FOR THE LOVE OF THE GAME

In his final days in office, commissioner Bud Selig sits down with News to discuss the good times and bad in a lifetime spent in baseball

MILWAUKEE — My first introduction to Bud Selig was at the 1975 All-Star Game in Milwaukee, at a time when — what else was new? — the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball was in a bit of turmoil.

I was there as a reporter for the wire service United Press International, not so much to cover the All-Star Game but the palace intrigue: Charlie Finley, the cantankerous and confrontational owner of the Oakland A’s, had formed a bloc of four American League owners who were determined to oust Bowie Kuhn as commissioner.

The night before the vote on Kuhn was to take place, I was with my boss, Milton Richman, the longtime, highly respected UPI columnist, at Milwaukee’s renowned German restaurant, Karl Ratzsch’s, where many of the owners were having dinner.

On our way out the door, Richman spotted Selig sitting at a table with friends.

“I want you to meet Bud Selig,” Milton said to me. “He’s not like most of these other owners. He really loves the game. That’s why I like him.”

As it turned out, two of Finley’s “Dump Bowie” owners, Brad Corbett of the Texas Rangers and George Steinbrenner of the Yankees, were persuaded to change their votes, and Kuhn was overwhelmingly re-elected the next day.

But as he was about to begin his press conference at the famous Pfister Hotel, Kuhn spotted Finley, who was in the back of the room holding court with a bunch of reporters, and said pointedly: “Charlie, you can leave my room now!” To which Finley retorted: “That just shows more class from you, Commissioner. You’re still the village idiot.”

As I watched this scene I remember saying to myself: Wow! What ever happened to civility among supposed gentlemen?

“Tell me about it!” Selig was saying in a wide-ranging interview with the Daily News last month as he prepares to leave office in January, after what many consider to be the most impactful commissionership in the history of the game. “For years, the owners were a very fractured group, and Finley was impossible. There aren’t a lot of people in baseball I didn’t like, but he sure was one of them.”

It is a cold, gray Milwaukee morning and Selig, now 80 and headed for a guest lecturing assignment on sports and society in the U.S. at the University of Wisconsin, is sitting in his office on the 30th floor of the U.S. Bank Tower, which offers a spectacular panoramic view of Lake Michigan from the window behind his massive desk.

Since 1992, when he became acting commissioner — after another owners’ insurrection similar to Finley’s “Dump Bowie” movement in 1975, this one successful in ousting Fay Vincent — this sprawling office has been the pulse and nerve center of baseball. It is where Selig, the Milwaukee “Golden Boy”, as Steinbrenner always called him, the man who never spent much time at the commissioner’s Manhattan headquarters at 245 Park Ave., spends hours on the phone, alternately cajoling and scolding owners, issuing directives to his deputies, and managing to squeeze in a few calls to chastise writers whose stories he found to be “not in the best

interest of baseball,” as he saw it. (I was good for those calls at least a couple of times a month.)

The office, which leads out to a hallway connecting to a conference room, is filled with baseball mementoes, both from friends and from Selig’s long career in the game beginning when he and fellow Milwaukee businessman Ed Fitzgerald brought baseball back to Milwaukee in 1970 by purchasing the bankrupt Seattle Pilots for $10.8 million.

There is the original Jan. 12, 1942 framed letter from President Franklin Roosevelt to baseball’s first commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, imploring Landis to keep the game going during World War II for the “morale of the country” — and a large, framed, signed black and white photo of Joe DiMaggio on a wall next to his desk.

“If you had to ask me my most treasured memento,” Selig says, glancing at the DiMaggio photo, “that would be it. Growing up here in Milwaukee, before we got Major League Baseball (the Braves moved from Boston to Milwaukee in 1953), I was a Yankee fan and Joe was my favorite player. I remember on my 15th birthday, my mother, who was a huge baseball fan, took me to New York and we went to a Yankee game, and it was such a thrill to get to see DiMaggio in person.

“Afterward, we went to see Ezio Pinza and Mary Martin in ‘South Pacific.’ Years later, I got to know Joe fairly well through George (Steinbrenner), and then, on my 70th birthday, George sent me that picture.”

Selig and Steinbrenner. Now there was an Odd Couple — Selig, the champion of the small market owners and share-the-wealth baseball economics, and The Boss, the ultimate big spender and fierce protector of the Yankee brand with all its accompanying excess. And yet, despite their polar opposite viewpoints on baseball revenues, and their sometimes heated battles, the two were the closest of friends.

It was Selig, along with Chicago White Sox board chairman Jerry Reinsdorf, who championed the effort to get Steinbrenner reinstated to baseball in 1993 from his banishment by Vincent, and Selig, who, four years later, kicked Steinbrenner off baseball’s executive council after the Yankees made a separate $93 million marketing deal with adidas (which was not a licensed MLB corporate sponsor) and filed suit against MLB to keep all the revenues for themselves.

