Transcripts For CSPAN2 Bud Selig For The Good Of The Game 20

CSPAN2 Bud Selig For The Good Of The Game July 13, 2024

Quarter of a century ago i came to milwaukee and blood as red about Franklin Delano roosevelt so he wanted to meet me to talk about history keand i wanted to meet him to talk about baseball so always theres been a push and pull, whats happening in baseball, whats happening in the country and weve had this great relationship. I became great friends with his family. Weve been to hall of fame games together, we went to japan for the opening day about the red sox and all this time but would tell me Amazing Stories so i was so glad when he finally decided to write this book which is a collection of the best stories because hes a great storyteller. So im so happy to be able to ask him questions that will illuminate area and we will get to the thing thats on everybodys mind which is the Houston Astros disaster in terms of what that means for baseball. This guy is always authentic, he will tell you whats happening but first id like to start with the friendship youve formed with hank aaron because i know weve talked about it and what it was like for you and barry bonds was chasing his record and what it was like for you to have an africanamerican was so essential in the sport and what all that meant cause hes the best. Thank you and its a pleasure to be here today and to add something that doris said. When we first met and for many years afterwards and maybe up to this date when we get together she wants to talk about baseball and i want to talk about history. Its the perfect marriage thats exactly right so i met henry aaron in 1958 long before i was in baseball and long before he was, he became the home run champion. We use to go to green bay packer games together but i was as you know, it began in 1957 before i methim. He hit a homerun to win the pennant for the milwaukee braves and doris, he was carried off the field and it was a moment ill never forget and the next day in the New York Times the picture is juxtaposed. Hank aaron being carried off the field in this gigantic celebration by his mainly white teammates and orville sprang back, he has a picture right next to it trying to go to school in little rock arkansas and the picture made an indelible impression. And toit influenced my thinking. I would tell you that Rachel Robinson, Jackie Robinsons widow who is a magnificent woman as you know, once asked me where that all started and i said when i looked at that picture, i realized how baseball could play a role sociologically and it did. So i guess the other story ill tell you about him, we write during the steroid tuition i asked six hall of fame players to come to washington and theydid. And to appear before john mccains committee and it went extremely well and hank was of course the leadoff speaker and the star of the group butwe had a dinner the night before. And the night before, after eating too much, he said lets walk back andwe walked back together just the two of alus. And he said to me at one point you have to understand he said for a guy who broke ruths record is most remarkably modest. Most remarkably modest person you could meet ill never forget we were standing under a street lamp and he said who would have ever believed when we were just kids growing up and met each other at someday id break, and its the only time i heard him say this, babe ruths record and you become the commissioner of baseball and we looked at each otherand kept walking. [applause] tell me about Branch Rickey and his role intalking about changing the country as well as baseball and bringing Jackie Robinson. That led to the most important moment in baseball history, certainly the most powerful and think about this, 1945. The clubs had voted 15 to 1 with landis as the commissioner who had said as long as he was the commissioner of baseball there would never bea minority player , imagine you mercifully, he died. So ricky, incredible when you think about it doris, signs Jackie Robinson to a montrcal contract. And i wont go through all the stuff, that in itself was amazing and in 1947 in ebbets field you would know that better than i would, jackie or as Rachel Robinson calls him jack, Roosevelt Robinson and it was just stunning. Remember, the clubs had voted 15 to 1 not to vote, not to allow a minority player right before that and ricky did it and the whole thing was just stunning and when you think of it, think about it this way g. Youll appreciate this. It was 3 and a half years before harry truman these segregated the United States army, seven years before brown versus education and 18 years before the Civil Rights Movement so Branch Rickey is a hero of mine. He also i think was the greatest sports executive of all time so you can put all that in together. And it was just really a wonderful story. I must say when i was a little girl as a brooklyn dodger fan Jackie Robinson was my favorite player and id like to think now it was because i knew what he represented for civil rights but if im honest it was just that he was so exciting as a player. Heat steel first base and he. Steals second and third and would completely rattle the picture so i loved him but i always wanted his autograph and there were always long lines but in those days you could just wait, they didnt charge you, you could go so i would go to other lines and i never got his until finally when i was a young teacher teenager i met and i went and as teenagers we had these ridiculous autograph books are youd say i will love you until Niagara Falls or i will cherish you until rubber tires and wed write all these stupid things to each other so i brought my autograph book and i got to the front of the line and i got to him and i thought he would just sign and he looked like one of my intimate friends but he started to read these things and i thought i was going to faint of embarrassment but then