Bud Selig

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When it comes to the corporatocracy of major-league baseball, in which billionaires beg for welfare, few things can stun, but one of the first moves by new commissioner Rob Manfred is as jaw-dropping as any made by his predecessor, Bud Selig. He’s named New York Mets owner Fred Wilpon chairman of the league’s finance committee. You know, the same Fred Wilpon who’s managed to turn the goldmine of a NYC baseball team into tin (accruing massive debts in the process) and was knee-deep in the Bernie Madoff Ponzi scheme. From SNY (though the bold is mine):

Manfred removed Mets owner Fred Wilpon from the executive council, but later named him chairman of the finance committee, which is responsible for conducting hearings on league investments, changes in ownership, and stadium revenue and financing issues, among other things.•

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ANGELOS CASTRO SELIG

Baseball has enjoyed great financial success during the uninspired tenure of Commissioner Bud Selig, but that’s mostly because changes in technology smiled on the game, creating huge demand from regional cable corporations for a quantity of family-friendly entertainment. It’s long ball meets long tail, as in many cities there actually aren’t a lot of fans watching those telecasts, but the checks clear just the same–for now, anyhow. As Selig steps down, Charles P. Pierce of Grantland examines his legacy, which more than anything announced the end of an independent figure in the commissioner’s office. That’s both good and bad: Kenesaw “Mountain” Landis’ freedom allowed him to project his racism onto the game, yet a truly conscientious person in the position could be a voice of reason concerned with issues beyond short-term wealth. From Pierce:

“In The Hustler’s Handbook, Bill Veeck wrote prophetically that, ‘In these days of corporate ownership, the Commissioner has become of particular importance to the hustler. Corporate ownership brings company men, company policy, and company cards with little holes in them. Corporate ownership, in short, brings committee-think, and with ComThink comes the banishment, discouragement, and attrition of colorful characters. The hustler is dependent upon colorful characters, because color is what is salable. Corporations don’t want to be regulated. They don’t want a Commissioner with any powers … The hustler needs a Commissioner who will throw his weight against the stuffiness, the routine, the deadly boredom of the executive suite. He needs a Commissioner who will help baseball, in spite of itself.’

(An aside: That Veeck was never commissioner, even for 15 minutes, is proof that, if there indeed is a God, He doesn’t have a healthy enough sense of the absurd, not even if you count the platypus.)

By all the standards that drove Veeck up the wall, Selig has been an enormous success. He leaves baseball an $8 billion industry, with the average franchise valued at nearly a billion dollars. There has not been a serious labor problem in 19 years. There have been 22 new ballparks built or utterly overhauled while he’s been commissioner, and the revenue-sharing money is well into nine figures a year. He has managed the drug hysteria. He will go down in the official history as a stern drug warrior who nonetheless was willing to compromise for a settlement. There seems little doubt that Selig is headed for a big afternoon in Cooperstown one day.

But the long view of history is going to say that, with Bud Selig, the office of the commissioner of baseball finally, completely, and probably perpetually became a management position. For a long time, at least theoretically, and in the dreams of people like Bill Veeck and Charlie Finley and others who would not be welcome in the world of Corporate Partners, the commissioner’s office also seemed to have a kind of ombudsman’s function. It was somehow supposed to sit in a place between management and labor, and between the game and the paying customers, in which place it was hoped the commissioner would arbitrate disputes, and that out of that arbitration would come solutions that would benefit everyone in the game, including those who devotedly followed it.”

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As often as I’ve criticized Bud Selig and Joe Torre for not acting quickly enough to eliminate home-plate collisions from baseball, I should stop and praise them for finally eradicating the concussion-inducing crashes. It’s time for the sport to progress, and this step is a good one.

Football, on the other hand, like boxing, has no answer for what ails it. No helmet is going to stop brain injuries. Football is in trouble. From Joshua Shepherd’s Practical Ethics post about the moral role parents play in their children participating in contact sports:

“A number of ethical questions arise in connection with this growing awareness. (What should the governing bodies of sports leagues do to protect players? What do teams owe players in such sports? Is the decision to play such a sport, or to continue playing in spite of suffering a concussion, really autonomous? Should fans speak up about player protection, and if not, are they complicit in the harm done to players? And so on.) Here I want to consider one question that has received little attention. It involves the role of parents in fostering participation in high-impact sports.