“I think I was more hurt than mad,” Selig says of the adidas flap. “I had worked so hard to get George back after what (Vincent) had done to him, depriving him his rights. But it didn’t scar our relationship.”

Reaching into his desk drawer, Selig produces a letter.

“Just listen to this letter George wrote me when he gave me the DiMaggio photo: ‘I hope you will on occasion look at this and recall some very great memories over the past quarter-century. There were a lot of highs and a few lows, but a friendship true that has and will continue to shine.’ ”

Back in the ’70s and ’80s, Steinbrenner regularly accompanied the Yankees to Milwaukee where he would sit and vent with Selig in the owner’s private box at old County Stadium, which happened to be adjacent to the press box, separated only by a glass partition.

“George came to Milwaukee more than any other place,” Selig says. “I’m not sure why.”

One particularly memorable Sunday afternoon game in 1978, the Brewers were in the process of completing a sweep of the Yankees, who had a number of their key players, including Thurman Munson and Graig Nettles, out with injuries, when Don Gullett, their starting pitcher, was forced to leave after just two-thirds of an inning with a sore shoulder.

Not long after, Mickey Morabito, the Yankees’ P.R. director, was summoned into Selig’s box where, as the writers all watched in bemusement, Steinbrenner began berating him right in front of Selig. Suddenly, Morabito turned around and began rushing out of Selig’s box, only to forget about the low overhang, whereupon he conked his head and toppled to the floor. As Morabito lay there, half-dazed, Steinbrenner stood over him, still screaming.

“It was the most astounding thing I ever saw,” says Selig, still laughing at the incident some 36 years later. “Poor Mickey was laying there, practically out cold, and George was completely oblivious as he kept on screaming at him!

“But let me ask you something: Could you ever imagine, 30 years ago, with George running the Yankees, every team in baseball sharing 34% of their net revenues? He would fight and fight, but in the end I could always count on George to cast his vote for the good of the game. He used to kid me by calling me the (small market owners’) ‘golden boy’.”

A year and a half after Finley’s failed bid to topple Kuhn at the ’75 All-Star Game, the American League owners were at it again — this time over whether to re-admit Bill Veeck, whom most of them despised, to their fraternity. The iconoclastic Veeck, who, in his previous stints as owner of the Cleveland Indians, St. Louis Browns and the White Sox, had set the baseball establishment on its ear with his zany promotions and revolutionary ideas about sharing gate receipts and interleague play, was attempting to buy the White Sox back, but had been told by the AL owners he needed to restructure the financing of the deal in order to be approved.

At the 1976 winter meetings at the Diplomat Hotel in Hollywood Fla., I happened to be sitting on the floor in a corridor off the main lobby, chatting with another writer, when I overheard voices from behind what was a partition wall we had been leaning against. It was the American League owners’ meeting, and a man who I later learned was John Fetzer, owner of the Detroit Tigers from 1961-83, was admonishing his fellow lords for having again rejected Veeck, even though he had done everything they had asked of him regarding his offer for the White Sox.

“I’ve been in the league for 20 years and in that time I’ve seen one slipshod thing after another,” Fetzer intoned. “We rush in here to vote, then rush out to get drinks. We’ve done more soul-searching over this deal than at any time before and we’ve left these people over a barrel. Look, I don’t like it any more than you do that we’re allowing a guy in who’s called me an S.O.B. over and over. But we told them to go do it and they did it. So gentlemen, we’ve just got to take another vote.”

Moments later, Veeck had been approved by a 10-2 vote.

“John Fetzer,” says Selig now, “what a man! I was raised by all the right people in baseball and he was my mentor. I remember going to a meeting with him in 1971 when he voted on something, which I knew wasn’t in his best interest. But when I questioned him about it later, he said: ‘Buddy, you have to do what’s in the best interest of baseball, not in the best interest of the Detroit Tigers or, in your case, the Milwaukee Brewers.’ I never forgot that. It may sound trite, but the sport transcends all of us. We’re the caretakers of this generation. It’s a painful lesson that some in this business never learn.”

No more painful than the ruinous 232-day strike in 1994 that Selig presided over and became the first — and hopefully only — commissioner in history to cancel the World Series. That debacle was the culmination of eight baseball work stoppages since 1972, all of them essentially over the owners’ steadfast resistance to the inevitable changing tide in baseball.

When Selig came into baseball in 1970, the game was still being run like a plantation: Elimination of the reserve clause that bound players to their teams essentially for life would not come until the Messersmith-McNally decision in 1975 by arbitrator Peter Seitz and the subsequent advent of free agency. A later result of that ruling was the strike over compensation to teams losing free agents in 1981 that resulted in the cancellation of 713 games. But by 1994 the dispute among the owners and players was about how to divvy up the hundreds of millions in revenue they were now reaping. When Selig announced the cancellation of the