For today’s Major League Baseball All-Star Game (weather permitting, as it only grudgingly did for last night’s Home Run Derby), one wonders how much retiring MLB commissioner Bud Selig paid the Washington Post’s Dave Sheinin to write this:

Bud Selig leaves a complex legacy

He finds himself thinking about history a lot these days, not so much the ancient minutiae he can famously recite from memory — the 1953 Milwaukee Braves starting lineup, for example, or the name of that one obscure pitcher who did that one amazing thing in that one game so many years ago — but History, writ large. His own history. Baseball history. American history. By this point, they’re all intertwined.

This is what happens when you’re about to turn 80, as Bud Selig will at the end of the month, and each week seems to bring the death of another good friend or colleague. It’s what happens when you are preparing to step down from the job you have held for 22 years, as Selig will Jan. 24, a job you have cherished and in many ways transformed. It’s what happens when you have held a lifelong obsession with history and now are confronted with it at every turn as the weeks tick down.

I learned about this because I got an email from Mueller Communications of Milwaukee, which intoned:

The attached piece by Dave Sheinin of the Washington Post not only describes the achievements that Major League Baseball Commissioner Allan H. “Bud” Selig has made, but delves into those qualities of leadership made him successful. I believe you will find it interesting reading.

This is why I have a, shall we say from the Post’s headline, “complex” relationship with the public relations world. PR professionals provide a valuable service for the news media by bringing to their attention their clients’ work when their clients’ work dovetails with the media’s needs.

This, however, is over the top. I am trained by experience, not education, in PR, but said experience teaches me that if a PR professional feels the need to hype his or her client — “achievements” and “qualities of leadership” that “made him successful” — I should become immediately suspicious. At least Mueller didn’t use the terms “buzz” or “hot,” which I loathe.

How about that complex legacy?

“If you look at this season, it’s almost a personification of his vision, with so many teams within striking distance,” says Bob Costas, a commentator for NBC and the MLB Network and the author of Fair Ball: A Fan’s Case for Baseball. “His mantra for 20 years has been ‘hope and faith for all.’ He’s come pretty close to accomplishing that.” …

His legacy is something Selig cares deeply about. Though he tosses off questions about it with a wave of the hand (“That’s up to the historians to decide,” he says), a man who gets a daily package of newspaper clips faxed from New York each morning — and who has been known to call the writers of negative stories to set them straight — doesn’t all of a sudden stop caring about the way in which history will view him, just as he is ready to depart.

Costas, interestingly, wrote in Fair Ball that he hated the wild-card. So instead of one wild card team, which is one too many, per league, now we have two. It’s not really an accomplishment to say that more teams are in the playoff chase when there are more playoff spots to chase.

Selig has only taken baby steps to actual competitive balance. The so-called luxury tax has not prevented the big-market franchises — the Dodgers ($235 million), Yankees ($203.8 million), Phillies ($180 million) and Red Sox ($162.8 million) — from outspending small-market franchises by an order of magnitude. If salaries were everything, the Yankees would win every World Series, so obviously they’re not, but consider who’s on first in each division and their payroll rankings:

• National League Central: Milwaukee (until the second-half begins and their losing streak resumes), 16th.
• NL East: Washington, ninth, and Atlanta, 14th.
• NL West: Dodgers, number one.
• NL wild card as of today (the other would be the NL East loser): San Francisco, seventh.
• American League East: Baltimore, 15th.
• AL Central: Detroit, fifth.
• AL West: Oakland, 25th.
• AL wild cards as of today: L.A. Angels, sixth, and Seattle, 18th.

At least baseball fans can chortle at the plight of the Dead Sox (fourth overall in payroll, last in the AL East), Rangers (eighth in payroll, last in the AL West) and Phillies (third in payroll, last in the NL East). Cubs fans are inexplicably going to Wrigley Field to watch a team with the 23rd highest payroll and the second-worst record in the NL (though their history shows they should be used to that). Imagine, however, being a fan of the Astros (lowest payroll, and dead last in the AL Central) or Diamondbacks (second lowest payroll, and in the basement by one-half game in the NL West), whose ownership appears to be not trying to win.

