a help. But you look back at his lifetime stats, they’re stunning. The consistency was stunning. He outdid Willie Mays in that regard. No question.

  Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner, wasn’t at the game in Atlanta when Henry broke Ruth’s record. I wouldn’t have missed that for the world if I had been in charge at the time. There’s not a chance I would have been anywhere else.

  So even though I didn’t like Barry Bonds, I was going from city to city, all over the country, to watch him chase his version of history. I did it because it was my job.

  The steroid issue really bothered me. It was a blemish on everything we did in that era, and nobody hated the taint more than me.

  Everybody said I was slow to react to steroids, that Major League Baseball was slow to react. Some people actually thought we deliberately turned a blind eye to sell tickets or boost attendance. Still, nobody could make a coherent argument that baseball benefited from steroids. They clearly weren’t in the best interest of the game, in any shape, form, or manner. It took us forever to get an agreement with the players union to test for steroids, and an unethical group of players took advantage of the union’s protection.

  Now here we were, at a new frontier, with Barry Bonds breaking the most famous record in American sports. I longed for the innocence and wonder we all felt when Henry broke the Babe’s record.

  I first got to know Henry when I sold him a Ford at my family’s dealership in Milwaukee. I was a wide-eyed kid then, eaten up by baseball but without any idea I would ever be more than one of the most passionate fans you’ve ever seen. Henry says I was a certain kind of fan in those days. I was one of those fans that a player knew he was going to have to get to know whether he wanted to or not. He’s probably right about that. I was persistent in everything I did and it brought me many rewards in my lifetime, none I treasure more than my friendship with Henry.

  He is as fine a man as I’ve ever known, and, as one of baseball’s first African American players, he has endured hatred few of us have known. He once shared with me a box of letters that was full of death threats sent to him as he was getting closer and closer to Ruth’s record.

  The letters were horrible, as was the treatment that Henry received early in his career. But his belief in himself, his faith, and his country was unshakable.

  Henry hit the last twenty-two of his 755 homers playing for the Milwaukee Brewers, when I was the owner. Braves owner Bill Bartholomay and I worked out a trade that allowed us to bring him back from Atlanta to the city where his major league career had begun, and his leadership, his presence, helped Robin Yount develop into a player who could thrive in tough circumstances, as he did in leading us to the 1982 World Series.

  I wasn’t there when Henry broke Babe’s record, but I listened closely to Vin Scully’s famed comments. I’ve listened to them over and over through the years. They give you chills.

  “What a marvelous day for baseball. What a marvelous moment for Atlanta and the state of Georgia. What a marvelous moment for the country and the world. A black man is getting a standing ovation in the Deep South for breaking a record of an all-time baseball idol. And it is a great moment for all of us, and particularly for Henry Aaron.”

  Scully, one of baseball’s greatest voices, got it exactly right.

  It was a great day for the South, a great day for baseball. It was everything you’d ever want, and it made you proud. Proud you were seeing history made by a man who had conducted himself so beautifully. But what I was experiencing on the Bonds Watch was not making me proud.

  Look, Barry was a great player. Let me make that very clear. A great player. He was a Hall of Famer long before he got associated with steroids. But like so many other players, some of them great players, he had made some really bad decisions—decisions that would shape their legacies while complicating mine.

  While I felt responsibility to be on hand for Bonds’s moment, I’ll admit I had a fantasy that I’d be spared when I went to Cooperstown to see Ripken and Gwynn be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Nobody would have blamed me for being there rather than on the road with Barry. But I received no reprieve, so I trudged on to Dodger Stadium and then Petco, the Padres’ beautiful home that had opened only three years earlier.

  I watched the first game of the Giants-Padres series with John Moores, who owned the Padres. He was a good host, but I’m not sure I was good company.

  I trudged up to a box high atop the stadium the next night. I didn’t mind being by myself.

  I thought I’d experienced every emotion possible at a ballpark. I’d been nervous a lot and angry more often than I’d like to admit. I’d chain-smoked and I’d felt the level of peacefulness that my friends talk about after long hikes at a national park. I’d been exhilarated and had moments of pure joy. But this took me to a place I’d never been before, and I’ll admit it.

  I was thinking about that and a million other things as I watched Bonds drive a pitch from the Padres’ Clay Hensley into the seats in left field in San Diego, setting off a celebration as he tied Henry’s record.

  I didn’t go to the clubhouse to congratulate him afterward. I just couldn’t bring myself to look him in the eyes and act happy about what he’d done. I don’t exactly have a poker face.

  When Barry hit No. 756 at AT&T Park three days later, pulling a fastball from the Nationals’ Mike Bacsik over the fence in right-center, I was in New York at a baseball meeting, watching the game on TV. I had planned to fly back to San Francisco the next day, but finally Barry did something I liked. He saved me one trip. It was the least he could do.

