by Bud Selig
Phil Wrigley, whose family had owned the Cubs since 1921, spoke for many owners of that era with his description of the enterprise. “Baseball is too much of a business to be a sport and too much of a sport to be a business,” he once famously said.
That’s the way it was when I came into ownership.
Walter O’Malley, who had owned the Dodgers since 1951, did a lot of talking at every meeting. He had inherited Dodgertown, the state-of-the-art spring training facility built by Branch Rickey, and then oversaw the building of Dodger Stadium in Chavez Ravine, which was a palace when it opened in 1962. They hated O’Malley in Brooklyn but not in National League meetings. He was powerful.
Calvin Griffith, who had moved the Senators to Minnesota when Washington fans stopped supporting him the way he believed they should, was pretty much the stereotype of the baseball owner. His family had been in baseball since 1919 and he mostly thought like his father, Clark, who had signed checks for Walter Johnson. I loved Calvin personally, but he was the prototype of the old-time owner. He was a great baseball man, really wonderful in so many ways, but stuck in the past.
Phil Wrigley was really a nice man. He loved the game. He was quiet, very quiet, and he really was an advocate of the fans. He started the “friendly confines” feeling at Wrigley Field. He was never out at the park with his chest stuck out, instead generally staying in his office in the Wrigley Building when the team was playing. But I did hear that sometimes he’d go to games and sit at the back of the grandstand, just wanting to be left alone.
He had a really good relationship with Ernie Banks and some of his other players, but he wasn’t pushing for a change in how baseball treated its players. The system was the system. That’s the way it was with just about every owner.
One guy who saw things differently was Charles Finley, who had bought the Kansas City A’s in 1960 and moved them to Oakland in ’68. He was creative, resourceful, and really destructive to baseball. He was all over the place on issues and, like too many owners, too concerned about himself and his team. He had a lot of crackpot ideas. He really hated Bowie Kuhn and didn’t think twice about taking on the game or his fellow owners.
There were some remarkably good men in the group of owners, of course. I loved George Steinbrenner when he bought the Yankees from CBS in 1973. We had a great relationship from the very start. I helped introduce him to the owners the way that Jerry Hoffberger, John Fetzer, and Dan Galbreath had helped me.
Oh, Charles Bronfman, too. The Expos owner was great. He encouraged me a lot early on. He was born wealthy because of his father’s empire, which was built around Seagram spirits, but spends his time and his money in wise, caring ways. He’s dedicated to so many social causes, one of the finest human beings I’ve ever known.
We became great friends when we both were young owners in the game. We were very close. The thing I always admired about Charles—a lot of people say it but they don’t mean it—is that he believed, as did Mr. Fetzer, that the best interests of the game always transcended his own. That’s very unusual.
We had a lot of fun together. We’d talk on the phone every Sunday morning.
Carl Pohlad, who owned the Twins, was another invaluable asset as a friend. I got to know him well after he bought out the Griffiths. We had an 11:30 in the morning call on Saturdays for many, many years, through a lot of our tough times.
Carl was influential in ways a lot of people never really knew. He informally assembled a group of small- and medium-revenue teams seeking change, which we came to call the Pohlad Committee. He had a wonderful way about him. He’s another guy who never got the credit for not only being influential in baseball but also really serving the game.
Carl was the kind of owner who if you were commissioner, trying to get things done, you wanted around. He was aggressive; he was also a great partner. You want people who understand what you’re trying to do and are willing to take pains to get it done. Dick Jacobs, who owned the Indians, was exactly like that. When he was selling the Indians, he told me, “You know, Commissioner, a lot of blood is going to be spilled, and it’s going to be yours, but you’re doing the right thing.”
You want to be a great owner? Yeah, you have to run a successful franchise, but you also have to understand, as painful as it might be, that the game is bigger than you are, and that’s how you ought to make your decisions. Hard to do. Really hard to do.
Marvin Miller was the enemy to a lot of these guys. They were not interested in listening to the discussion with an open mind. As we went through the 1970s, we made a lot of mistakes, as did the union. I don’t know how else to say it. Lack of enlightenment was one of the reasons we made mistakes. Marvin ran into a lot of opposition, a lot of anger. Unfortunately, a lot of that was the fault of our people. That hurt us, and it hurt us for decades to come.
In the Brewers’ first season, the major league minimum salary was $12,000 and the average $31,543. Ten years later, with Marvin doing well for his players, the minimum had grown to $32,500, and the average to $185,651.
The tide had turned the players’ way, thanks to fundamental changes in the economic system that Miller brought in while proving himself to the players, who began to trust the union implicitly. While owners were divided, players were united behind Marvin to an unbelievable degree.
I was there for all of baseball’s disputes with Marvin’s union, but in the 1970s I was just another face in the hotel conference room. Marvin called the first player strike in the spring of ’72, over a demand for inflation increases in the pension system. The amount of money we were fighting over is laughable—not just because of inflation, it was laughable back then, too—but owners didn’t like to be told what to do. The start of the season was delayed about two weeks before owners cracked and settled.