Without parental encouragement, participation in such sports would dramatically decrease. Certainly, parental encouragement or discouragement can be trumped. In societies which highly value such sports, some adolescents would find a way to participate. But I will not consider here the (vexing) question of how best to respect an adolescent’s budding autonomy. Arguably, if an adolescent wants to participate in a high-impact sport, a parent should acquiesce. Whether that argument is plausible depends, in part, on the risks of playing the sport in question. The question I want to consider is the following: is it morally permissible for parents to encourage their children to play high-impact sports?”

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babepointing

Some things are immensely popular right before a steep decline, like cricket in America in 1900 or newspaper advertising in the 1990s. Just because you’re on top doesn’t mean you’re staying there. Baseball has never been more popular in America than it is now, as measured by ticket sales and television contracts, but something seems amiss. It’s no longer the national pastime; thanks to gambling, a taste for violence and a less-demanding schedule, the NFL reigns supreme. And there isn’t a star in baseball equal to Lebron James of the NBA. 

From the moment of the Nelson Doubleday hokum, the sport was always sold on a lie. Myths were built, and that was unsustainable. It was never a rustic sport nor a clean one, but it was protected as such because it was considered too important to the national psyche. It was the present being sold as nostalgia, and that can’t work in a world of decentralized media. 

But even before the PED scandals of the ’90s and aughts (which are largely silly and filled with hypocrisies) made it all come crashing down, baseball had lost traction with the popular culture, a sport that revered team before individual and humility before braggadocio, unless you were looking for a fastball behind your ear. These society-wide things are (probably) cyclical, and all you can do is better promote your stars.

Commissioner Bud Selig’s retirement is a positive, as his leadership has flagged on almost every important issue, from technology to padded caps for pitchers to stadium disputes. The rise of regional sports cable and its need for live content has provided the MLB with money to paper over Selig’s failings. Owners and players have never been richer, and there’s some danger in that. I have doubts that the next commissioner will be more progressive, but we can hope. So many kids and young adults having no interest in the sport is scary.

The other best thing that could happen to baseball would be to have its antitrust exemption stripped. There is no way for competition to arise under the current system. (To be fair, even without the exemption, it would be difficult to start a new league.) But perhaps a speed league that enforced rules to shorten games to two hours would force the MLB to change and grow. Good competition for the league is as important as good competition between the teams–maybe even more important in the big picture.

The opening of “Is It Game Over?” Jonathan Mahler’s recent New York Times essay:

“MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL is doing just fine. Unlike the N.F.L. and the N.B.A., it has been free of labor strife for nearly 20 years. It has more exciting young stars than I can ever remember. It has even achieved that elusive ‘competitive balance,’ with seven different champions over the last decade. Teams across the country are playing in brand-new ballparks that they somehow persuaded local governments to help pay for. Over the last 20 years, baseball revenues have grown from roughly $1 billion to nearly $8 billion.

The game, in other words, has never been healthier. So why does it feel so irrelevant?

Maybe the best evidence of this admittedly unscientific observation is the national TV ratings. There’s no sense comparing baseball’s numbers to football’s, which exist in a whole other Nielsen’s stratosphere. But baseball is losing ground to pro basketball, too. In 2012, the N.B.A.’s regular season ratings on ABC were nearly double those of Major League Baseball on Fox. The last eight years have produced the seven least-watched World Series on record.

More to the point, baseball seems simply to have fallen out of the national conversation (unless the conversation happens to be about steroids, that is). The last time baseball felt front and center, culturally speaking, was the 1998 home-run race between Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. And we all know how that turned out.”

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Baseball pitchers should have been wearing padded caps or fitted helmets for years, but, you know, Bud Selig is MLB Commissioner, so everything has to move at a glacial pace. The only good thing to come out of the harrowing recent incident that saw Toronto pitcher J.A. Happ suffer a skull fracture after being struck by a batted ball was the solution to the problem brainstormed by Tampa Bay’s southpaw Matt Moore. From Roger Mooney in the Tampa Tribune:

ST. PETERSBURG – It was after the shock of seeing the line drive slam into the side of J.A. Happ’s head had subsided a bit – after word spread through the Rays dugout that as scary as it seemed, the Toronto starter would be OK – when the Tampa Bay pitchers discussed ways to avoid such incidents.

Matt Moore suggested a sensor inside the baseball and one inside the pitcher’s cap that would cause the ball to explode when it came within a certain distance of the pitcher’s head.

‘That’s Matt’s great idea. I kind of like it,’ Rays pitcher David Price said.”

