The baseball commissioner who made Bush president: the culture, politics, and economics of baseball in the Bud Selig era.

• Author: Fisher, Anthony L.
• Position: 'The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Baseball's Power Brokers' - Culture and Reviews - Book review

The Game: Inside the Secret World of Major League Basebalis Power Brokers, byjon Pessah, Little, Brown and Company, 648 pages, $30

IF NOT FOR Bud Selig, erstwhile owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, and his single-minded determination to control Major League Baseball's costs by imposing a salary cap on players, George W. Bush probably would have never run for governor of Texas, much less president of the United States.

That is just one long-rumored story confirmed in Jon Pessah's The Game, a sweeping and comprehensive investigation of the business of baseball over the past three decades. Selig, along with former Players Association chief Donald Fehr and the late New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, is both credited and blamed for just about everything that has brought America's pastime into the modern era.

Once struggling to survive, Major League Baseball (MLB) now enjoys massive revenues, billion-dollar local TV contracts, and per-game attendance levels that are up by more than 5,300 over 1995, even after a recent slight decline. But the game also suffers from a confused legacy, with its record books (fetishized by its fans like no other sport's) tainted in the minds of many by the influence of rampant performance-enhancing drug use.

It is Selig whose legacy is most scrutinized. For all his successes, the second-generation used car mogul from Milwaukee comes across as a panicky, short-sighted crony capitalist who fleeced the taxpayers and fans of his home city and actively enabled other owners to do the same.

To tell the ultimate inside-baseball story, Pessah, a founding editor at ESPN: The Magazine, interviewed more than 150 people, including players, coaches, senior front office staffers, and three MLB commissioners--Selig, Fay Vincent, and the new guy, Rob Manfred.

The story begins in the early 1990S, around the time Selig led a coup against Vincent, whom the owners deemed insufficiently devoted to their interests. Selig used the popular and gregarious Bush--the public face of the Texas Rangers, though he was just a minority owner--to whip the requisite votes in favor of removing the incumbent commissioner. The two small-market owners had a quiet understanding between them: Upon ousting Vincent, Selig would serve as interim commissioner, then, once the battlefield dust cleared, yield the throne to Bush.

Though Bush was a friend and longtime supporter of Vincent, he agreed to rally the troops to support the vote of "no confidence" in the commissioner, based largely on the promise that Selig "would support his dream to become baseball's next Commissioner." It didn't work out that way. Selig would spend the next 22 years in Bush's dream job. He would preside over a players' strike that culminated in the only cancelled World Series in baseball history--something the Great Depression and two world wars couldn't accomplish--but then help engineer a renaissance, thanks to the boom in attendance at new retro-designed family-friendly ballparks (which replaced many cold and ugly '6os and '70S mixed-use behemoths), a surge in colorful international talent from places like Japan and the Dominican Republic, and, yes, the steroid-infused home run craze of the late '90S and early 'oos. Selig was the proud steward of baseball's rebirth, but once the steroid jig was up, he would become the flustered face of indignation.

The commissioner's old ally in Texas, stuck with nothing else to do after Selig left him twisting in the wind for more than a year, never officially telling him that he had no intentions of abdicating, would be pushed by Karl Rove into running for governor. Bush unseated the incumbent in 1994, he launched a bid for the White House five years after that, and the rest is history.

Soon after Selig took the job, he was summoned before Congress for one of many hearings in which a committee of mad-as-hell senators threatened to...