MILWAUKEE (SPECTRUM NEWS) – Former Brewers owner Bud Selig published his third book recently, titled For the Good of the Game, and it illustrates his greatest battles with baseball throughout his career. 

“If you’re a Brewers fan, he’s done everything you could possibly have wished for,” said Brewers’ fan Tom Szyszko.

As most Brewers fans know, the team didn’t get to this point without some battles, and many of them had Selig at the helm. Looking back at the 1960s, Selig wrote a lot about his efforts to save baseball in Wisconsin.   

“Nothing was more rewarding for me than bringing baseball back to Milwaukee after the Braves left,” Selig wrote. 

The Milwaukee Brewers played their first game in April 1970. Selig’s passion for baseball and the Brewers is intertwined in his writing. He called County Stadium his “home away from home.”

As much as he loved County Stadium, Selig knew the Brewers needed a new home.  He talked about the politics surrounding the plans for Miller Park. 

“We couldn’t survive without the stadium, and I wasn’t going to let Milwaukee lose its baseball team, the team I’d worked so hard to bring to the city all those years ago,” wrote Selig. 

Selig is brutally honest in the book about his time as commissioner of Major League Baseball.   He gets right to the point in chapter one, tackling the steroid issue and his feelings for Barry Bonds. Selig traveled the country in the summer of 2007 and was there when what he calls “the self-absorbed slugger” broke Hank Aaron’s home run record. 

“Barry had brought scandal to the game I’d fallen in love with as a boy,” wrote Selig.

After being accused of being slow to react to players using steroids, Selig wrote about how the issue really bothered him and called it “a blemish on everything we did in that era.” Critics called him the steroid commissioner.  

“It’s not fair, I don’t like it, but I’ve come to understand it,” wrote Selig.

Selig’s supporters look at all he did to change the course of baseball.

“He changed everything,” said Szyszko, “Now they have a realistic drug policy. They have a realistic cap, so yeah, he’s done a lot.” 

Selig wrote about inheriting an economic nightmare when he became commissioner, but there are also a lot of lighter moments in the book, and Selig shares little known parts of his life. Selig worked at his family’s dealership and sold a car to Hank Aaron. He remembers Aaron told him buying the car was “so good for my business that I still owe him money."

He also mentions embarrassing moments like the 2002 All-Star game, hosted by Milwaukee.   Everybody remembers that game, which ended in a tie. Selig remembers it as an ugly scene and fans going home angry.

“That’s baseball,” he wrote. “You almost never get the result you want."