By John Klima
Staff Writer

A clubhouse guy was hanging over the railing at a ballpark the other day, and the discussion turned to the argument that football has surpassed baseball as the national pastime. The clubby’s chew nearly fell out of his cheek when it was suggested that baseball has lost its clout in the market place.

“You talk about football and you know what you’re talking about?” the clubby asked, “Millions and millions of dollars. You talk about baseball and you know what you’re talking about?” he asked. “You’re talking about billions and billions of dollars.”

Leave it to the guy who orders bats and balls for a living to break down baseball’s economic might into strong and simplistic terms. The guys in the trenches see things better than many.

While the clubby was hanging around, Bud Selig was presiding over a podium at a Boston hotel last week in a non-public speaking engagement. He recalled his own past and the path from young owner to baseball commissioner, where his stewardship of the game has reached the point of historical comparison.

At the impressionable young age of 35, Selig went to his first owners’ meetings in 1970. The kid from Milwaukee was ushered into the room and seated by Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, perhaps purposefully, between beer baron Gussie Busch of St. Louis and chewing gum chief Philip Wrigley of the Chicago Cubs. These were the lords of the National League, with decades of firm muscle and expansive bank accounts planted deep within the traditional power structure of the game.

Selig sat in his chair and listened as the yelling commenced. Fierce and archaic rivalries between leagues, teams and players dating to the turn of the century split the room in half. It was as if warships from another age traded fire.

“People were yelling and screaming,” Selig recalled last week in Boston at a meeting of the Sports Lawyers Association, where he was honored with the organization’s Award of Excellence. “I went back to Milwaukee and wondered what in the hell I had gotten myself into. It didn’t get any better for the next 2 ½ decades.”

These days, Selig speaks glowingly of a new Golden Age in baseball, one that surpasses the nostalgic pull of the 1950s. Mickey, Willie and the Duke made millions for baseball, but Selig has helped the game make billions, with no end in sight. In an environment where he was not challenged on the authenticity of the game’s hallowed home run record, nor pressed for information revolving around a first baseman’s guilty conscious, Selig reached into the past to evaluate his own accomplishments.

In a room full of friendly lawyers and allies such as Stan Kasten and Larry Luccino, Selig used baseball history to argue his own case. History is a fair monitor of progress, and though he has taken his lumps and worn criticism like Don Baylor standing in the way of a hundred fastballs, Selig retains the right to call attention to his tenure. Respect for baseball’s past, and passion for the present, are devoutly connected. History is on his side.

“Attendance and popularity are the two barometers of success,” Selig said after receiving the award, which is a nod to community service. “The 1950s were not the Golden Age of Baseball. We are in the midst of Major League Baseball’s great Renascence. The game has never been more popular nor has it been more successful. That conclusion is supported by every conceivable measure of comparison.”

The kid grew up. From a business standpoint, there’s no question that Selig has transformed Major League Baseball from a solid business into a corporate behemoth, with several far-reaching tentacles squeezing revenue out of various streams. He made his case with money, the blood of baseball success.

“We have set attendance records in each of the last few years,” Selig said. “We will set another record this year.”

Selig said Major League Baseball’s revenue stream reached $5.3 billion in 2006, will pass $5.5 billion in 2007 and will reach over $6 billion in 2008. Franchise values have hit record highs. According to Forbes Magazine, the New York Yankees are worth $1.02 billion, followed by the Red Sox ($617 million), Mets ($604 million), Dodgers ($482 million), Cubs ($448 million), and, Kasten’s Washington Nationals ($440 million), whose value spiked 42 percent according to the magazine, fueled by revenue sharing taxes provided largely by the Yankees ($77 million) and Red Sox ($51 million).

Selig believes the key to prosperity lies in strong relationships between the clubs and the Players’ Association, but his behind-the-scenes work to bring revenue sharing to the small market clubs from which he claims his roots also benefited the game. This led to competitive balance, the end of another Yankee Dynasty, the wild card, and more fans interested in their clubs for longer durations of the season. It has led to seven different World Series winners in the last seven years.

Here, you can easily detect Selig’s loyalty to the small-market clubs, from his memories of the Boston and Milwaukee Braves, to his no-club-left-behind mantra. The purely Selig innovations of revenue sharing and competitive balance tax were wrought from labor strife, but from such conflict came an era of labor peace that Selig has used to expand the game’s influence.

“I’ve always said that our goal is that fans of as many franchises as possible should have hope and faith,” he said. “Check on Labor Day and see how many clubs have a chance of making the playoffs based on divisional playoffs or the wild card. Last year it was 19 clubs. This year I believe it’ll be somewhere between 23 and 25 clubs.”