  After the record-breaking home run, the video board at AT&T Park played a tribute to Bonds from Henry Aaron. He hadn’t been sure he wanted to do anything to commemorate the moment, but I persuaded him to record his congratulations, no matter the circumstance. I told Henry I felt it was the right thing to do, and Henry always did the right thing.

  This awkward spectacle was the final exclamation point in an era of unprecedented power hitting throughout baseball. I’d seen it all, studied it, and would continue to study it for years.

  I know some people will forever link me with Barry Bonds. Some will say baseball’s failure to limit the impact of steroids quicker is my failure. They may even call me the steroid commissioner.

  That’s okay, I guess.

  It’s not fair, I don’t like it, but I’ve come to understand it.

  Did I understand the dimension of the problem from the beginning? No. But did other longtime, well-respected executives, like John Schuerholz and Andy MacPhail? No, they didn’t, and they say that.

  Steroids became a bigger issue than any of us imagined when we were watching Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa in the summer of 1998. But through my work with owners—eventually with cooperation from the players union, which was kicking and screaming all the way—we ended up with baseball having the toughest steroid policy in sports.

  I couldn’t be prouder as I look back. The same is true for the economic overhaul of the sport during my tenure.

  On the busi
ness side, I inherited a fucking nightmare, if you’ll pardon both my language and my honesty. But give us some credit. We identified and corrected our problems, learning how to get all parties to work together for the common good.

  Baseball boomed. It had generated $1.2 billion in revenue in 1992 and grew into a nine-billion-dollar-a-year business by the time I stepped away in January 2015, after thirteen consecutive years of growth.

  We set attendance records every year from 2004 through ’07, after we negotiated a labor agreement without a work stoppage, one that included the first protocols to test for steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs. Teams opened twenty ballparks in my years in charge, and that’s no small thing. We gave hope and faith to fans of small- and medium-market teams, at a time when such teams were dying under baseball’s hopelessly outdated model. If we hadn’t overhauled our revenue-sharing system and made the labor deals we did with the union, there are a lot of teams that would have been out of business. A lot of teams. Ten or twelve teams, maybe. That’s how desperate it was. David Glass reminded me of that when his Kansas City Royals won the World Series and back-to-back pennants.

  I shudder to think where baseball would be if we hadn’t found a way to work together to make these deals. We literally might have been out of business. I’ll say that.

  Our success, our ability to finally solve our problems, didn’t have anything to do with steroids. Instead, it had everything to do with changing a business model that had been largely untouched for half a century.

  I know all about change. My life has been full of it.

  2

  BASEBALL WAS THE language spoken in the house I grew up in, on Fifty-second Street in Milwaukee. I was the second son of immigrants, but we were a first-generation family of baseball fanatics, in particular my mother and me.

  With the closest teams in Chicago, we found our rooting interests at the top of the standings. My brother Jerry, who was about four years older than me, was a Cardinals fan. I was a Yankees fan, and how could you not be? With the exception of a stretch in the middle of World War II, they were a real dynasty. They won the American League pennant twenty-two times in twenty-nine seasons from 1936 through ’64, and had the greatest collection of players you can imagine. I was seven years old when Joe DiMaggio had his fifty-six-game hitting streak, and to me he seemed like a god.

  I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have a hometown team of my own. That would truly be the American dream realized, not that I wanted for much as a boy.

  I did have a running joke with my father. It’s one I’d break out in October or November, when I was out shoveling the driveway for the first of what seemed like a thousand times every winter.

  Why’d you come to Milwaukee? You couldn’t have gone to San Diego or Phoenix?

  My father, Ben Selig, was born in Romania in 1899. His father, Abraham, was born there in 1865, and no doubt endured harsh winters and the brutal persecution of Jewish families. My grandfather sought a better life in America, and like so many immigrants he set sail for America and arrived through Ellis Island around 1909, when my father was just a boy.

  From there, they moved on to Milwaukee. I never really understood why they chose Milwaukee. Maybe the climate reminded them of Romania. Maybe they had friends from the old country who told them there were jobs in Milwaukee.

  My mother, Marie Huber, was also an immigrant. She was Russian, born in Odessa, in Ukraine. Her father, Joseph, was born in 1873 and died young, leaving her to be raised by her mother, Gertrude. She would be the only grandparent I knew. Mom and her siblings left their home on the Black Sea and headed to New York at about the same time as my dad and similarly kept moving west until they settled in Milwaukee.

  Why’d they come? I can’t tell you for sure. This was a time when coming to America was what you did if you wanted to work hard and build a better life for your family; it was a country filled with immigrants. They arrived with little except the clothes on their backs and their dreams. And it turns out they weren’t wrong when they set out on their journeys.

  Milwaukee isn’t just my hometown; it’s the only place I’ve ever lived, unless you count four years in Madison, at the University of Wisconsin, or a stint in the army, when I was stationed at Fort Leonard Wood in Pulaski County, Missouri, deep in the Ozark Mountains. In 1934, when I was born, Milwaukee was a city of about 580,000, not much smaller than it is today. That may not sound like much, but Chicago’s the only bigger city in the Midwest. All that time, though, Milwaukee was the center of my universe. I am so lucky to have started my life here and even luckier to still be here.

