MLB Commissioner Emeritus Bud Selig will be inducted into the Baseball HOF this weekend, and today on ESPN, he discussed his tenure, saying, "Those 23 years are the years of the greatest change in baseball. ... I'm very proud of what we did. The economic changes were clearly the thing that is most special, important. In 1992, there was no revenue sharing, none, zero, and we got it up to $500 million." He added, "Baseball was in a period in the early and mid-'90s where change was necessary. We couldn't go on. Our gross revenue was stuck at $1.2 billion and not going anywhere. And I'd remind you when I left, it was well over $10 billion, $11 billion and still growing rapidly. ... The fact of the matter is the sport has never been more popular."
Selig said of things he wished would have happened during his tenure, “I can honestly say that there really wasn't anything that I set out to do that we didn't get done." He said of steroids in the game, "We were not slow to react at all. This was a matter of collective bargaining and everybody knows what happened and why it happened and that we had a real problem, but we got it done" ("Mike & Mike," ESPN Radio, 7/27).
