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What's next for Major League Baseball?

In January, Bud Selig will step down from his position as commissioner of Major League Baseball, a post he's held for the past 22 years. On Thursday, team owners voted--after much intrigue--to hire his hand-picked successor, baseball's chief operating officer Rob Manfred, for the job.

Selig is 80 years old. It is time for him to retire. While baseball will survive his stewardship, he was a problematic figure, probably the person most responsible for the 1994 strike which cost Tony Gwynn a shot at hitting .400 and the Montreal Expos their best chance for a World Series appearance.

To over-simplify just a little, the roots of the 1994 strike lay in the players' distrust of Selig who, as the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, was among those cited for collusion to prevent the signing of the league's top stars at their market value from 1985 through 1987.

To this day, Fay Vincent, Selig's immediate predecessor as commissioner, characterizes the collusion as "a $280 million theft" from the players by Selig and Chicago White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf that continues to poison the relationship between the game's labor and management.

Vincent isn't exactly a Selig fan: In the aftermath of the collusion debacle, Selig and Reinsdorf actively worked to oust Vincent and install Selig as "acting commissioner," a position he maintained until 1998 when he finally sold off the Brewers (to his daughter) and baseball gave up the pretense of searching for a new commissioner.

On the other hand, the owners love Selig, and they should. The game is in its best financial state since the free-agent era began in the mid-1970s. Broadcasting contracts with Fox, Turner and ESPN will bring in about $12.4 billion over the next seven years. Revenues are projected to approach $9 billion this year, nine times what they were when Selig took over as commissioner, and attendance figures (about 30,500 per game) aren't far off the all-time high (32,785) set in pre-recession 2007. Two years ago, the Los Angeles Dodgers sold for a record $2 billion. Every owner has been made much richer during Selig's tenure.

Whether Selig deserves much credit for that is open to debate, but the fact is he's leaving the game in good financial health. The best thing about Selig's tenure is the ironic fact that despite the commissioner's history as a labor hawk, we've had 20 seasons uninterrupted by work stoppages.

Things are going so well that there's talk that some owners (led, once again, by Reinsdorf) might even be preparing to take a hard line with the Major League Baseball Players Association--now headed by Tony Clark, a former player, rather than Donald Fehr, who was arguably the most effective union leader in America when he led the MLBPA--when the collective bargaining agreement comes up for negotiation in 2016. Labor hawks like Reinsdorf reportedly perceive an opening that might allow the owners to claw back some of the money they've spent on ridiculous guaranteed contracts they've given to .220 hitters. Sigh.

I believe Selig--along with owners and fans and writers and the rest of us--was complicit in what we call the game's "steroid era," when the use of so-called performance-enhancing drugs and other factors disrupted baseball's delicate balance of offense and defense, resulting in artificially inflated numbers that wrecked the record books and created all sorts of moral problems for hypocritical Hall of Fame voters.

Still, I can't say his departure doesn't make me a little wistful. That the baseball we have today is not the same as the baseball I grew up loving is not Bud Selig's fault. When Leonard Schecter wrote, in 1968, that baseball "may be the only game that can be enjoyed while reading a newspaper," he meant it as a kind of compliment. Nowadays it sounds like an indictment, and there's talk of enforcing the pitch clock.

Even as baseball has prospered, it's been eclipsed by the National Football League and the National Basketball Association, who have done a much better job of marketing their product on a national and, in the NBA's case, international level. So while baseball players may be among the best-paid professional athletes, they don't approach the celebrity of stars from other sports. A Harris Poll released in July had only one baseball player--retiring Derek Jeter--among the country's Top 10 favorite professional athletes. (There were four NFL quarterbacks--Peyton Manning, Tom Brady, Drew Brees and Aaron Rodgers--on the list; two NBA players--LeBron James who came in first, and Kobe Bryant; NASCAR driver Dale Earnhardt Jr., golfer Tiger Woods and, remarkably, 51-year-old Charlotte Hornets owner Michael Jordan, who last played in the NBA in 2003 and who had held the distinction of being No. 1 from 1993 through 2005.)

Baseball, with its quaint rhythms and mysterious (to the uninitiated) rites and rituals, has become a regional sport, more in line with college football than the NFL or NBA. While there are pockets of fervency, mostly in the urban areas that harbor franchises, and teams like the Red Sox, Yankees and (inexplicably) the Chicago Cubs have national constituencies, there seem to be fewer and fewer people who actually follow baseball.

Part of this is due to the length of the season, which is one of the chief charms of the sport for the deep baseball fan. Obviously, when you play a 162-game schedule, individual games matter less than if you only play 16. They say on any given Sunday any team in the NFL can best any other team, but in truth the better teams are usually obvious, and they usually win. In football, it's easy to see which team is superior, even if it's not always easy to see why.

In baseball, it's not even considered an upset when a last-place team beats a first-place team. It's not even unusual. And individual excellence is determined by the slow accretion of information. Baseball is a game that rewards patience and close attention and bores those with abbreviated attention spans to tears.

In a way, baseball is a lot like those newspapers people used to be able to read while watching the game--its core audience is aging and therefore shrinking. And most attempts to attract younger fans--to make the product faster, flashier and more in tune with a video-game culture--seem likely to alienate its loyalists.

The next commissioner will likely face a difficult situation. After he reinstates Pete Rose (an overrated player and problematic person who nevertheless deserves to be in the Hall of Fame), what then? It's like the scene at the end of The Candidate, when Robert Redford turns to his political consultant Peter Boyle and asks: "What do we do now?"

pmartin@arkansasonline.com

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Editorial on 08/17/2014

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