Presented by ENERGY SHIELD ROOFS.
This Day In Sports…March 3, 1984:
With the groundwork already laid for what would be a very successful Olympics in Los Angeles that summer, Peter Ueberroth is elected the commissioner of baseball to succeed Bowie Kuhn effective October 1. Ueberroth was chosen largely on the track record he had already developed as chairman of the L.A. Olympics Organizing Committee. The 1984 Summer Games were the first privately-financed Olympiad in history, and—despite the task of managing 70,000 employees and volunteers—would be the best-run to that point.
Ueberroth’s accomplishments during his 4½ years as baseball commissioner were numerous—he avoided an umpires strike right out of the gate during the League Championship Series in 1984 and limited a players strike to one day in 1985. Ueberroth also negotiated baseball’s first billion-dollar TV contract, and he reinstated Hall of Famers Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle after Kuhn had banned them from the sport for their associations with casinos. (How ludicrous would that be today?) On the other hand, Ueberroth fined numerous players for cocaine use and began the arduous process of investigating Pete Rose’s gambling allegations.
Attendance in the majors set records in four consecutive years under Ueberroth, ultimately helped by his insistence that Chicago’s Wrigley Field add lights. That happened late in the 1988 season after 74 years of day games for the Cubs. By the time Ueberroth left office, all MLB teams were either in the black or breaking even. He did, however, lose three large cases charging collusion between the commissioner and the owners, and that led him to step down as commissioner in 1989.
Did you know? Ueberroth graduated from San Jose State in 1959 with a degree in business and played water polo for the Spartans as a scholarship athlete. He competed in the 1956 U.S. Olympic water polo trials but didn’t make the team. After his days as commissioner, Ueberroth was considered for the vice-presidential spot on Ross Perot’s independent ticket in 1992 and ran for governor of California in 1993. Now 88, he’s still involved in sports and remains a board member for the Lott IMPACT Trophy that goes to college football’s best defensive player, with character a key element.
(Tom Scott hosts the Scott Slant segment during the football season on KTVB’s Sunday Sports Extra. He also anchors four sports segments each weekday on 95.3 FM KTIK and one on News/Talk KBOI. His Scott Slant column runs every Wednesday.)
