For the Good of the Game
Presented in partnership with the University of Wisconsin Department of History, the longtime Commissioner of Major League Baseball Bud Selig in conversation with Professor David McDonald. Selig provdes an unprecedented look inside professional baseball today, focusing on how he helped bring the game into the modern age and revealing his interactions with players, managers, fellow owners, and fans nationwide.
More than a century old, the game of baseball has always been resistant to change—owners, managers, players, and fans all hate it. As always, baseball needs to evolve—to compete with other professional sports, stay relevant, and remain America’s Pastime. Perhaps no one knows this better than Bud Selig who, as the head of MLB for more than twenty years, ushered in some of the most important, and controversial, changes in the game’s history—modernizing a sport that had remained unchanged since the 1960s.
In this enlightening and surprising book, Selig goes inside the most difficult decisions and moments of his career, looking at how he worked to balance baseball’s storied history with the pressures of the twenty-first century to ensure its future. Part baseball story, part business saga, and part memoir, For the Good of the Game chronicles Selig’s career, takes fans inside locker rooms and board rooms, and offers an intimate, fascinating account of the frequently messy process involved in transforming an American institution. Featuring an all-star lineup of the biggest names from the last forty years of baseball, Selig recalls the vital games, private moments, and tense conversations he’s shared with Hall of Fame players and managers and the contentious calls he’s made. He also speaks candidly about hot-button issues like the steroid scandal that threatened to destroy the game, telling his side of the story in full and for the first time.
As he looks back and forward, Selig outlines the stakes for baseball’s continued transformation—and why the changes he helped usher in must only be the beginning.
Bud Selig
Bud Selig is the former ninth Commissioner of Baseball. A life-long baseball fan and long-term baseball executive, he’s known for contributions to America’s Pastime including reform of drug testing policies and labor relations. Tenured for over two decades, he lives with his wife, Sue, with whom he has three daughters.