For 92 years and three months, Bud Selig remains loyal to his life mission. He continues to ruin baseball quicker than he once licked a frozen custard cone. When he took over the sport as commissioner, he and Jerry Reinsdorf engaged union leaders in hostilities over a salary cap and canceled the 1994 World Series. Soon enough, they were eclipsed by the NFL and Michael Jordan, forcing them to deal with attendance issues before claiming not to know anything about steroids.
“If baseball has a problem, I must say candidly that we were not aware of it,” Selig told the Los Angeles Times of the S-word. “It certainly hasn’t been talked about much.”
Congress called and forced him to fess up. The game was desolate. He retired, gave way to Rob Manfred, and while baseball used a pitch clock to accelerate a dawdling pace, the rhythms are still slow in a country that loves football, basketball and contact blather. Selig finds his mission in the same insubstantial position of 32 years ago. He wants a hard cap — though his hometown team, the Brewers, plays in the smallest market in the major leagues, while the opponents, the Rays, rank 26th in payroll. This is the Series that laughs at cap fiends, which makes it amusing that Milwaukee has a 2-0 lead and might win the championship that always eluded Selig as owner.
He is thrilled by the wild dash, as he tells the media. Imagine the Brewers winning 103 regular-season games, sweeping the Dodgers and sweeping the Rays for an 11-1 October. This would be one of the better teams of all time, right there on the edge of Interstate 94, where much of America knows little about their makeup beyond late-night-talk-candidate Pat Murphy, the fastball records of Kid Charizard and Sausage Races.
“I was at home. I saw the left fielder racing to get the ball and I wasn’t really sure if he caught it. He made actually made a hell of a play,” Selig said. “And I tell you, what I said to myself was, ‘Oh, my God. We just won the pennant. This team is going to play in the World Series.’ An incredible story.”
Yet when he focuses on the issue that will separate owners and players on Dec. 1 — and he does, in every interview — no one wants to hear it. Especially from him. Selig and Reinsdorf have not scanned the last three decades and think they’ve done anything wrong. For Bud Lite, as I called him, the union blew it and will blow it once again.
“Do we need a salary cap to continue this for owners such as Mark Attanasio and the Tampa people and others? You bet we do,” Selig said of the Brewers owner. “The basic question there always is: How come baseball is the only sport without a salary cap? My mother was right. She wanted me to be a teacher.
“You have to make adjustments. The changes that (owners) are proposing are not only rational, they’re essential.”
The problem with this Series — while the Brewers and their fans are magical — is that dialogue already has turned vicious. Jibbering and jabbering about the cap doesn’t excite people who know a lockout is weeks away. This is what Selig and Reinsdorf did in 1994, when the Chicago ego monster said he wanted to be a “hawk” — and not Hawk Harrelson. They acted like kingpins of the universe on Sept. 14, when they ditched the Series. I have seen massive mistakes in sports. That might have been the biggest.
The national pastime became the national past-its-time. In his dreams, Selig thinks he can win a Series and grab a salary cap. The Major League Baseball Players Association never loses. The union would rather miss entire seasons than surrender.
“Re-thinking where you are is a really important part of trying to make a deal. It’s actually a skill in collective bargaining,” Manfred said Friday, taking a shot at union chief Bruce Meyer. “It’s easy to say: ‘I’m here and I’m never moving.’ That’s not a particularly skilled approach to the process. We have an unprecedented level of unanimity among ownership that it is something that we need to do.”
Said Meyer: “It has nothing to do with what the Dodgers are doing. There is no reason whatsoever that the (Pittsburgh) Pirates can’t do what the Brewers have done, or what the Rays have done. I think the fact that they’re doubling down on the cap now, in the wake of what’s happening with this World Series, just illustrates that it’s not about competitive balance. It’s not about teams not having hope. It’s about their desire — which they have had for decades — to have a system that artificially suppresses player salaries, player freedom of movement removes player guarantees, and limits flexibility in all different areas, guts the amateur entry system. You know, the rest of it is a charade. I mean, they don’t really want it for any of the reasons they say.”
Said Manfred: “I think the small markets operate at a disadvantage economically. They just don’t have the resources that bigger markets do. I mean, (here’s) the best evidence. Look, the Brewers have been a well-run franchise forever. It’s been 40 years since we’re here. Once every 40 years is not enough.”
Jamming the cap — so Shohei Ohtani makes $202 million for five years instead of $700 million for 10 years — is insanity. Know how much money he has made so far for the Dodgers, even in a season when his body broke down? Much more than $700 million.
What we’d rather do is concentrate on the Brewers, who took their seventh comeback win of the postseason Saturday night. They fell behind 4-0 and returned for a 5-4 victory. All the Rays do is make mistakes — or they might lead 2-0 — with an error and defensive mixups. Jackson Chourio, perhaps the best player in this series, threw out a Tampa Bay runner at home from left field.
“As long as there’s game left, we have a chance. I think we’ve all bought into that. We’re never out of it,” said shortstop Cooper Pratt, who drove in the winning run with a seventh-inning single.
“It’s mayhem, and I’ve never experienced anything like it before,” said Sal Frelick, who hit his first home run since July 11.
Before the game, Murphy discussed the purpose of wearing ties. “Let’s talk about that. What are ties? What’s the purpose of ties? Is it a tradition? Really, explain it to me,” he said. “I wore a tie in grammar school every day. And then in high school at Christian Brothers Academy, I wore a tie. But I cut it off. Wore boots. They didn’t like me.”
Afterward, he repeated the usual champion’s line: “These guys do not give up.”
And there was Selig, counting down the minutes when 46 of 57 teams have won it all with a 2-0 Series lead. Or is he counting down the hours to 11:59 p.m. on Dec. 1?
Bud LIte is back. All you need to know: He and Reinsdorf are a collective 182 years old. And they still think they run the game, God help us.
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Jay Mariotti, called “without question the most impacting Chicago sportswriter of the past quarter-century,’’ writes general sports columns for Substack while appearing on some of the 1,678,498 podcasts and shows in production today. He is an accomplished columnist, TV panelist and talk/podcast host.