The longtime Commissioner of Major League Baseball provides a look inside professional baseball today, focusing on how he attempted to bring the game into the modern age and his interactions with players, managers, fellow owners, and fans nationwide.
If you can find a better account of Major League Baseball’s most important issues and changes over the last half-century, read it ... Selig pulls no punches ... could have been titled Saving Baseball, and Bud Selig turns this uplifting story into a compelling read about how he overcame one obstacle after another off the field in order to preserve and improve the quality of the game on it.
I was pleasantly surprised to find For The Good Of The Game to be charming, informative and even entertaining ... outside of...rare exceptions, Selig's book is about the best memoir you can hope to read from a powerful professional sports insider. Much of that is due to the deep love and respect that Selig carries for the game of baseball ... The book's charm also comes from the Forrest Gump-style encounters Selig kept collecting throughout his life ... The book certainly has many of the usual flaws of a famous person's memoir: Several anecdotes and phrases resurface from chapter to chapter. The writing style isn't consistent. A few sections feel like the places Selig decided to stuff in all the moments that an editor must have told him readers would expect to hear about ... I wish he had been a bit more reflective on what he, as the head of Major League Baseball, could have done to limit the problem [of steroids], or fix it faster.
Mr. Selig may be too inclined to portray himself as an honest broker seeking a middle ground between hot heads on both sides of the bargaining table, but there is merit in highlighting the intransigence of players as well as owners when it comes to assigning the blame for baseball’s troubles. As befits the man known as 'Budget Bud' by team owners, he prefers to focus on the bottom line ... While celebrating baseball’s financial success, Mr. Selig is silent about the erosion of baseball’s once dominant hold on the nation’s sports fans ... Mr. Selig insists that 'baseball is an essential part of people’s everyday lives' and firmly believes in the 'unique role baseball plays in American life.' But that may be more a declaration of faith than a true assessment of the sport’s current status—and future prospects.
Image by Gerd Altmann from Pixabay[/caption]
