Bud Selig is Lifetime Achievement honoree

Former MLB Commissioner Bud Selig will be honored May 18 at the Sports Business Awards. Photo by: SCOTT PAULUS / MILWAUKEE BUSINESS JOURNAL

While on his final trip around the bases, Bud Selig often spoke of how even he was stunned by the breadth of the transformation MLB underwent during his 22 years as commissioner.

Interleague play. Revenue sharing. Two wild-card slots in the playoffs, and then two more. Pooled Internet rights. Improved competitive balance. Labor peace.

It all happened while an industry that was worth about $1 billion when he took office grew to approach $9 billion when he retired last year.

A savvy consensus builder who often was criticized for moving too deliberately in the early days of his tenure, only to emerge as the architect of unprecedented change, Selig is the recipient of the SportsBusiness Journal/Daily Lifetime Achievement Award for 2016.

Through five decades in baseball, Selig earned a reputation for dogged pursuit, whether to achieve his own goals or forward the agenda that he thought best for the game.

Selig’s sports career began with what many believed was a pipe dream: the return of a Major League Baseball franchise to Milwaukee, home to the Braves from 1953 through 1965, when they left for a growing market in Atlanta.

A car dealer who owned a minority stake in the Braves, Selig was heartbroken when the club departed. He set out to prove that the market could still ably support a team. Selig organized exhibitions and regular-season games, bid for an expansion team that instead landed in Seattle, and tried to buy the Chicago White Sox and move them north.

Those all failed, but when the Seattle franchise fell into bankruptcy, Selig pounced, putting together a group that bought the club for $10.8 million before the start of the 1970 season.

Interleague play was a pet project for Selig from not long after he bought the team, and the first significant change he was able to usher after taking over as interim commissioner.

When owners formally elected him to the position in 1998, it set off a firestorm from those who rejected the idea that the holder of that office should come from the ranks of ownership. As it turns out, Selig’s background as an owner gave him insights into and, more importantly, credibility among his fellow owners, whose support he needed in order to bring about change.

His push for more revenue sharing was a long, sometimes ugly, battle. But he got there, wearing away at opponents from the top of the economic strata while building support from the middle. The pooling of Internet rights wasn’t as difficult a fight, but only because there was so little inclination of their value. As it turned out, that decision helped him remake the economics of the game.

Those were but two examples of the dramatic, cultural shift that marked Selig’s tenure, as a game long deemed to be burdened by its traditions managed to remake itself as a business while preserving its core. Time and again, Selig built consensus, understanding each club’s priorities and hot buttons, and making sure each got enough of what it needed to go along with what was best for the whole.

“It is the skill of a consummate politician,” said John McHale Jr., a longtime MLB executive who was in his teens when he met Selig, a young Milwaukee car dealer. “He had a way of developing fabulous, strong, candid relationships. … Everybody has to feel like their interests are represented and their well-being is at the forefront.”

Selig will be honored on May 18 at the Sports Business Awards in New York City.