MILWAUKEE – Definitely one of the few lakeside office suites in Milwaukee where the water view has been reduced to a supporting role. To see Lake Michigan from there, you must first visit Bud Selig’s baseball museum.
A bench made of bats and pedestals. 75th birthday poster scribbled by the likes of Berra, Brock, Feller, and Killebrew. Plenty of brewer memorabilia, a Joe DiMaggio magazine cover, a Robin Yount painting, a Joe Morgan jersey, a wall for Jackie Robinson. A large baseball rug by Selig.
Eventually you’ll get to Selig himself – the former baseball commissioner, at one time or another, and maybe all of a sudden, you thought maybe he was reviving baseball, ruining baseball, and summarizing everything that can be good and bad about baseball. He was there this week, 87 years old, still watching the sport, which he has no problem with but remains obsessed with.
“There’s something about the game that has fascinated me my whole life,” he said on Thursday, his eyes seemingly every few seconds. White Sox-Astros game and his voice sometimes invoked the movement between sips of Diet Coke.
“For its flaws,” he said, “it’s still the best game in the world.”
Many reminders of the game’s past in Milwaukee now pop up here. The brave — Milwaukee’s old franchise – and Brewers – local club since 1970 – They will hold their post-season opening meeting on Friday, when they will begin their National League division series. Forty years ago this week, Brewers playoff debuts. Henry Aaron’s legacy died this year and lurking in Atlanta and Milwaukee, beloved as the Brave and Brewer.
Like it or not, so is Selig’s.
Before being a leader in Major League Baseball for more than 22 years, he brought baseball back to Milwaukee and kept a small-market franchise afloat in an entirely different economic era for the sport. While in office, he helped protect clubs like Milwaukee. Now honorary commissioner, the role baseball bestowed him retirement in 2015Selig said he met with Brewers current owner Mark Attanasio almost daily throughout the season.
He chats with the fans, watches a dozen or so games a night during the regular season, and manages to equally respect and lament where the sport is. (“I can live with that,” said the Hall of Famer, with some regret as he contemplated how the final strokes now started with a second base runner.)
It turns out that the life of a former commissioner who can’t completely get away from it all can mimic, say, the life of a former president: part landmark, part mascot, part consultant, part permanent service as former polisher.
Selig, who has been out of office for nearly seven years, knows that there are ongoing debates about where the fault lines should be in everything from business shutdown to business shutdown. Killed 1994 World Series to the steroids that have given the game a reputation as a haven for cheaters.
On Thursday, he defended his record, as in his 2019 memoirs. As usual, the problem was mostly the players’ association, not the baseball owners or their commissioners.
“I know what people are saying, and now that I’m a history professor, I watch people try to review history and I’m very impressed with it,” he said. War II” graduated from the University of Wisconsin.
(2007 report On steroids in baseball commissioned by the MLB and drafted by former Senator George J. Mitchell, he concluded that “the effect of the Players League opposition was to delay the adoption of mandatory random drug testing for nearly two decades,” but “mass failure recognize the problem as it arises and deal with it early.”)
Drug use has faded as a crushing crisis for MLB, but the troubles ahead for Commissioner Rob Manfred may seem familiar to Selig’s time.
The collective bargaining agreement is scheduled to expire on December 1, and questions are swirling about when a new agreement might take place. There is a persistent puzzle of how to make a slow-paced sport appealing in an accelerating world. The extent of the postseason, which could affect revenues and season length, is up for debate, and many predict that Selig will move from the 10-team format to a 14- or 16-team design.
At least in public, Selig largely keeps his thoughts to himself and expresses his confidence in Manfred.
“I would hate for others to express their opinions without scrutiny,” Selig said in response to an inquiry into the postseason expansion. “I love this system as it is. If someone has a better system, fine. I think that worked very well.”
He was much less cautious about this year’s grief.
Selig had gone for her first dose of the coronavirus vaccine when her cell phone rang around 9 a.m. on a Friday in January. Looking back, he said, he should have realized something was wrong when he answered.
Aaron was dead.
The conversation partner Selig spoke to twice a week for decades was gone 47 years after Selig arranged Aaron’s return to Milwaukee, and long after, Aaron learned how a Black boy from Alabama and a Jewish boy from Milwaukee grew up to become two. he would note. baseball’s most influential figures.
“I miss him so much,” Selig said between pauses, calling Aaron by his own name instead of “Hank.” “We were going to talk about everything. There are times when we go back and talk about the ’57 Braves and the Yankees and how they beat this guy and that guy.”
A few more stops.
“It was a void,” he finally said, “a void in my life.”
Aaron said he would definitely find excitement in the series between Atlanta and Milwaukee. And now Selig, who’s done almost nothing to hide the joy of being able to openly cheer for the Brewers again, says he doesn’t go to the ballpark that often anymore, while Mondays 1 and 2 of the series are in Atlanta.
He couldn’t predict an outcome, saving it: “This club goes as far as the shot takes.”
It’s very similar to the 1982 Brewers, who reached the World Series in seven games against Louis, but lost.
Even now, he’s still shuffling the roster, still thinking about Milwaukee’s greatest moments, still selling baseball in a place that both loves the game and exposes its vulnerability.
1982 The Brewers “were a great team, it was a great year,” he said to start a monologue shortly after one of his routine visits to Milwaukee’s oldest custard stand. “It’s not that I’m a poor loser, but if we don’t lose Rollie Fingers, we beat the Cardinals at 82 and there’s no doubt about it; I even got Whitey Herzog to admit it at one point. But whatever it is. When you think about that team, there were great days here in Milwaukee. We had five Hall of Famers on that team. Consider: Yount, Molitor, Sutton, Simmons, and Fingers; that’s pretty good.”
Of course it does, because decades later it’s about baseball in Milwaukee.