Selig’s new book covers Aaron, steroids, Bonds
ATLANTA — Bud Selig was devastated when the Milwaukee Braves left town to go south to Atlanta in 1965. But that was 54 years ago.
“Sure, I was mad like everyone else,” said Selig, the former owner of the Milwaukee Brewers and Major League Baseball commissioner from 1992 to 2015. “But I’m over it. I have enormous respect for the Braves.”
Selig’s memoir, “For the Good of the Game: The Inside Story of the Surprising and Dramatic Transformation of Major League Baseball,” was published Tuesday.
He opens his book with his uncomfortable journey around the country going to Giants games awaiting Barry Bonds to break Hank Aaron’s home run record in 2007. Selig felt this obligation to be there even though he believed Bonds’ career had been tainted by steroids. It was the one issue during his 23year run as commissioner he wished he could have dealt with sooner.
“Our image suffered,” he wrote. “We paid a terribly high price.”
The Bonds chase was made worse by the fact Selig was such close friends with Aaron — a man he has now known for sixplus decades. As a car salesman in Milwaukee in the late 1950s, he sold the outfielder a car when both were in their early 20s.
“It was a little small Ford,” Selig recalled in a phone interview. “It was his way to get around. We got close. Hank and I went to football games. He wrote a note for my book that symbolized our friendship.”
Selig then read aloud Aaron’s promotional blurb that is on the back of the hardcover edition of his book: “Who would have imaged all those years ago that I, a black kid from Mobile, Ala., would break Babe Ruth’s home run record and you, a Jewish kid from Milwaukee, would become baseball commissioner?”
Just reading that the first time, he said, got him “really emotional.” The two octogenarians see each other regularly, the last time at Frank Robinson’s funeral two months ago. Both Aaron and Selig spoke.
The book, which chronicles Selig’s modest upbringing to his unlikely rise to sports team owner to his often tumultuous ride as commissioner, came to be in part because of noted historian Doris Kearns Goodwin. She encouraged Selig — a history professor as well — to write it and ended up penning the foreword.
At Selig’s induction ceremony at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., in 2017, he recalled she told him, “You have great stories. You can’t let that all go. Write a book! That’s what history is about!”
Selig said in the book that he didn’t immediately see how serious the steroid problem was and by the time he did, he met strong resistance from the players’ union. The union resisted robust drug testing until players like Derek Jeter began publicly stating they supported it.
He also often was pilloried by pundits and fans over what is now known as the Steroid Age.
“People misunderstood the role of the commissioner,” Selig said, noting that he did not have unilateral power to ban steroids from the game.
Now, he said, baseball has a strong drug policy. By the time he left as commissioner in 2015, his office had handed out 44 suspensions for PED and amphetamine use. (Selig, by the way, does not believe steroidusing players like Roger Clemens, Juan Gonzalez and Bonds deserve to be in the Hall of Fame.)
Good news: Steroids are no longer a major topic of conversation in baseball. Experts don’t really mention that nowadays as a reason why the game in the 2010s has experienced a major escalation in both home runs and strikeouts.
Selig, in the interview, largely punted on many issues facing baseball today: an aging audience, the rise in sabermetrics, games dragging too long, free agency for older players, the growth in the use of the shift and relief pitchers, to name a few.
“I have a lot of faith in (Commissioner) Rob Manfred,” he said. “They’ll figure it out.”
Change is part of the game, Selig added, and that’s OK.
“People hate change,” he said. “Look at the wild card. People complained so much when I instituted that. But it’s the best thing I ever did. So many more teams are in the pennant race on Sept. 1.”
Wildcard teams have made it to the World Series a dozen times since 1995.
And he extolled the fact he was able to help create a redistributive luxury tax — though not as extreme as a salary cap like pro football and basketball — that enables smaller markets to create teams to better compete with those in larger markets like New York and Los Angeles.
Baseball attendance is down this season, he noted, but just slightly. Overall, he considers the game healthy despite competition from video games and soccer and other pursuits.
“We’re still doing great. It’s down maybe 1, 2%,” he said.
He’s also proud that there has been no baseball strike in 25 years, that management/ union relations are reasonably good.
Then there’s the perpetual dilemma that is Pete Rose, the wouldbe Hall of Fame player with the most hits in the history of the game, who remains out of baseball because he bet on it while he was a manager, an ironclad nono in baseball since the Black Sox scandal of 1919.
Selig did not reinstate Rose, and neither has his successor, Manfred. It wasn’t because Selig didn’t respect what Rose did as a player. Selig was flabbergasted that — despite physical proof — Rose denied to Selig’s face in 2002 that he had gambled on baseball.
Later, Rose changed his tune a bit, which annoyed Selig even more.
“He was just a compulsive liar, his own worst enemy,” Selig wrote.
In the interview, Selig added: “I had a difficult situation with him. It’s been disappointing. I regard baseball as a social institution. Rose had responsibilities to uphold that. He didn’t. Every player from 1920 on when the Office of the Commissioner was created, every single person knew you could not gamble on baseball.”