Bud Selig has a laundry list a mile long of crimes he’s committed against baseball. Yet the sport is in great shape. This article examines what might be Selig’s legacy, with the help of Dylan’s “The Times They Are A Changin’”.

Come writers and critics who prophesize with your pen; And keep your eyes wide the chance won’t come again

For most of his tenure, Commissioner Bud Selig has drawn the ire of baseball fans for the way he has handled issues that have arisen under his watch. A partial list of his bungling includes:

Advancing an adversarial relationship with the MLBPA

The aborted Spider-Man money grab

I was but one of many who wrote extensively on the problems created by Bud and how he was doing harm to the game. But the times they are a changing. As we get ready for the start of Spring Training in 2008, the sport is in better condition than in any point in my lifetime. And if you are going to criticize someone when they do a poor job, then you have to be willing to praise them when they do a good one.

The order is rapidly fadin’

Now with baseball on the cusp of passing football and regaining its rightful place as the National Pastime, it is time to reassess where we are and how we got here.

Now you the gentle reader might be thinking, did you just say baseball is passing football? How on earth can you make that claim?

In 2007, baseball passed the six billion dollar mark in revenue, which is equivalent to what football did in 2006, the last year where figures are available. Since 2004, baseball’s revenues increased 50 percent and have doubled since 2000. Meanwhile, football’s increases have been around half of that in the same time period.

MLB COO Bob DuPuy told CNNMoney’s Chris Isidore that baseball projects another revenue increase in 2008 and a double-digit increase in 2009, when new stadiums open for both New York teams and the sport debuts The Baseball Channel. If not this year, baseball will pass football in total revenue in 2009. Now, people can point to various surveys and Harris Opinion Polls to claim football’s continued superiority, but when in doubt, follow the money. People are voting with their pocketbook for baseball.

Please get out of the new one if you can’t lend a hand

Baseball has thrived in recent years thanks in part to the sport’s foresight in imagining the possibilities of new media. Online ticket sales have been a major source of revenue, as has MLBAM, baseball’s interactive online presence.

Perhaps the biggest accomplishment of Selig’s era occurred in 2000, when he got all 30 owners to agree to turn over control of individual team’s Web sites to MLB.com and to share internet revenue equally.

“Sharing Internet revenues equally will change the internal economics of the game,” Selig told BusinessWeek in 2001. “It helps us to solve our disparity problem” between large- and small-market teams.

In a story in June of 2007, Newsweek profiled MLBAM CEO Bob Bowman and reported that the company provided revenue of $400 million. A story in the Sports Business Journal later in the year tagged ’07 revenue at $450 million. The company reinvests profits, but it is still likely a seven and possibly an eight-figure revenue stream for each club, each year, that did not exist previously.

And don’t criticize what you can’t understand

Another feather in Selig’s cap is reaching détente with the Players’ Union. Now, this is as big as a turnaround as one can possibly imagine. Selig was a main architect of the collusion process, which poisoned labor relations for years. He led the sport’s anti-marketing campaign, for years crying that the owners were losing money hand over fist, despite all physical evidence to the contrary, in an effort to win financial concessions from the union. Finally, he was the man who tried to force the contraction of two teams, in an effort to cut jobs and labor costs.

But he was also the first commissioner to avoid a labor stoppage with the expiration of the Collective Bargaining Agreement. The owners and players do not yet enjoy a true partnership in all manners, but a climate does exist where the owners can make plans without worrying about the near certainty of a strike. And that helps with everything from budgeting for salaries to funding for long-term projects.

Some criticized Selig for not getting a salary cap in negotiations with the union, but even with rocketing salaries, the owners are better off without one. MLB recently released final payroll numbers for the 2007 season and clubs spent a combined $2,711,274,581 on player salaries last year. That’s a staggering number, unless you consider that revenues were over $6 billion. So, the percentage of revenues spent on salaries is roughly 45 percent.

By contrast, the salary cap in the NFL was targeted at 57 percent of total revenues in 2007. In the NBA, players are guaranteed to receive at least 57 percent of revenues in salaries and benefits this season. In the NHL, the owners were thought to score a massive knockout in the last labor contract when they forced the players to settle for 54 percent of revenues. So, anyone in 2008 who says that MLB needs a salary cap is completely, totally and without a doubt uninformed. Or the staunchest player advocate around.

Come senators, congressmen please heed the call; don’t stand in the doorway don’t block up the hall

The latest achievement for Selig is winning the public relations battle in the sport’s campaign on steroids. Many questioned why Selig chose a politician, former Senator George Mitchell, to head his investigation on baseball’s history with steroids, but it was clearly a peace offering to legislators. And Congress accepted the gift.
After the latest round of congressional hearing, it is clear that baseball is off the hook and that Congress will now hound individual players instead of Selig and the owners.

One can argue if this is a good thing, especially with the owners’ role in the whole affair, but there is no doubt it allows the sport to move forward. Besides, Selig already negotiated a strict penalty for steroids. The NFL suspends players for four games, or one-quarter of the season. MLB suspends players for 50 games, or nearly one-third of the season. And that’s a real penalty to go along with the Mitchell Report and the PR piece for Congress.

The line it is drawn the curse it is cast; the slow one now will later be fast

As a baseball fan, I still don’t trust Bud Selig. But there is no denying that he is building a strong case for being an effective commissioner. The negatives are real and they are numerous. But the positives – record revenues, labor peace, drug testing - are substantial and they have the game in great shape. The job of any steward is to leave things in better shape than the condition in which they were inherited. And I believe that by the end of his term, despite everything, Selig will have accomplished that goal.