incomplete keeping with the sentiment of the autograph book he wrote keep your smile a long long while and it was the best and years later i got to give an award to Rachel Robinson at Eleanor Roosevelts home and i just kept thinking if only my father and been there to see that i was meeting Rachel Robinson, giving her an award and i told her how i had had a crush on her husband and this story and shes an incredibly dignified, wonderful woman. She told me the stories of the pressure on him was enormous and after he took great abuse in cincinnati and st. Louis, philadelphia and then chapman who was the manager who mercifully to got fired the next year but was awful and ricky did something d that you didnt do back in 1948. He said to her he was worried about jackie and she was worried. I want you to go on the road, travel with him the rest of the way home and somehow they got him through that and it was really, its the more you read of the story and the more you know about the story, it is really a great story and its you know, didnt solve many all of our problems but if you read it, it sets an example for what people should do. Its so important for us today just because in this last day and a half weve been talking so much about the situation of the country and just now having had a talk about how angry people are on both sides of the political aisle and those moments have to be remembered because the country can step up, they do step up and an individual can make a difference but why we talk about the great Branch Rickey, can we also talk about the man who broke my heart, Walter Omalley by abandoning us and moving the dodgers to losangeles . Many of you may have been the recipients of that but for a little girl it was disaster. I teach now and walter does not come out well. Heres, when i look back in 1957 and the giants are going to move and they should move, there on the polo grounds and whatever you giant fans they had , that was it but i say that not because im talking to you but i believe that. It was a move that really i think broke the court of what people thought about sports. And what i mean by that is the dodgers were something special, not only in brooklyn but everywhere. And therefore did la deserve a team . Of course la deserved a team. Should la have a team . Of course they should but not the brooklyn dodgers. And you can suggest that as you well know historians that revisit history and they tried to make believe its robert mosess fault, it was not robert moses. Yes they wanted to build it on atlantic and flatbush avenue and they didnt and moses offered them a place where they later built shea stadium. As people have said that wasnt perfect for the brooklyn dodgers that it was a lot better than going to los angeles so thats not final chapter in baseball history. We sent positions to Walter Omalley, i used to have dreams that i encountered him somehow and i was the hero had persuaded him that he couldnt leave the brooklyn dodgers to go to los angeles and there was this horrible thing we used to say to one another which is embarrassing even more as a human being as well as a historian, we used to say what if you were in a room with, stalin and Walter Omalley and you had two bullets, what would you do . You dont even want to hear the idiotic things we said it was unanimous, that was a story that harry had two bullets and walter got both of them. Lets talk about the concept of your leadership as commissioner and weve been talking these last couple of aldays politically about the gap between the rich and poor and the lack of mobility and the fact that some people in the country are not feeling or getting the same chances as other people and that was the situation of Major League Baseball when you came in. That the big market teams were winning year after year, same teams when the playoffs, if you were a small market team and you have very little hope that your team was going to make it so you introduced a whole series of things to help that situation and each one must have been top billing. Baseball as a social institution and you know i believe that was resistant to change so when i did the wildcard, oh my goodness. All the abuse and you cant do that but i knew the one thing we had to get to was revenuesharing and doris, i believe that an important part of baseballs hope and faith so that in as many franchises as is possible on march this year, march 26, people at least have hope and faith that their team can be competitive. We had gotten weto a point in the mid90s where that wasnt so any more so therefore, revenuesharing was critical. It took a long time, went through a lot of pain. I did a lot of other revenuesharing things like aifor instance band which was our Internet Committee which proved to be an extraordinary success. I wanted every club on the same amount. I wanted the Kansas City Royals to on as much as the new york yankees, the Pittsburgh Pirates on as much as the Los Angeles Dodgers because it was good for the sport and it provided the hope and faith that you needed so slowly but surely as you know under a legislative process we got things done to a point where we had over 500 million in revenue sharing but a lot of other revenuesharing mechanisms and i dont mind telling you that in 2014 and 2015 when we went to the world series in Kansas City Missouri there was a field for me and as i walked around kansas city ill never meforget people everywhere kept saying thank you. So again, the key words you see here at every meeting where hope and faith and its worked out well. Weve got work to do yet but we came along way in a short period of time. You had statistics about how many more teams got into those final playoffs that had before. Lots of them, especially the wildcards. When 2000 went on everybody got on the playoffs at one point or another which made me happy and did what we wanted to do and so it worked out. It really worked out well and its so important because the fact of the matter is and i used to say that to the big who balked at a lot of things and ill say this in George Steinbrenners defense, he was difficult. He was unusual. He was all of the above and im being serious but in the end, he went along with it and so it turns out the best years baseball ever had from 2005 on were really the golden years, attendance was up 80 Million People and so forth were the years we had revenuesharing and we had nuall these other devices that went in it was good to the game. Which is the title of the book. What about instant replay . It was difficult because im really a traditionalist at heart and i want to give credit to tony larusso and tony was working for me at the time and he said to me at one point weve got to go to instant replay. And he said not in baseball and i said football, you get instant replay and it takes six minutes before they find out whats good or bad but he convinced me over and over with the help of joe torre and mike sasha and jimmy leland that it was good and so on the theory that you really want to get it right, you had a nohit game in detroit with two outs where they had pitched a perfect game and the umpire blew the call and it was painful and he was a good umpire so finally i said to myselflets do it. And we did it and it worked out very well. I now im going to go back to the worst moments of my childhood as a brooklyn dodger fan because it has to do with whats happening with the bruce Houston Astros. The new york giants were way behind the brooklyn dodgers in 1951, i think maybe we were 14games ahead. There was a butcher shop in my neighborhood who were all new york giants fans and they had kept a running tally of everything going on that summer and it was so exciting , every time i go there we be on top and the giants way down but by mid august they started climbing and finally caught up to it and there is a three game playoff and in that last game Bobby Thompson at the famous home run against psour flight got that is called the shot heard around the world. We lived in concorde for 42 years and we go to the minuteman statue, i take people all over the country and it says the shot heard round the world and im thinking of Bobby Thompson. I think im supposed to be a historian, somethings wrong with this but years later this guy josh prager get a book and wrote the story for the wall street journal in which he discovered the electrician who claimed they had set up some sort of system in the giants park where in centerfield they had a telescope and were able to signal the pages to the batters and i think of what that did to all of us. My sister who was beautiful and 15 years older than me addicted he was going to hit a homerun, i was so mad i didnt want to her again. I wouldnt go back to the butcher shop for days because i was so embarrassed until they sent me the first flowers ever sent to me, they called me ragtop because my hair was so messy and come back dear ragtop, we miss you and this is a huge part of childhood and i cant imagine what its like for the fans of the dodgers and to know whats happening with houston now and this sophisticated system of cheating and what is baseball doing, what can they do, technology is going to get better andbetter , how are we going to prevent . Your right, fear he has been part of the game but a different kind of sign stealing, players trying to pick up, lets see if i can give you a personal story. As a kid i went to Wrigley Field in the 60s, the milwaukee braves with hank aaron and Eddie Matthews and so on were playing the cops and i never it never was much ofa contest but i dont want to insult my cubs fans. The fact of the matter is sitting in the centerfield brie bleacher was a pitcher named bob youll and bob youll was had a raincoat anticodon and he was stealing signals. The cubs finally figured it out in the sixth inning andit was a big uproar but having said that , this was a most unfortunate incident. No question about it. But ithink rob manfred , commissioner dealt with it harshly. After all, manager larsons job, the general manager lost a job. They got five Million Dollars which is the maximum that you can find somebody. Then they lost their first and second draft choices which really hurts for two years. And then two other managers y lost their jobs including the manager of your favorite team. And but, i think people will understand in the future now how serious this was an these were serious, serious consequences for the houston club. Yes, technology is Getting Better but so are we and i think that you will not see this happen again, i will be very surprised if it does but baseball is taking this very seriously and using every technological device they know to make sure that it doesnt happen again and if somebody is idiotic enough to do it again theyre going to get penalized as severely as the Houston Astros. Was there an actualrule that was violated . How did it work . In 2017 rob manfred sent a letter to all the clubs, there was no question about pa it and apparently there are some people and it often happens where they think its for everybody else but not for them and they ignored it and now theyve paid a terrible price for what the rules are there and theyre going to come up with more rules and im satisfied that a lot of other things that we go through it was most unfortunate. As i said cost a lot of people their jobs but itwont happen again and if it does they will get killed. That sounds alright to me so lets talk about this more personally because i love that theres a thread about your love of baseball, where it came from and your mother, and the ukraine going to games with her and obviously the Milwaukee Team that you got to tell us personal stories about how everybody has a reason why baseball becomes so passionate and its usually a paren

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