Comparing baseball and the National Football League is tricky, except that they are competing for your entertainment dollar. The NFL has never canceled its playoffs due to labor unrest; baseball did, in 1994. The numerous past examples of teams going from watching the playoffs to playing in the Super Bowl the next year shows that even fans of, say, the Cleveland Browns have some hope when the season begins. And yet, fans in some baseball markets know full well at the start of the season that their team will be out of the race by Memorial Day.

Sheinin reports that baseball shares $400 million in revenue now. That, however, is a pittance compared with what the NFL shares. If baseball was serious about revenue sharing, teams with huge broadcast contracts — all the big-market franchises — would be required to share all of those revenues with the smaller markets, because it takes two teams to play a baseball game.

This may be why Mueller Communications pushed this story:

He has been called a master politician himself, skilled both at whipping votes when there is the possibility of consensus and at applying the dark arts of politics when there is not. In Milwaukee, the city’s power brokers still speak in awe at how Selig pushed through the construction of Miller Park, mostly through public money, when both the mayor and (eventually) the governor were against it.

“He comes up, and he goes, ‘Goddamn it, governor, I’m sick and tired of all this horseshit!’ ” says Carl Mueller, a prominent Milwaukee public relations man and longtime Selig confidante who was involved in the effort to get Miller Park built, recalling a meeting in Gov. Tommy Thompson’s office. “ ‘I’m going down there, and we’re going to pass this bill. And I got one question: Are you with me or not?’ ”

The bill passed. “I wouldn’t want to cross him,” Mueller says of Selig. “Having him in your corner is worth a lot, and I think the owners understand that. I’ve never witnessed what happened to people who crossed him, but I don’t think you do it twice.”

Had that story gotten out during the Miller Park debate (and Thompson been a Democrat and Selig a Republican, instead of the other way around, this story would have gotten out), the Brewers would be the Charlotte Distillers or something else. It says more about  Thompson than it does about Selig that Thompson didn’t tell Selig to go east on Interstate 94 and keep going until the water went over the top of his car. (Indeed, Thompson then pushed for the stadium bill by telling those outside Milwaukee to “stick it to Milwaukee.” And to be honest, the Miller Park roof remains probably the best $100 million portion of a building project in the history of this state, as I rediscovered upon a trip to Miller Park when it was 49 degrees in the parking lot.)

Sheinin concludes …

Baseball still has its problems. Oakland and Tampa Bay are stuck in bad stadiums. Washington and Baltimore are fighting over their cuts of a shared television network. Most vexing of all, the games themselves are too long, and thanks to the rise in strikeouts and the work-the-count approach of hitters, the ball is in play less than ever — not a great prescription for a sport struggling to keep the attention of the next generation of fans.

The Pete Rose issue still looms, too — the banished Hit King, 73 years old himself, withering on the vine, hoping for a reinstatement from his 1989 ban for gambling on baseball. If Selig is considering reinstating Rose on his way out — his own version of a presidential pardon — he isn’t saying, having stayed almost completely silent on the Rose matter.

… without one single word about the enormous problem of the game’s arrogant umpires, too many of whom think fans pay good money to see them instead of, you know, the players. Selig does deserve credit for bringing the umpires out of control of the individual leagues, but too many umpires who do not deserve to get major league paychecks are getting major league paychecks. Indeed, baseball arguably still has the worst officials of any of the professional sports.

I don’t believe in praising people for adequately performing their work when they are much, much more than adequately compensated for that work. The National Hockey League has grown tremendously under commissioner Gary Bettmann, and the National Basketball Association grew considerably under former commissioner David Stern. Former NFL commissioner Pete Rozelle was the greatest commissioner in the history of professional sports, and the NFL grew from there under former commissioner Paul Tagliabue and current commissioner Roger Goodell. Compared to them, Selig did OK, and only OK.