Selig finally appreciated for his work as commissioner

	Bud Selig has implemented plenty of change in baseball, which has led to an explosion in revenue. Jed Jacobsohn/Getty Images
	MAILBAG Got a question or comment for Jon? Your name: Your e-mail address: Your home town: Enter your question:

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, who picks up an award or honor almost every other week now, recently was named Sports Executive of the Year by the Sports Business Journal. And no one even thought about snickering.

Selig turned in a tremendous year by any standard, and perhaps an even better one compared to his two main contemporary commissioners, the NBA's David Stern and the NFL's recently-departed Paul Tagliabue. Selig is putting together a pretty good run, so good that it's time folks start reassessing his place in history.

Stern and Tagliabue have been accepting bouquets and taking bows for years, but the reality of their sports may finally be catching up to them, too late in Tagliabue's case. With Selig, it's the opposite. He got slammed hard for a few years, and now it's his turn to receive well-deserved congratulations. The awards are coming in at such a rate that Red Sox chairman Tom Werner recently commented to Selig, "When does the victory tour end?''

When Selig was announcing the cancellation of the remainder of the 1994 season, no one could have envisioned this. Back then, some folks would have given anything for Selig to step aside. Now it's the opposite. Now the small-market commissioner can do no wrong. Selig's famous for getting unanimous votes to support all his baseball causes, and the support for him within the game is about that now. Outside the game, it's growing, too.

"In the '90s, when we were really trying to change things, a lot of things, particularly the economic landscape, it was painful,'' Selig said in an interview this week with SI.com. "With change, there frankly was a lot of frustration. Baseball is a social institution, and social institutions are especially resistant to change.''

The funny thing is, in some ways no one's more resistant to change than Selig himself. His routines are his life. When I caught up with him, he was on his way to Gilles, the nondescript food stand on Blue Mound Road near Miller Park, where he dines nearly everyday for lunch. He had a hot dog and a Diet Coke, the same meal he has everyday.

And yet, when it came to the sport he loves, Selig initiated change after painful change. The sport moved at a glacial pace for decades, then he came in and introduced revenue sharing, a luxury tax, realignment and the wild card, to name a few things.

In Selig's real life, in pleasant Bayside, 20 minutes north of Milwaukee, there are no wild cards. In baseball, the wild card was a watershed.

"I shudder to think where we'd be without the wild card," he said. "At the time, you would have thought I defiled motherhood."

Twelve years ago, folks thought Selig and his cohorts were about to bring the ruination to baseball. Instead, baseball is thriving like never before. The sport set an attendance record for a second straight season, by exceeding 76 million fans. The $3 billion TV contract is the biggest ever.