  I was given the name Allan Huber Selig by my parents, but I’ve been Bud since I came home from the hospital. My mother gets credit for that. When she introduced my older brother to me she said, “Look, Jerry, you have a little buddy.” I’ve been Buddy, or Bud, ever since.

  Jerry and I were raised in a nice, Jewish, middle-class neighborhood on the West Side of Milwaukee. We lived in a trim, three-bedroom home with a stone exterior. My father graduated from North Side High and then went to work selling ads for the Milwaukee Journal. My mother learned English quickly upon her arrival in America and soaked up information and culture. She didn’t believe in limits and showed that by graduating from Milwaukee State Teachers College, which is now the University of Wisconsin–­Milwaukee (one of her classmates there was Golda Meir, who would wind up as the prime minister of Israel). Anything but typical for women of that era, my mother was tough and determined, not gentle and accepting. But she was as nurturing as she was demanding. She was extraordinary, really. She became an English teacher, and you wouldn’t be wrong if you said she was strict, both in the classroom and at home. Jerry and I were expected to make A’s in school, always. But my mother was kind and loving in everything she did. She was an avid reader, a champion of education, and a fan of the opera and the symphony. She was a traveler and—this would prove very significant to me—an outstanding, devoted, committed fan of baseball.

  My dad was a great salesman. He was very present, and people really liked him. One of those people was Ray Knippel, who was one of the first big car dealers in Wisconsin. The dealership was Mertz-Knippel, in West Allis, and Dad had that account for the Journal. They must have advertised a lot, because Dad became really close to Ray Knippel, who offered him a job as a sales executive for the dealership. He went to work there in 1921, and the following year Knippel asked my dad to become his partner. Otto Mertz, who had been the more garrulous of the two partners in the dealership, had drowned. Knippel was not really a salesman—he was more of an inside guy. He needed somebody on the outside, dealing with people, and that was where my dad could make a difference.

  My dad and Ray built the business into the biggest Ford dealership in Wisconsin, eventually outgrowing their location on West Greenfield Avenue. They expanded into a bigger location on West National Avenue in 1946. When they did that they changed the name from Mertz-Knippel to Knippel-Selig, and Dad bought out Knippel when he was ready to retire. Then it became Selig Ford. My dad was also a pioneer in the leasing business. He may have been the second or third person in America in the lease business. By 1960, it was big. We would have ten thousand, twelve thousand cars under contract.

  My parents were great with all kinds of people. It didn’t matter where you came from or what you looked like. People were always people and were to be treated respectfully. I lived in a household where I never heard a word of prejudice ever, about blacks, Hispanics, Asians. Nothing. Our neighborhoods and schools were effectively segregated—white only—and I’m sorry to say I never really thought about it. That’s just the way it was then.

  Milwaukee was home to a minor league team, the Brewers. I was only three years old when my mother started taking me to see them play. They had been a staple of life in our city since before my parents arrived, and in my childhood played in the American Association, only one step away from the big leagues. Their affiliations changed over the years, but fo
r a long time they were tied to the Cubs.

  That was great for me because I listened to a lot of baseball on the radio, especially the two Chicago teams. The Brewers played at Borchert Field, named after the team’s colorful owner in the 1920s, Otto Borchert. It was quite a stadium, notable for not having any seats where a fan could see both foul poles. That sounds like an impossibility, I know, but it was true.

  I would go to a lot of games with my mom, who rooted for the Brewers as hard—and loudly—as anyone there. When I got older, I could take the bus and go on my own. Kids would pick their favorite players. Mine was switch-hitting outfielder Hershel Martin. Don’t ask me why Hersh Martin, but he was my guy, for sure. I took particular delight when he played for the Yankees in 1944 and ’45, when DiMaggio was on military duty in California and Hawaii.

  The Brewers had a run of great managers while I was watching them. First was former White Sox catcher Ray Schalk, who would later be elected to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee. Then there was “Jolly” Charlie Grimm, who had managed the Cubs in the World Series three times, and Nick “Tomato Face” Collup, a legendary minor league slugger. Even Casey Stengel came through for a season managing the Brewers before his twelve seasons with the Yankees. It was minor league baseball, sure, but it was great entertainment.

  We had a lot of fun playing in our neighborhood, too. I was fortunate in that I always had someone to play catch or a game of pepper with. Herb Kohl lived on Fifty-first Boulevard, about a half block away from me, and we went back and forth between our houses all the time. We were in the same grade in school and shared lots of the same friends.

  Herb would go on to grow his family’s supermarkets and retail chain, dive into a successful career as an investor, become a U.S. senator, and purchase the NBA’s Milwaukee Bucks. But we didn’t talk about our ambitions when we got together. We talked about baseball and we played baseball.