Book-a-Day Review: For the Good of the Game

For the Good of the Game: The Inside Story of the Surprising and Dramatic Transformation of Major League Baseball, by Bud Selig with Phil Rogers

There’s a scene in the movie Lincoln, in which the president, working on a telegram in the middle of the night during a watershed moment of the Civil War, asks the operator if he thought people were “fitted” to the time in which they lived. The young man answers that some, like Lincoln, are.

That made me ponder: was Bud Selig, commissioner of baseball for more than 22 years, fitted to the era in which he served? If someone else had been in that office, would the game have gone through the same expansion, labor issues, and PED scandals? Would it have had the “surprising and dramatic transformation,”, both in terms of increased financial success for both payers and owners? Impossible to say, but Selig takes a good deal of credit and a bit of blame for the ups and downs of the national pastime during his stewardship.

That’s the beauty, for lack of a better word, about memoirs: they’re the memories of the author and the way the reading audiences recalls things are of no consequence.

Selig runs through the stories of his introduction to the game, thanks in major part to his mother, who indulged his mania in a way few parents might (she certainly would not have thrown out his card collection). From there, it’s on to his love for the Milwaukee Braves, the heartache of their move to Atlanta, the subsequent machinations of securing another Major League franchise, and his ascension to the thrown, so to speak. Fairly standard stuff, full of the characters he met along the way, such as George Steinbrenner, Hank Aaron, and Barry Bonds, among others.

Fans are often asked how they might change the sport if they were commissioner. I doubt some of their ideas might be that far off from Selig’s.

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A couple of years ago, I served as a freelance editor for a gentleman from a Middle Eastern country who wished to write his memoirs. I had never done anything like that before (and would probably never do it again). It was a unique circumstance: he was only in this country for a short while on vacation and the work demanded that I actually sit down next to him and go through his manuscript word by word, which was especially challenging since English was not his native language. I fought him over the words he used to described his story, trying to convince him that he might not have been the unique fellow he believed himself to be. From his point of view, in his skin and given his cultural situation, he was in a class by himself.

I know Phil Rogers must have had an easier time, but I wonder what it’s like, working with a major celebrity like Selig, fully aware — as Rogers would have been as a sportswriter for several newspapers as well as MLB.Com and the MLB Network — of whether his subjects were being totally honest or puffing up their accomplishments a bit. Not saying that’s what Selig did. Just thinking out loud.