Former MLB Commissioner Bud Selig and Atlanta Braves president and longtime executive John Schuerholz were elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame on Sunday by the Today’s Game Era Committee.
David O’Brien of the Atlanta Journal-Constitution reported the news. The 16-person committee unanimously elected Schuerholz, while Selig received 15 votes.
“To say this is a significant day in my life would be an understatement. I consider myself very fortunate,” Selig said, per Tom Haudricourt of the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.
This is the first year of the Today’s Game Era Committee voting, which aims to add deserving names from the modern era who have not been selected on the writers’ ballots.
George Steinbrenner, Lou Piniella, Mark McGwire, Davey Johnson, Orel Hershiser, Will Clark, Albert Belle and Harold Baines were also considered but did not receive enough votes. Piniella was the only person other than Selig or Schuerholz to receive more than five votes, per Baseball America.
Candidates needed 75 percent of the vote to make the Hall of Fame.
Selig, 82, served as MLB’s commissioner from September 1992 (acting) to January 2015. He oversaw some of the sport’s greatest moments of growth and perhaps the lowest moment in MLB history, with the 1994 work stoppage causing the cancelation of the World Series.
Baseball also underwent massive scrutiny under Selig for its lack of performance-enhancing-drug policy, which allowed home run records to be broken in part because of steroid use. The latter half of Selig’s tenure was largely about eradicating those issues and pushing the game into the 21st century. MLB now has perhaps the most stringent drug-testing policy of all four major professional sports in the U.S., and he turned the commissionership over to Rob Manfred after years of steady financial growth.
Schuerholz, 76, is a long-tenured baseball executive who had Hall of Fame-worthy runs with the Kansas City Royals and Braves. He spent the formative part of his career in Kansas City, moving up in the organization to eventually serve a successful general manager term. He was instrumental in building the Royals’ 1985 World Series team before joining Atlanta in 1990.
With the Braves, Schuerholz built a dynasty throughout the 1990s with a successful pitching staff. The Braves reached the World Series four times and won it in 1995, their first and only title since moving from Milwaukee.
Follow Tyler Conway (@jtylerconway) on Twitter.
Read more MLB news on BleacherReport.com