“Bud Selig is, without question, one of the most skilled and accomplished professionals in the sports industry today,” said Joseph D. Kearney, dean of Marquette Law School. “We are truly honored that he would commit his time to our students and grateful that he’s chosen our classrooms as a place to pass down his significant wisdom to the next generation of leaders.”"Significant wisdom?" "One of the most skilled and accomplished professionals in the sports industry today?" Who the hell are you kidding, Dean Kearney?
As an initial matter, Bud Selig does not have a law degree. I'm not going to argue that every law school professor has to have a law degree, but since the purpose of law school is train future professionals, the non-lawyer professor had better be able to offer something substantive to the legal education of the students in his class.
Bud Selig does not. On the contrary, there are many reasons why Bud Selig is not fit to teach Sports Law and Policy in a law school classroom. What follows is a list of reasons in no particular order.
Bud Selig is something of a hypocrite. Not that relevant (or uncommon for law school faculty, I imagine), but it's a good introduction. In the 1950s and early '60s, Bud was a big fan of the Milwaukee Braves. He even used some of his family wealth to become a stakeholder in the team and actively work to keep the team in Milwaukee, even legally challenging the eventual move on rather spurious grounds. Once he lost and the Braves moved to Atlanta, Selig immediately tried to buy and relocate two other teams from their cities, first the White Sox and then the Seattle Pilots, where he succeeded and made them the Milwaukee Brewers.
Bud Selig was part of a corrupt organization suppressing the wages of its works. While Selig was primary owner and President of the Milwaukee Brewers, baseball's owners colluded to subvert the free agency system and keep players on lower contracts than what the free market would have dictated, including Brewers star Paul Molitor. In the end, baseball's owners paid $280 million in damages to players for their collusion. And this in a business where open competition is already prevented by antitrust exemptions.
Bud Selig was instrumental in the sport-killing strike of 1994-1995. There are a variety of factors that led to the strike of 1994 (like the owners being such bad businessmen that they were collectively unable to handle a non-collusive environment), but one of the biggest is that the owners ousted Commissioner Fay Vincent in 1992. Vincent had been a firm Commissioner, standing up to both owners (see his handling of the 1990 lockout) and players (see his move to permanently ban Steve Howe after repeated drug offenses) in the best interests of the game.
And what owner was instrumental in the group that pushed for Vincent's ouster? Yup. Bud Selig. As a result, Bud Selig was named acting Commissioner. Almost immediately, the owners moved to lower the Commissioner's powers to act in the "best interests of the game." While the ideal commissioner is a neutral party who works, as Vincent did, to bridge the parties, the balance became skewed in favor of the owners. With this imbalance, the owners basically tried to brow-beat the players into signing away arbitration rights. Naturally, they called a strike while a weak, owner-friendly Selig watched from his Commissioner's office. Because he did nothing to postpone or prevent the strike, Selig canceled the World Series for the first time in 91 years. It made it through the Depression and World War II, but it could not withstand Bud Selig's stewardship. Come 1995 and, seeing that the owners lost a ton of money in '94, Selig suddenly demanded that the show would go on, that baseball's teams would hire "replacement players." It was a farce that no one really took seriously. Thankfully, the strike ended when the players' union won an injunction that was upheld on appeal.
However, the damage to the sport was done. Although people generally had little sympathy for players who make $1 million+ on average, it's clear the driving force was owners scheming to create a negotiating imbalance between labor and management, something as detestable in sports as it is in a steel mill. Selig was instrumental in creating that situation.
Bud Selig does not respect the ethical principles behind "conflict of interest" regulations. Beyond Selig being chums and co-conspirators with the very owners he was now supposed to regulate, Selig maintained a direct conflict on interest. Commissioners are not supposed to have ownership interests in any team. To get around this rule, Selig transferred ownership of the Brewers to his daughter Wendy. Most speculate he maintained an active role in the club. Only the most technical sense is this not a blatant conflict of interest.
Bud Selig has the "wisdom" of a moldy rock. In the 2002 All-Star Game, both managers had used their available substitutes while the game was still tied 7-7. The rules of baseball are clear: there is no such thing as a tie and no one re-enters a game after leaving. The managers had clearly screwed up. What did Selig do? Instead of telling them to play until someone wins (like Vincent or Kennesaw Mountain Landis would have likely done), he called the game a tie to wide criticism. To compensate for his ridiculous mistake, the following year he pushed to make the All-Star Game (a somewhat- arbitrary, non-serious celebration of baseball) determine which league had home-field advantage in the World Series (a serious, non-arbitrary thing) to wide criticism.
This wasn't the first or last time Selig had angered fans with a complete refusal to understand the game of baseball or respect its traditions. He has also implemented inter-league play, moved the Brewers from one league to the other (conflict of interest, anyone?), disbanded the separate league offices, split the leagues into three divisions, and introduced the concept of a wild card playoff contender. Although some of these have been financial accomplishments, they've contributed to a marked decline in the popularity of baseball over the last 20 years.
Bud Selig's own propaganda page claims that baseball's popularity is increasing, focusing on absolute numbers and taking liberal advantage of the economic boom of the mid-to-late '90s. Such claims shouldn't pass the basic sniff test of skepticism. For just one example, check out the damning television ratings. The 1985 World Series between St. Louis and Kansas City (by all means, a series no one in New York or Los Angeles should have cared about) drew twice the ratings' share as this year's World Series between San Francisco and Texas (Dallas). This last World Series, the first for the Giants since Willie Mays suited up, got beat by sitcoms and Grey's Anatomy.