Selig was the first modern commissioner to proceed with a give-and-take mentality, one that simply hadn’t been seen in the history of the game’s labor relations. Though never a lawyer himself, over the years Selig spoke the language of dollars and found common ground where none had existed before. This was the genesis of the Golden Age he speaks of, and, if history is his judge, then Selig is correct in his assessment.

“It was a one way street,” he said. “Clubs had all the power and players had no recourse. That began to change in the 1960s when the Players’ Association was formed. Change was long overdue.”

This simple statement is the belief that separates Selig from other commissioners. Happy Chandler fought the battle 50 years ago and lost his job. Fay Vincent is writing books. Selig played the game and adhered to the rituals of the baseball business. He found the balance between cooperation and cut-throat that is so critical to a baseball career.

“Baseball’s greatest problem was the acrimonious relationship between the clubs and the Players’ Association throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s,” he said. “I believe now that the 1994-1995 work stoppage was a very powerful lesson. We learned that baseball as a sport could no longer conduct its business in such a state of anger and instability.”

When the current Collective Bargaining Agreement expires in December 2011, baseball will have gone 16 years without a strike or a work stoppage, the longest period of labor peace since the inception of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. In baseball terms, Selig has been both a wartime and peacetime president, but his legacy comes in peace, prosperity and cash flow. After the 1994-1995 work stoppage, the era of peace outweighs the strike and steroids. Again, Selig doesn’t control players. Clubs control players. Players control players.

“We have stability and trust between the players and owners which was long overdue,” Selig said. “While we may have different constituencies and different economic interests, we have one very important interest in common: the desire to grow the game both domestically and around the globe to maintain it as the national pastime.”

The game boomed in this time of peace, and its players grew larger as its revenue streams grew. Now, times have changed, again, and baseball makes money even as its players move forward from the era where there was no drug testing. Selig has taken fastballs in the ribs for this as well, but far away from the cameras, things have changed inside of baseball.

General Managers and farm directors now essentially govern their own players with tactics ranging from threatening language to brow-beating. They threaten their own minor leaguers with punishment from the club on top of punishment from the league because clubs detest losing their most prized possession, players.

By extension, the drug policy has influenced agents, who don’t want to see their own earning power diminished. There are agents who urge their players to stay clean.

Major League players operate under a different framework, but, they too, have their bench marks. Players want to be beloved, even the crankiest of record-chasing sluggers. But Selig’s tenure has made it perfectly clear, without so much as saying a word, that there is a land of exile where returning to rituals of the 1990s in the decades to come will not be tolerated.

It’s time to let the steroid years fade into history and fit into the game’s historical context. It will not be forgotten and it is a part of the baseball story now, but it is only a chapter, and not a definition. To argue that steroids distort Selig’s tenure shows a woeful lack of historical intellect. This is not to suggest revisionist history. No, leave the drugs be in their imperfect context. This is important. But find a baseball figure of historical importance who doesn’t own an imperfection. Fault is part of the game. Would you prefer to honor Ban Johnson, who tried to push certain clubs and owners out of business? Would you prefer to honor Judge Landis, who religiously protected the gentlemen’s agreement? There are many players no one ever saw because of Landis. There are many players we’ll see because of Selig.

The history of the game is marked with faults, which as many poets have noted, makes it the appropriate metaphor of the American landscape. When Selig is finished, there will be more than one Urban Academy to remedy the low numbers of Blacks in baseball. He listened to Jimmie Lee Solomon and allowed baseball to begin the process of duplicating Latin American player procurement in the inner-cities of the United States. Clubs, inevitably, are followers, not leaders. Solomon knew this. Selig heard him.

Today, the facility in Compton stands alone, but tomorrow, Atlanta will join it. Others will follow. Don’t be surprised when, if you venture to Cooperstown in the decades to come, that you see the plaque of an African-American player who got his start in such a facility.

Don’t be surprised when you see a Japanese player’s plaque next to his. Don’t be surprised if you see a Chinese player. Selig has provoked the game’s evolution, which should not be forgotten. This era of expansion can be seen everywhere. Independent leagues have boomed in the past 15 years, coinciding with the rise in Major League Baseball’s popularity. Look at all the organized and non-affiliated clubs operating today, the influx of new stadiums in the affiliated and non-affiliated minors, the boom in college baseball, and you’ll see the influence of Major League Baseball and Selig’s tenure.

All of this expansion is spurned by baseball’s own business plan. There will continue to be Major League Baseball everywhere; from TV to the Internet to the radio signals coming from space. Baseball is cemented in ways its competition is still devising ways to colonize. This has been by design.

Selig saw the future through the screaming and yelling of the baseball tycoons. Perhaps, like the clubby suggested, there is truth in such simplicity. Here’s to history and a new suggestion. In the decades to come, look past the Hall of Fame plaques of Japanese players and Black players. You’ll find plaque of the kid from Milwaukee.

John Klima is a national baseball writer for the Los Angeles Newspaper Group.