Adios. Eventually.
By Mitch Berg
Pat Reusse on Bud Selig’s reign over major league baseball, due to end in a little over two years:
Fay Vincent was voted out of office as the baseball commissioner on Sept. 7, 1992. The main grievance against Vincent was that his intervention in the 1990 lockout of spring training had prevented the owners from getting a grip on the game’s economics.
Bud Selig was named the acting commissioner. He was the longtime owner of the Milwaukee Brewers. He planned to return to running that club as soon as a new commissioner was found…That will be 17 years on the job for Baseball Bud. And he will leave as did Vincent: with the owners having no grip on the game’s economics.
Selig was going to be the owners’ answer to the players – a commissioner that could stand up for owners’ interests.
The players struck in August 1994, and the owners lost a World Series trying to put a restraint into the salary system.
They messed it up, of course. They went through weeks of fruitless negotiations in the fall of ’94, then made the mistake of trying to declare a legal impasse a few days after the union had altered its position.
“The fact the impasse was declared after the union had moved created a legal situation for the owners that was unsupportable,” Griffith said. “They were forced to withdraw the claim of an impasse.
“They followed by taking the position that salary arbitration was a ‘permissive’ subject of negotiation, rather than a ‘mandatory’ subject of negotiation. It’s complicated, but the owners were wrong on that one, too.”
Bottom line: The owners gave up in April 1995 and basically settled on the players’ terms.
Which has had fallout all over the place, including regional politics; scrambling to pay the ever-escalating player salaries, teams feel no compunction about going to cities and states demanding new stadiums and, for all intents and purposes, big pieces of city rebuilt around the team’s needs.
So adios, Bud Selig (eventually), and good riddance.
