Hot News: Leaving a Sport in Better Shape

MINNEAPOLIS - They came to their current positions 22 years ago, one as a member of the Yankees' organization, the other as the baseball commissioner. Derek Jeter was drafted in June 1992, three months before Bud Selig rose to the top of the sport's hierarchy. Now they are retiring, with just the final lines remaining for their weighty legacies.

Selig's will be more complicated, of course. It is Jeter, not Selig, who was celebrated this week at his final All-Star Game. The commissioner has been inconspicuous, sitting beside his friend Hank Aaron in a suite for Monday's Home Run Derby and letting his top lieutenant, Rob Manfred, handle the on-field duties.

Selig is perhaps best remembered here for the contraction threat in 2001, when Montreal and Minnesota seemed to be on the verge of elimination. The Expos eventually moved to Washington, while the Twins, after much wrangling, finally left the Metrodome for dazzling Target Field.

This ballpark is a fitting a symbol of Selig's tenure. Securing it was a thorny issue that took complicated maneuvering, with mistakes and hurt feelings along the way. But the end result is something better and more sustainable than what had gone before.

'It was really painful; it was really difficult,' Selig said Tuesday. He was talking about his efforts to promote competitive balance, but really, it has all been a fight. Expanding the playoffs and interleague play were easy, compared to the fight for revenue sharing, the early battles with the union and the public humiliation of the steroid era.

Reforming the game's economy, Selig said, stands out most to him as the cornerstone of his legacy. Getting there, alas, took the cancellation of the 1994 World Series. He is also proud of baseball's drug testing program, widely heralded as the toughest in professional sports. Again, though, it took the tainted feats of a generation before baseball got there.

Ignore all the bad stuff in between, and the before-and-after images of the Selig era are striking.

'I think the industry's doing a lot better now, monetarily,' Jeter said. 'I think attendance is higher than it's ever been, salaries are higher than they've ever been, teams are making more money than they ever have, TV deals are bigger, there's more exposure, there's more parity when it comes to teams, there's expanded playoffs. So the game has grown quite a bit since I first came into it, but I think it's grown in a good way, and I think it will only continue to grow.'

Attendance is not at an all-time high, but it is up roughly 5,000 fans per game from 1995, when Jeter made his major league debut and the sport was reeling from its longest work stoppage. Only one current player, in fact, had played in the majors before the August 1994 strike: Alex Rodriguez, who was driven from the game this season by Selig's steroid cops. Timeline: Highlights and Milestones: Derek Jeter

Rodriguez always wanted to be the symbol of Major League Baseball, but his greed and insecurity ruined that. It is Selig's good fortune that despite all the goons who reigned in his tenure, in the end, it is Jeter who stands tallest.

'If you were sitting two decades ago and you said, 'Boy, this is a guy that I want to be the face of baseball and be what this generation will remember,' you couldn't have written a script like this,' said Selig, who then compared Jeter to Aaron. 'How lucky can this sport be to have the icon of this generation turn out to be Derek Jeter? It's absolutely remarkable.

'I told him this in front of his parents about five or seven years ago, and he had a great response. He said, 'Boy, I sure fooled you, didn't I?' But if he fooled me, he fooled everybody else in the world. That's how I feel about Derek Jeter. Makes it easy to be the commissioner of baseball.'

Jeter has grown used to such praise, the same kind showered on Mariano Rivera at his final All-Star Game at Citi Field last summer. Jeter is part of the All-Star team, but also somewhat separate. He did not attend the derby Monday night, choosing family time over gawking at homers from sluggers he barely knows.

Kyle Seager, a young All-Star who plays in Seattle, said that he had hoped to spend a little time with Jeter but that he was tough to find, with all the commotion around him. Brian Butterfield, a Boston coach who instructed Jeter in the minors, said he had been nervous even hitting grounders to his old protégé.

'I didn't want to hit him one with backspin so it eats him up,' Butterfield said. 'I was like, 'C'mon, c'mon, center this baby, get a little topspin.' '

Jeter said it was hard to dwell on his final moments, because the Yankees have another game to play on Friday. He allowed himself a bit of introspection when asked why people are so drawn to him.

'I try to be respectful to everybody I deal with, especially the players I play with, the players I play against, the fans, the media,' Jeter said. 'I know I don't give you guys what you want a lot of times, but I still try to be respectful. But I don't sit around and think, 'Why does someone respect me in return?' I've never thought about it.'

Selig, meanwhile, acknowledged that he thinks a lot about his legacy these days. He turns 80 on July 30. Recent innovations, like instant replay, are imperfect but improving. A few items will be left unresolved, like better ballparks for Oakland and Tampa Bay.

'I've been fortunate in my career to solve most everything else that I tried to do, and I'm proud of that,' Selig said. 'But there are some things in life that just take more time.'

He leaves baseball in better shape than it was when he took over. Most of that came with great difficulty. Having Jeter as the sport's frontman was the easy part.

Post By http://www.nytimes.com/2014/07/16/sports/baseball/derek-jeter-and-bud-selig-in-matching-tenures-made-mlb-better.html