Baseball commissioner, Bud Selig will have his final All-Star Game on July 15. Hopefully this final event will go slightly better than his 10th All-Star Game with him as the only standing commissioner in 2002. At that game, the competition went to 11 innings, the teams ran out of pitcher and Selig finally had to call it a tie. Despite that embarrassing episode, Selig will be remembered as one of the greatest commissioners of baseball. The office of commissioners has long been fraught with turmoil. Lewis Lapham said of the commissioner as an office that was an American “wish for kings.” The commissioners office threw out the Black Sox, but quietly supported gamblers, the office was the bulwark of the reserve system until an arbitrator took it down. The commissioners office dealt with twenty years of labor strife that came to a brief stop in the 1980s with a collusion strategy that really just cause 10 more years of strife. Finally Selig, while he was in office in 1994 put his foot down by cancelling the World Series. As if this wasn’t enough to deal with, players then started taking performance-enhancing drugs as much as they could. It began drug hysteria in the game from which baseball is just emerging. In some ways the performance enhancing drugs saved the sport because it brought the scandal crazed press back to the stadium to document the habits of these players. Selig used that to his advantage and used getting his players back on the straight and narrow as good PR. In addition to turning the drug situation around Selig has had many other notable accomplishments. He has kept labor problems at bay for 19 years, he has overseen the building or refurbishing of 22 ballparks, and revenue sharing is now up into nine figures. His legacy is as a drug warrior who will compromise slightly to get things done, and that is something everyone can respect.