At Cooperstown, a Good Day for Bud Selig, but Not a Perfect One

Allowing Bud Selig in the Baseball Hall of Fame is like putting George W Bush on Mount Rushmore.

To paraphrase Tom Hanks: Are you tying? Are you tying?! There's no tying in baseball!

But the car dealer in Mr. Selig came through: given a lemon, he made lemonade, if not limoncello, by awarding homefield advantage to the league that wins the All Star Game.

Selig....the "drug dealer". If you are gonna put him in the hall put many low level drug dealer in NYC during that period too. They loved and supported the Yankees too.

Selig and drugs along with money helped destroy Major League Baseball.

They vote the steroid commissioner in but not the home run king. What hypocrisy.

Now with Selig in, you can officially change the name to the Hall of Drug Abusers Sponsored by the Commissioner Who is Now Inducted Along with Them.

No support of Bud intended, but I think the Commissioner has always served at the behest of the owners. Every commissioner from Landis through Uberroth can probably be charged with some form of destructive decision-making. Selig is just the first to be openly recognized as the stooge of the likes of the Busch's, the Bush's, Big Steiny (Seinfeld reference) etc. The office was never intended to be a position of neutral mediation between owners and players. To quote Annie Savoy "You can look it up".

"Hall of Fame" recognizing the likes of "Village Idiot" otherwise known as Bowie Kuhn along with Selig while shunning emancipating pioneers such as Curt Flood, Marvin Miller deserves wrathful contempt.

the used car salesman, the all star tie game, the owners' toady...... at least selig has no shame.....maybe a good thing to retire on.

The Oakland Athletics have been trying to build a new stadium for 20 years with no luck. I suggest the blame lies with Bud Selig and his college roommate and previous owner of the Athletics Lew Wolff. They both lied to the City of Oakland and the Oakland fans for years.

Being a Wisconsin daughter, I have always been a Milwaukee baseball fan - first with the Braves and then with the Brewers. My heart was broken when the Brew Crew failed to win the 1982 World Series. That said, I have never been a fan of Bud Selig. Maybe that is because my dad had a negative experience when leasing a car back in the day from Selig Auto Dealership.

The fact that Pete Rose continues to be denied entry into Cooperstown very much like Ron Santo (until after his death of course), will always leave a sour taste in my mouth. I love Pete Rose but know in my heart that he will NEVER know the joy of being a Hall of Famer.

Lost on the international news page is a subtle rebuke to RoidBoy Bud:
Anyone else notice a significant number?
755
Vlady Putin is clearly a b-ball fan.
Rebuking the Titans of the Steroid Era
and recognizing clean Hank's home run record
755

You can argue that Selig should not be in the Hall of Fame--whether I personally agree or not isn't the point here--but you shouldn't act surprised that it DID happen. As one of my co-workers recently pointed out to me, there are people who think "As long as I'm making money, everything else is okay" (thus explaining why the stock market has been reaching high after high now that Trump is president). And that same mentality is going on here. But there's also the current state of American ethical thinking, which can be summed up in two statements:
1. It's okay if *I* do it, it's not okay if *you* do it.
2. Get results and everything else is forgiven.
And there is then this corollary:
Actions do not have consequences, so long as (1) everyone's coming out ahead on the balance sheet and (2) you are a well-connected, preferably rich, person.

So: you may be angry (and maybe justifiably so) about Selig's enshrinement, but you shouldn't be surprised.

You gotta love it! The press rejects any ball player who used steroids yet allows the jerk who knew what was going on into the Hall of Fame. Where is Marvin Miller when you need him?! Oh yeah he can't get into the Hall of Fame because he unionized baseball. No hypocrisy here!

Glad to hear Selig got the reception he deserved in Cooperstown. From swiping the year-old Pilots from Seattle for his own Milwaukee to being the first commissioner plucked from ownership, Bud represents a less noble version of the game.

What a travesty: Bud Selig was one of the masterminds of Collusion, which, after the Color Ban, was Baseball's ugliest conspiracy. He and Jerry Reinsdorf convinced the other owners (as well as the two League presidents and the then Commissioner) to form a conspiracy in which no free agent would receive an offer from any team other than his original team. Players like Jack Morris, Carlton Fisk, and Andre Dawson found that no one was interested in their services, so they had to go back to their original teams and accept whatever was offered. Collusion lasted from 1984 to 1987! And then this scoundrel was made Commissioner and turned a blithe and blind eye to the farce known as the Steroid Era. Cancel my visit to Cooperstown.