In 1992, the Simpsons had a memorable episode featuring nine baseball personalities. Of them, I would argue seven (Roger Clemens, Don Mattingly, Ozzie Smith, Wade Boggs, Ken Griffey, Jose Canseco, and Darryl Strawberry) were commonly-known and two (Sax and Scioscia) would have been fairly obscure to the average viewer. Many other contemporary players, such as Tony Gwynn, Cal Ripken, Ryne Sandberg, Bo Jackson, or Mark McGwire, likely would have been known. A few years later, players like Randy Johnson and Mike Piazza appeared in commercials.
Today, how many active players in baseball would a non-fan know of? Only Alex Rodriguez, Derek Jeter, and Albert Pujols come to mind. Do ordinary people know who Chase Uttley, Tim Lincecum, Roy Halladay, or Joey Votto are? Would they be able to identify them the way they would have with Cal Ripken or Wade Boggs? I don't think I'm being merely nostalgic when I say "no."
Yet according to Dean Joseph D. Kearney, the overseer of this decline in broad popularity is "skilled" and "accomplished."
Bud Selig has promoted a culture of disrespect for the United States Congress and the Judiciary. In the 1980s, Commissioner A. Bartlett Giamatti (yes, actor Paul Giamatti's father) discovered that Pete Rose had gambled on baseball. Without going into too much detail, he essentially banned Rose from being involved with baseball. As a result, baseball has no serious problem with players or managers gambling on the sport.
Under Bud Selig's watch, multiple players have lied to official bodies investigating their behavior. In the steroid hearings of 2005, former Rangers star Raphael Palmeiro blatantly lied to Congress on national television. At the same circus of a hearing, Mark McGwire refused to answer questions and Sammy Sosa pretended he didn't understand English. In an unrelated inquiry, superstar Barry Bonds has been indicted on multiple counts of perjury. And then there's Roger Clemens, who potentially faces the most trouble of them all after being indicted for perjury and lying to Congress.
That's five Hall-of-Fame caliber players besmirching the game's reputation by not being forthright with Congress or in judicial proceedings. If Selig was any kind of a firm commissioner, this problem would have been nipped in the bud by making an example of someone, as Giamiatti did with Rose, as Vincent tried to do with Steve Howe, and as Landis did with the BlackSox.
In line with his attitude of passively promoting rule-bending, Selig sat by and watched as baseball was overtaken by rampant steroid abuse. As early as 1998, Mark McGwire was on public record as using then-legal performance enhancers. Baseball lacked far behind the Olympics and the NFL in regulating steroids. Anyone looking at the progression of McGwire, Bonds, or Sosa over the years would have seen the obvious trend at work. Yet the rising home run numbers of these biological freaks and their home run chases made money. In 2002, baseball instituted testing and moderate sanctions, but the tests were incomplete and players still had license to use human growth hormone.
It wasn't until 2006 - eight years after the problem indisputably surfaced and after the U.S. Congress got involved - that Selig appointed the "independent" George Mitchell to investigate steroid use in baseball and make recommendations. Owing to his disregard for conflicts of interest, Mitchell had served as a Director of the Boston Red Sox. The Mitchell Report would directly list 47 players in baseball who used performance enhancers, although it should surprise no one that no Red Sox (Mitchell) or Brewers (Selig) made the list, even though guys like David Ortiz and Manny Ramierez were using steroids at the time by their admission.
At the end of the day, over 100 players have been implicated in the performance enhancing scandal. The "significant wisdom" of Bud Selig has led to the biggest controversy in the game's history, in terms of scope easily breaking past the BlackSox and their puny-by-comparison eight co-conspirators.
Bud Selig was an interested party in every recent case in this sub-field of law. Admittedly, I know little of sports law. But what I do know is that Bud Selig, as Commissioner of baseball, was either a party or an interested third-party in every law suit that's been filed involving a professional sports league in the last twenty-five years. Given his position, how is he supposed to fairly teach this law to students?
How can he detach his own interest in baseball's tenuous antitrust exemption when he teaches a case such as NFL v. American Needle? How can productive classroom discussion be had? It's one thing to have a prominent attorney teach a course, or even a former public official. But a private party who has a stake in every outcome in the area? It seems to be a disservice to have this individual leading discussion. If any of these students actually do practice sports law, Marquette owes them a duty to adequately prepare them. They can't do that if the professor is so utterly and personally biased in every single discussion.
I understand why schools do this. Kids will take his class just so they can say (perhaps in job interviews!) that they had Bud Selig and even emailed him a question or two. Marquette probably thinks it adds to their prestige to have Selig pop through their doors.
But the man has presided over a massive slide in the place of baseball in United States culture, and perhaps worse from the law school perspective, he's repeatedly shown a disregard for ethical obligations and led baseball's integrity as a sport down the tubes. The law is nothing without ethics or integrity, neither of which Selig has shown any ability to foster. And since he leads a business that violates antitrust laws and still has slid in relevance, I fail to see what he can teach students from a business perspective.
The ABA states that a "law school shall maintain an educational program that prepares its students for admission to the bar, and effective and responsible participation in the legal profession." Given this individual's public history and lack of a law degree, in no conceivable way does his continued employment do that for Marquette students.
My torts professor came to class drunk twice, and had to stumble out after canceling class. He was then convicted of possessing child porn. For some reason, I didn't get my money back for that course.
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