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Robots, not humans, should be calling balls and strikes at every Major League Baseball game. It should have been this way for years. There was a sad reminder of the reluctance to automate this aspect of umpiring on Sunday night when Marty Foster ended the Tampa Bay-Texas game with one of the worst ball-and-strike calls imaginable.

Of course, we won’t be seeing the game utilizing computers to greater effect anytime soon. Commissioner Bud Selig and his inner circle have shown a shocking incompetence in regard to most of the key issues facing the game–instant replay, home-plate collisions, the untenable stadium situations of the A’s and the Rays, the Mets festering ownership crisis–procrastinating rather than acting. These failings have been papered over by the sport’s runaway profits, which have everything to do with the explosion of regional cable and its hunger for a quantity of family-friendly events that defy time-shifting, and little to do with anything in particular that Selig has done.

What are the arguments for not using software to call strikes? There is a tradition of catchers framing pitches, purists will say, which will be lost. A small sacrifice that will eliminate larger issues. You don’t want that much variance in the execution of the rules of any sport, with the egos of the least-important “participants” taking center stage. A loose application of rules also opens up the possibility of officials tilting games for illicit purposes (not the case with the Foster call, of course). And inconsistent outcomes due to human error is one of the reasons why boxing has seen such a decline. (Knowledge of the impact of head injuries has been just as damaging, thinning the ranks of talent.) Professional basketball’s referee scandal of a few years back occurred because the rules of the game allow for far too much interpretation. That needn’t be the case with baseball.

The human element will be lost, the stalwarts argue, not acknowledging that baseball is not some pastoral pastime but a multibillion dollar industry, and one that can easily afford to ensure its integrity if it weren’t for the lethargy and myopia of its highest ranks.•

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David Stern: I've been NBA Commissioner for so long that people have stopped questioning if that's a good thing. It is not. (Photo by Cody Mulcahy.)

David Stern, NBA (1984- ):
In the last ten years on Stern’s watch, the league has become a gigantic money pit ($400 million this year alone), attendance has plummeted despite the presence of huge stars and there’s been a gambling scandal involving an on-court official (thanks to the lax management of officiating). Stern did an exceptional job marketing the game and its stars during the ’80s and ’90s and fostering the globalization of basketball, but even the Michael Jordan glory years will have to be rethought if it ever surfaces that the Bulls legend stepped away from the game for a couple of years for some sort of unseemly reason.

Verdict: It is well beyond time for Stern to be replaced.

Roger Goodell, NFL (2006- ):
Just go the gig, so there isn’t enough of a body of work to judge him on. Has shown a serious interest in the concussion problem that has plagued the NFL. Has tried to be firm but fair-minded when it comes to off-the-field misbehavior by players. Showed initiative by moving Pro Bowl to the week before the Super Bowl to give it some relevance. One hopes that he will pay more attention to the plight of former players than his predecessor did. He should also try create a better system of financial education for current players, as the majority of them end up broke a few years out of the league.

Verdict: Has shown promise and deserves an opportunity to live up to it.

Gary Bettman, NHL (1993- ):
Thought it was a good idea to move an ice hockey franchise from Canada to Arizona. Allowed the league to expand ridiculously so owners could cash some quick checks at the expense of the level of play and the long-term health of the NHL. Placed far too many teams in Southern U.S. markets and not enough in hockey-crazed Canada. Two labor stoppages have occurred on his watch, including the complete cancellation of the 2004-2005 season. Has done nothing to reduce the number of teams that qualify for the playoffs, which seriously diminishes the meaning of the long regular season. Has postured that he will no longer allow NHL players to participate in the Olympics, which is great publicity for the league. Current TV deals with NBC and Versus aren’t befitting a pro sports league. Revenues have increased during his tenure, but revenues are not the same thing as profits or long-tern viability.

Verdict: The NHL Commissioner job is not an easy one, but Bettman has been subpar from the beginning. Should be replaced.

Bud Selig, MLB (1992- ):
Whether it’s steroids, exorbitant ticket prices or late starting times, Selig is always the last one to know there’s a problem. A former owner, he’s remained popular with current ones by allowing them to greedily pocket short-term cash at the expense of fans and the game’s future. People have been claiming baseball is on the wane since the 1880s, but Selig does actually test the game’s resiliency. To his credit, he’s been behind the push to globalize the sport and has supported RBI (Reviving Baseball in Inner Cities).

Verdict: Should be ousted and replaced by someone with discipline and vision. Scheduled to retire in 2012, but the owners will simply install a similarly ineffectual mediocrity.

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