How did Bud Selig ever get in the Hall of Fame? Who voted him in? Names, please. Not all commissioners have been the brunt of fan and player distrust. I was at the 1992 Induction, Fay Vincent's last, and he was not roundly catcalled, and he was struggling with the eternal Pete Rose question and owner discontent because their bank accounts were not filling fast enough. No, Selig is different. From the outset he was an owner's pawn, interested in the bottom line financially and not much else. His lasting contribution? Seriously, keeping the plantation mentality alive so players could continue to serve at their masters' pleasure. He's in the Hall of Fame? Cheapens the Hall and anyone connected with the process that put him in there.

Marvin Miller should be inducted into the Hall.

So, the originator of the goofy one game playoff between two teams in the playoffs and the coccamamie idea of the all star game determining the home field in the Series, the guy who cancelled the 1994 season, and most of all, the guy who turned a blind eye to the juice is in the HOF. I suppose if the baseball writers think that highly of him, they could explain why Roger Maris isn't in the hall and Bud is.

Selig does not belong in the Hall of Fame, and to try to associate his name in any way with that of Jackie Robinson is both offensive and ridiculous. Selig is best remembered for moving two teams from one league to the other, depriving Montreal of the Expos, allowing "wild card" teams to play in the postseason, reshuffling the teams into six divisions (so that Toronto is in a different division from its nearest neighbours, Cleveland and Detroit) and his ridiculous decision to end an all-star game while the score was tied.

This is why i would have booed Selig too:
1. He is the steroid commissioner, and no amount of white washing will ever change that. He looked the other was as players ballooned and home runs flew over fences, and all the great power records in Baseball were shattered, by player who cheated.
2. He moved all World Series games to night time, which kept generations of children from enjoying and watching the world series, and how many older American fell asleep before the ninth inning
3. Under his reign as commissioner, Baseball slipped from the number one sport in America in popularity, to a sport some would say is slightly behind basketball in that regard.
4. He is given credit for absolute no-brainer ideas, wow, i couldn't add more playoff games, i couldn't get baseball into the internet age.
Under his watch Baseball became a laughing stock, a punchline for late night comedians, with Baseball players lying to congress, which included Sammy Sosa suddenly forgetting how to speak english.
A whole generation of children turned to other sports, under his watch , as he failed to properly market the Stars of the game.
He doesn't belong in the hall of fame , i don't know why he is, he was out of touch then and he is out of touch now, he lives in his own fantasy world, and has never admitted to his mistakes.
You can put him in a thousand Hall of fames, still he will go down as the Steroid commissioner, not on a plaque in Cooperstown but in the mind of all true baseball fans.

Bud "Man Molehill" Selig was as terrible a commissioner as he was a wonderful owner for the fans of Milwaukee. His legacy however is rife with neglect born of cluelessness consistently overwhelming his best intentions and harming the game he clearly loves. Luckily for "Bud", competence and honorariums are not mutually exclusive.

Selling was a former owner (Brewers) who became commissioner (fox in hen house) and oversaw the steroid era, as well as a myriad # of bad ideas (winner of all star game hosts WS). This guy should not be in the hall of fame. Pete Rose is more deserving

Selig was a bum and a schmoo. The designated hitter is mostly his fault and that is like saying all he did was start World War 2. His idiotic idea of awarding the home field advantage in the world series to the side that won the All-Star game was the single most stupid destructive decision ever made by a Lord of Baseball. His armful of idiotic ideas and calls have apparently been wiped out by the fact he managed to line the pockets of the team owners more successfully than those before him apparently. He smelled the game up and I don't know anyone who missed him or did not diss him.

Selig deserves being hammered for the destruction of the '94 baseball season. He was the owners' front man in a scheme later determined as spurrious by the courts. It was a waste of everyone's time, and the waste and destruction of a baseball season. Selig is the one person who could have led the baseball world out of that, but he didn't have the guts, skills, brains, and/or desire to do it. So it's on him, forever. Put that on his plaque.

And how much of that increased TV revenue directly or indirectly resulted from obvious juicers going yard, nonstop? And don't forget, under Bud Selig, baseball games CAN end in a tie (see 2002 MLB Allstar Game).

Selig enabled the steroid era and lots of steroid users aren't allowed in so why is he? Steroids made the league and the owners a ton of money so I guess that means he did a great job?

Alex, Manny, Ortiz, Bonds, Pudge, Clemens, Sosa, McGuire and Selig all belong together...outside Cooperstown.

