SBJ/SBD tonight at the ninth annual Sports Business Awards will present the Lifetime Achievement Award to MLB Commissioner Emeritus BUD SELIG, who said the honor "means a great deal." Selig, appearing Monday on WFAN-AM's "Mike's On," said, "I’ve been reading the SportsBusiness Daily a lot. I start every one of my days (with The Daily) and the fact that they would honor me with a lifetime achievement award does mean a great deal because my twenty-two-and-a-half years as commissioner were very eventful and like everything in life ... you have your ups and downs." Selig: "This award means a lot to me given everything that I went through." Selig said one of the things he was most proud of from his legacy as commissioner was the "economic reformation of the game" because when he assumed the role of commissioner in ’92 the economic system "hadn’t been changed since the Ebbets Field/Polo Grounds days." Selig: "Here we had a rapidly changing culture so I had to do a lot of things, some of them were painful and at the time controversial." But Selig said at the time he "understood that we had to change the system, had to change the economics, had to change a lot of things" and "people don’t like change." HBO's BILL SIMMONS was also on the show, saying the formation of MLBAM and its enormous success will be "one of the biggest parts of your legacy when people look back 30 years from now because you guys were so far ahead of the digital thing." Selig: "I am very, very proud of that" (“Mike's On,” WFAN-AM, 5/16). Selig was on ESPN Radio's "Mike & Mike" yesterday and said, "I can't tell you there's anything that I really set out to do that I didn't. My greatest accomplishment I really think was the economic changes" ("Mike & Mike," ESPN Radio, 5/17). Read this week's SportsBusiness Journal profile on Selig ahead of tonight's awards ceremony.