We called a lockout the following spring, with John Gaherin representing the owners. Ted Simmons had declined to sign his contract, saying he’d play without one and let an arbitrator decide afterward what he’d been worth, and owners decided the situation needed to be clarified before camps opened. We had already accepted Marvin’s push for an independent arbitrator to decide certain issues that had previously fallen to the commissioner, and during the lockout that delayed spring training in ’73 we negotiated the basics of the salary arbitration that still exists.
Arbitration was something of an outlier in the disputes of those days because most of the owners supported the idea just as much as players did. It was presented as a better alternative than free agency—so a way to enforce the old system—and had the support of most owners. Offering it got the players to sign off on a three-year collective bargaining agreement without losing any games to the ’73 lockout. We didn’t address the elephant in the room—free agency.
We should have understood our economic system was from a different time and no longer worked. It was an anachronism, and we should have found a way to work with players to replace it. We weren’t smart enough, unfortunately, and all we did was make the union stronger.
Instead we had to learn the hard way—by losing in arbitration and in court on several separate grievances filed by the union throughout the 1970s. Things were changing, but few of the owners could see just how far we would be planted on the wrong side of history.
We couldn’t make progress even when we really tried to work with the Players Association. When the issue of free-agent compensation became contentious in 1980, we came out of an all-night session at the Doral Hotel in New York agreeing to form a one-year joint study committee, which seemed helpful at the time.
It was a four-person arrangement, including two members from management and two players. I was pleased because it was a heavily Milwaukee group, with Harry Dalton and Sal Bando working alongside Frank Cashen and Bob Boone. They met eight times but couldn’t bridge the gap, as the dynamics between Miller and our negotiator, Ray Grebey, were unproductive.
“The four of us felt we had a good early rapport,” Dalton recalled in the book Lords of the Realm,
by John Helyar. “But every time we seemed to be making progress, either Grebey or Miller would confuse the issue.”
These talks extended into the 1981 season. Players went on strike on June 12 and we didn’t get an agreement until July 31, making it by far the longest work stoppage in sports history.
The fifty-day strike wiped out 712 games and cost the owners an estimated seventy-two million dollars in losses (although forty-four million was offset by strike insurance) and cost the players twenty-eight million dollars in lost salaries. But this was arguably Marvin Miller’s finest hour, as players rallied together with spirit through the long negotiations—sometimes as many as twenty-five or thirty players would show up to support the union at bargaining sessions—and rarely questioned the union’s leadership.
For our side, we had a new labor leader in Grebey, but he proved ineffective, in large part because owners were divided on the significance of compensation for departing free agents but also because he lacked the authority that Miller had on the other side of the table. We would crack just before our strike insurance was scheduled to run out. That was probably predictable, in hindsight, and we didn’t really achieve anything for all the pain that we suffered that summer. Marvin would claim that he’d brought about complete surrender, and he wasn’t wrong. As strong as the Players Association had been going into this round of bargaining, it was even stronger coming out of it.
The strength of the players flew in the face of what was happening in America at the time. The power of most unions was being diminished with Ronald Reagan in the White House, and the NBA was quietly working toward a peaceful negotiation with its union on a new collective bargaining agreement during our dispute. The next NBA deal would include a limit on each team’s payroll. That salary cap—along with the arrival of Michael Jordan—would help the NBA have tremendous success, but Miller would always be appalled by the willingness of unions in basketball and football to make concessions to their owners and commissioners.
For my part, I couldn’t help but recognize the horrible PR position that owners were in during these public fights with our players. We couldn’t win. You don’t want the fans to get mad at your players. You don’t want them thinking, I love Bud Selig, but I hate Robin Yount. What does that do for you? It only hurts you.
I knew there was no way we were ever going to win with the public. We couldn’t expect any sympathy when we wound up in the headlines. Bowie Kuhn had given me a lesson about that in 1971, when I was just getting into baseball.
Bowie had invited me to lunch on one of my trips to New York. We went to a place he picked—Rose’s on West Fifty-second Street, an Italian spot that had been a baseball hangout since the days of John McGraw—and after we’d been seated for a few minutes in walked Pete Rozelle, by himself. He came over and sat down at our table, joining us for lunch. I knew I was going to have a good time, and I did.
For one reason or another, the New York press was killing Bowie that day, which wasn’t really unusual. Bowie was always getting killed by columnists and reporters, while Rozelle was constantly patted on the back. He owned New York. He owned pro sports, and I personally was a Rozelle fan. I loved the guy.
Again, I don’t remember what the issues of the day were, but it struck me that Rozelle was getting a pass while Bowie got crucified. It didn’t seem fair to me. Bowie liked his Scotch, and he’d knocked back a couple at lunch. He and I just sat talking for a while after Rozelle left.
I said to Bowie, “It’s not fair, you’re getting killed on this and Rozelle can’t do anything wrong.”
He looked at me across the table and told me something I’ve never forgotten.
He told me I was right, but also that it didn’t really matter.
