January 15, 2015

And Now, The End is Near…

Bud Selig finished his final owners meeting, which was a Bud love fest:

“A remarkable collection of speakers,” Selig said. “There was a lot of emotion, a lot of history, and it was more emotional than I thought. I have to admit that. … It was really just a wonderful night.”

Bud did say something that I thought was insightful:

His first owners meeting was in St. Louis “and it was a disaster,” he said. “There was agreement on nothing.”

Unifying and changing the game “was a long-term project,” he said.

“The ’90s were tough, tough on me, tough on everybody,” Selig said. “But I knew early on that we had to do things that we had to do. The system was not working. The system was an anachronism. I used to kid that this is the system of the Ebbets Field and the Polo Grounds. And I wasn’t being facetious. Nothing’s changed since the ’30s, and there was just unhappiness everywhere.”

While that’s not quite true, as free agency and arbitration in one form or another had bee around since the mid 1970s. What was true in that statement is the owners from the days of those old New York ball parks were still in power, and they did not like the loss of control that came with free agency. One thing that helped Selig a great deal was that group dying out. On top of that, Selig was careful to bring in owners who saw things his way. He helped others build new ball parks, so by the end the owners were beholden to Bud. He would never allow an innovator like Mark Cuban into the club.

There is no owner now who ever worked with the old reserve clause in place, so no one is going to go to war to get it back. I would not mind seeing a little more public conflict between owners, just to see what other ideas are floating in their minds. Maybe we’ll get that since they are not as behold to Rob Manfred.

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *