By Brian E. Clark
WisBusiness.com
MADISON – Steroid abuse notwithstanding, baseball is the midst of a remarkable renaissance – with major league teams on pace to sell a record-setting 75 million tickets this season.
They also should take in $4.8 billion, three times what theyearned a dozen years ago, Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig Monday night at the annual gathering of the Greater Madison Chamber of Commerce.
Moreover, wealthy teams will share $300 million with small-market clubs this year, said Selig, who has been commissioner since 1998. He said enhanced revenue sharing will not only help teams in cities such as Milwaukee, Cleveland and San Diego survive, but it will also ensure greater competition throughout the leagues.
The commissioner also also predicted steroids will soon be gone from the sport.
“Performance enhancing drugs cheapen baseball and are dangerous,” he said. “Worse, players who use drugs influence kids to try them because they are their role models.
“We will eliminate steroids from baseball,” said Selig, who unilaterally banned them from use in the minor leagues.
“But drug testing in the majors is subject to labor negotiations,” he said. “And while I am confident the current program is working, we must put a tougher system in place.
“The issue is integrity,” he charged. “It’s mine and the players and the game’s.”
Selig said he hopes the players union will accept his proposal that steroid-users face a 50-game suspension for a first-time violation. A second transgression would mean sitting out 100 games, and a third violation would produce a lifetime ban from the sport.
“The plan has been warmly accepted by members of Congress,” he said. “We are now waiting for an answer from the players union.”
Selig, whose family sold the Brewers to Los Angeles businessman Mark Attanasio last year, said in remarks after his speech that his old team is in good hands.
“Mark is doing wonderfully well,” said Selig. “He is a perfect owner. Thoughtful and quiet. He’s got a great farm system going and I predict more good things for my old team. I wish them the best.”
Selig said he is confident that when historians write about baseball in 2050, they will look back to the century’s first decade as a “golden era.”
And he said the changes he helped bring about — including inter-league play, wild cards and expanded playoffs — have made the game more interesting.
“Purists did not like the wild card,” he said. “But 90 percent of the fans love it. It means 17 of 30 teams still have a chance of making the playoffs. It has been largely responsible for keeping up attendance.”
Selig said it was not easy to convince baseball team owners that changes were needed and the ways of doing business in the ’50s and ’60s were no longer valid.
“The infighting over revenue sharing was vicious,” he said. “But we were able to get it done and the results have been impressive. The landscape has changed and for the better.”
But Selig said baseball cannot rest on its laurels and must do all it can to stop drug use.
“We have a social responsibility and we are held to a higher standard than other institutions,” he said, citing the 1947 addition of Jackie Robinson — the first black to play major league baseball — to the Brooklyn Dodgers as the sport’s finest moment.