“Remember, Buddy, we’re always held to a higher standard,” Kuhn said. “Baseball always somehow gets held to a higher standard. It’s a compliment, except when you’re commissioner. Then it makes life tougher.”
Bowie was 100 percent right, and I’ve never forgotten it. I certainly experienced it when I was commissioner, and I kept it in mind when we got back on the field after the 1981 strike. I couldn’t imagine baseball would ever go through anything worse than a fifty-day strike. But as it turned out, the fights were only getting started, both with the union and among owners, and publicly we would always be held to a high standard.
9
THE OWNERS MIGHT have been stuck in their ways, but in 1981 the Brewers were moving forward in all the right ways. I’m not sure when I knew the Brewers had officially become contenders, but it was probably around the time George Steinbrenner made a reservation for me at the New York restaurant and institution ‘21.’
George was emotional, demanding, controlling, and as combustible as a Molotov cocktail. He was also, believe it or not, a gentleman. I’ll never forget that even as our teams were in the heat of battle he took a few minutes to make this reservation for me at ‘21,’ which is Sue Selig’s favorite restaurant in New York.
I had known Sue in high school. We had a lot of the same friends. She was a baseball fan from the time she was a kid, going to games at Borchert Field with her dad. Sue went away to college, first to Colorado and then the University of Minnesota. She eventually moved back to Milwaukee and was going through a divorce about the same time as me.
We played tennis together. She was a very good tennis player and I was very competitive. She still kids me that I deliberately smashed a ball off her once when we were playing doubles.
About the time I was making my last trade—the Cecil Cooper deal—I was kicking the door on some free agents represented by the agent Jerry Kapstein. I traveled to Providence, Rhode Island, where Kapstein’s office was, and took Sue along.
We were considering Gene Tenace and Joe Rudi, who had been important players for championship teams in Oakland but were never taken care of by Charlie Finley. I wanted Kapstein to know they’d be more than just players to me if they came to Milwaukee, but instead Tenace signed with the Padres and Rudi became an Angel.
It was still a great venture, because of Sue. She got along great with Jerry and his brother Dan, which made the trip a success. Sue is very outgoing, extremely social, very aggressive.
We did sign another Oakland player that year, Sal Bando. And Sue was great in making Sal and his wife, Sandy, feel comfortable in Milwaukee. Sal would like it so much that he would have a long run as the Brewers’ general manager in the 1990s.
Everybody loves Sue. I remember the first baseball meeting she attended. People who I didn’t know were outgoing were raving about her. The whole Griffith family loved her. Calvin came over and said, “This young lady you married, I really like her.”
Mr. Fetzer liked her. She fit in beautifully, which isn’t always the case.
Sue liked to travel, and she had known me most of my life. She certainly knew what she was getting into. She still says I make her nervous at baseball games, but I’ve always known that I could be myself around her. That’s such a blessing with anybody, especially your wife.
The first years that Sue and I were together were great ones for me and the franchise. We had put together strong teams that would be competitive year in and year out, and now suddenly we were right there with the biggest teams in the game. This was what I’d been working so hard to experience, and in 1981 we were in the thick of the postseason.
The Brewers were 31–25 when players went on strike, third in the AL East behind the Yankees and Orioles. We remained consistent after returning to play—a credit to Yount, Molitor, Ted Simmons, and our pitchers, the best of whom were Pete Vuckovich and Mike Caldwell, with Rollie Fingers always there to protect leads—and a 31–22 record after the strike was good enough to grab the first playoff spot in franchise history.
During the 1981 playoffs, I had one of those moments I will never forget, as long as I live. It was a little thing, but when you own a team, and when you’re competing against a powerhouse like Steinbrenner’s Yankees in those years, you never forget the momen
t. It was that sweet, like something you would script.
When George made us a reservation at ‘21,’ I’m sure he thought I’d be there drowning my sorrows after the Yankees had eliminated us. But we were tougher to put away than George thought we’d be. The Yankees had won the first two games of this best-of-five series in Milwaukee, which killed me, but then we went to Yankee Stadium and won games 3 and 4, forcing the series to the deciding game.
I stayed around for a long time after game 4, just enjoying myself, and as I prepared to leave, I took the elevator down to the basement of the old Yankee Stadium. It could be like a tomb down there, like the catacombs. But when the elevator door opened, George was right there.
It was just me and George. He said, “Well, Buddy, I guess this is the way it’s supposed to be. We’ll play for a spot in the championship series tomorrow.” His demeanor had changed since the first two games in Milwaukee, that’s for sure.
I heard later that he had been in the clubhouse after game 4 and had a battle with his catcher, Rick Cerone. George went in and said he was embarrassed. He was fuming that the Yankees couldn’t beat the Brewers. I could tell he was still mad when I saw him, but he tried his hardest to be gracious.
That moment—just making the owner of the New York Yankees sweat a little—meant so much to me, with where I came from and all it had taken to get here.
To have beaten the Yankees would have been such a thrill for me. We were close to doing that in game 5, after Sue and I had so thoroughly enjoyed our dinner at ‘21’ the night before.
