Like Orel, I'll take this one at a time.
Orel Miraculous said:
The very first freaking Super Bowl ever played in 1967 drew a larger TV audience than any single World Series game that year (a series that, you should recall, went 7). Football is a made-for-TV spectacle that is perfectly designed to appeal to the short attention span of the modern American public. Football becoming more popular than baseball was essentially inevitable.
Using TV ratings for the Super Bowl to argue that football has always been more popular than baseball is mindlessly stupid. Reminds me of the arguments that NASCAR fans used to make when they would say that it was "the most heavily attended sport." (No, you just use larger stadiums for your events.)
In 1967, all World Series games were played during the day, and televised baseball was not how the majority of people followed games - radio was. The Super Bowl ratings do not prove your point. In fact, they prove nothing.
Which is 10:30 in the Pacific Time Zone, right? Where half the country lives? That time zone? Complaints about playoff games starting at 8 PM EST are always facile. Playoff games are specifically scheduled to allow as many people as possible to watch them. This is undeniably a good thing.
As has been pointed out, 15% of the country is not 50%. It's a huge error and it completely undermines your point.
Aside from this being demonstrably false (the Yankees have never had the highest payroll for 20 straight years, and have only ever spent $50 million more than everyone else 5 times) what was he supposed to do? Predict the massive and unforeseen economic shift the game went through in the mid-90s? Besides, the problem has been more or less rectified, the Yankees have been forced to reign in spending.
This point is basically correct. The system in place was more of less Bud-neutral.
I don't even know what you're getting at here. The commissioner has absolutely no control over the Hall of Fame, and the All-Star game (just like every other All-Star game) has been declining in importance for decades. Bud didn't do that, the inexorable march of time did.
These two assertions are incorrect.
Bud actively lobbied for the change that precludes any player on the suspended list from standing for election to the HoF. He also has had a strong influence over the effective blackballing of any player strongly suspected of PED use from being considered. You may like or dislike these changes, but to assert otherwise is to engage in willful blindness.
You are similarly incorrect about the All Star game. Back in 2002, Bud Selig stepped in and declared that the game would end in a tie when the teams ran out of pitchers. (In his home park - Miller Field.) It was a joke and exposed a game that had already been losing its relevance as a complete fraud. Bud was so humiliated by the criticism over this that he decided to make home field advantage in the WS dependent on the All Star game.
Again, you can make arguments about whether this is a good thing or not, but to say he has had nothing to do with what the All Star game has become is simply 100% complete bullshit. No person has had more influence over what this game has become than Bud.
Good God, why do people continue to make this joke? Two shitty teams playing each other!! This is the worst thing ever and it never happened before interleague! Thanks a lot, Bud! Seriously, do you sit down to watch a Mariners-Twins game and say to yourself, "Jesus, this American League bullshit is such a joke! No one wants to watch this!" Yes, interleague often results in two bad teams playing each other. This is the inevitable result of there being more than one bad team in Major League Baseball. It also gives us awesome Mets-Yankees, Cubs-White Sox, and Red Sox-Dodgers matchups.
This is a fair point, and I'll go ever farther.
Interleague play was an incredibly useful innovation at a time (1997) when MLB popularity was in the toilet following the 1994-95 work stoppage. The fact that it has arguably outlived its usefulness should not detract from the reality that it was a widely hailed innovation in a sport that was greatly needed at the time.
One. One strike. Followed by 20 years of labor peace, which is essentially unprecedented in American professional sports and far better than each of the other three major leagues.
Yup, that sucked, no getting around that. Of course it should be noted that Bud absolutely learned from that disaster, resulting in the sentence I typed one inch above this one.
And here you go down the rabbit hole again.
This one labor stoppage was a direct result of Bud. Hell, he was elevated to the post
specifically to lead the owners through a labor stoppage that came damn close to ruining the game.
The labor peace we have had since then is a reflection of the owners realizing that the militant strategy they adopted had failed miserably and that they really could lose everything if they continued down that path. As the leader of the hard line faction (along with Reinsdorf) Bud Selig was directly responsible for this miscalculation and he gets no credit from me for the labor peace that has followed.
The final game of the 2009 WBC was watched by more people than any other baseball game in at least the last 30 years, and quite possibly was the most-watched game of all-time. So yeah, fuck the guy that came up with that idea.
Not going to revisit this issue with you. Time will tell who is right.
He's a douchebag. Not sure what that has to do with Bud Selig though.
It actually has a lot to do with Selig.
Back in 2001, baseball had a serious problem with the Montreal Expos. Some of this was due to the changes in politics/demographics in Montreal, but much of it was because the fan base was so disgusted by the labor action in '94 that they simply never came back to the game.
Baseball also had a problem with the owner in Montreal - Jeffrey Loria - who had no vision for how to revive a struggling franchise. (MLB had a similar problem in Minnesota with Carl Pohlad.) So Bud being Bud, he decided to essentially transfer Loria's ownership of the Expos to the Marlins (facilitating the process with an MLB-funded buyout) while taking over the management of the Expos through the league office. He then tried to erase the problems in Montreal and Minnesota by contracting the teams.
We all know how successful he was at that, but more to the point, by throwing a financial lifeline to a failed owner with no sense of vision for how to rescue a franchise when the fan base is not engaged, Bud Selig is directly responsible for the mess in South Florida.
Of course, by doing this he also allowed John Henry to escape to Boston, so every disaster has its silver lining, I guess.
-70*
PEDs will unquestionably be the blackest mark on his record and they will define his legacy. How anyone could possibly lay the blame for PEDs in baseball solely on Bud Selig is beyond me. The Olympics have a massive PED problem; international cycling has a massive PED problem; the NFL has a massive PED problem--all of this despite the fact that Bud Selig had nothing whatsoever to do with any of them. Why? Because athletes cheat, they always have and they always will. At least MLB has started to get a handle on it and is doing a far better job than the NFL.
I don't think anyone is laying the blame solely on Bud. But the man was commissioner during the steroid era and he deserves a large part of the blame for the celebration of the steroid-fueled HR binges that "brought the game back" from the 1994-'95 labor stoppage.
Bud Selig has also stated that he has been aware of the PED culture in MLB for years - he has talked about walking through the clubhouse of the Milwaukee Braves in the 50s and seeing greenies in a bowl like candy - so he has no excuse for his inaction. He knew full well what was going on and as Commissioner he should have done something about it before it became a huge scandal. He did not.
I could go on and on, but the fact is that Bud Selig isn't some visionary who has been a great commissioner. He's Forrest Gump, succeeding wildly by being in the right place at the right time.
I don't even like Bud Selig that much, honestly. But for some reason (probably mostly because he looks like a goofball, really) talking about Bud Selig turns otherwise rational people into mouth-breathers.
On this, we agree.