As an Astro fan, he should be booed forever for forcing the Astros to change leagues from the National league where they had 50 years of history to the American League meanwhile keeping his Brewers in the NL despite their starting in the AL so he can sell tickets to Cubs fans.

Couldn't watch, as a certain steroid user, Pudge, and a likely, Bags, were inducted, along with the commissioner who enabled them. We should have been able to find out all who were on the list and keep them all out. i say this knowing that one of my favs, Mike Piazza, would likely be included. You can't cheat and not be punished.

Not sure how any retrospective on Selig, however brief, can omit that he was on four occasions one of the architects of collusion, price fixing. But for baseball's ludicrous legal monopoly, he'd have gone off to make license plates somewhere.

No discussion of the thankfully rescinded All Star Game/World Series home field advantage fiasco?

Very unpopular guy in Houston with the number one reason being the forced move of the Astros to the AL.
Bud Selig in the HOF, Barry not. Yeah, that makes sense.

Sure steroids were a collective bargaining issue. But what did Bud do to lead and push that issue onto the agenda. The evidence suggests that after '94 the bozo owners, including Selig, had so little confidence in the future of the great game of which they were the stewards, that they had no interest in addressing the barrage of home runs. No other game puts so much emphasis on career statistics, and that history forever carries the stain of the Selig era. Oh, and don't get me started on one-game playoffs to earn the right to advance to the World Series. TV money was coming anyway, it happened in spite of Selig not because of him. Look at the ratings for the baseball playoffs; they stink. Even the world series, as the article notes.

To traditionalists Selig was a disaster. The travesty of "wild cards" (which have made the regular season irrelevant), the even greater travesty of interleague play (which has made the post-season irrelevant), replays, the constant tinkering with divisions -- all of this has made a once-great game into a sad spectacle.

Two points:
1) Selig was an owner and reflected the owner's viewpoint.
2) Revenues are shrinking because the real economy is shrinking. There exists the never-ending circle of all sports, baseball in particular, demanding larger and larger payouts from cable tv (read Disney in the case of sports broadcasters) and more and more people saying "no" to cable in general and sports in particular because those sports financial demands passed through to the end-user with a sweetener for themselves tacked on at the end.

I think something was lost when an owner became baseball's commissioner.

Bud Selig in the Hall of Fame is an abomination almost as bad as the enshrinement of players who took steroids. He played a huge part in the transition of baseball into Home Run/Strikeout Derby, destroyed the relevance of the regular season and turned the post-season into an interminable afterthought. No wonder Baseball makes such a big deal of the All-Star game; it's what they want Baseball to be: a meaningless exhibition built around 100 MPH fastballs, strikeouts and home runs.

Selig was an owner put in place by the other owners as one of their own to look out for their interests. The only thing that kept the owners in check was the player's labor union or their would have been salary caps, low contracts due to collusion and the abuse of players as we see in the NFL. Does anyone remember the voluntary 24 player teams? Or is that lost with the tied All Star game and making the All Star game meaningful? Not that I miss Bowie Kuhn. Kids not interested in baseball, how about putting the playoffs and world series on during the day? But that affects revenue.

There is the issue of Pete Rose. Many, many fans do not forgive Selig for keeping Rose out of the HOF. Racism, misogyny, drug use, and alcoholism are overlooked by the Hall, but Rose's transgressions are not. Remember - there is nothing objective about the HOF. It is not owned by MLB, and its voting is highly highly subjective.

I would have enjoyed reading about the former players. 98% of the article was about Selig. Note to writer: the players are always more interesting.

When you consider the condition of the game when he became acting commissioner and what he accomplished - a massively long list, Selig is the best commissioner of any sport at any time, period. He gets hammered for the 94 WS, but those old enough to remember the 70's and 80's remember nothing but labor strife. Strikes, lockouts, reduced seasons, endless threats between owners and the union were all commonplace every year. Regarding steroid use, where are all the stories from the many TV and print journalists who spent hours in locker rooms with players who put on thirty pounds of exaggerated muscle during the four month off season? I saw nothing from team medical staffs or the players union, whose job it was to protect the players. Sure the owners deserve some dirt on their white shirts, too, but this was a collective bargaining issue. You simply can't hang this whole thing on Selig.

The elephant in the room during this induction was steroids. Specifically: Both Robin Yount and Paul Molitor are on the record claiming that Bud Selig took steroids during the 1982 Harvey Wallbanger season. You can't take that back Mr. Selig.