What If George W. Bush Had Been MLB Commissioner?

Before he became a two-term president or even ran for Texas governor, George W. Bush was part-owner and General Managing Partner of MLB’s Texas Rangers, in a deal inked this week in 1989. We now know that the world of baseball almost kept the younger Bush away from following his father’s path to the highest office. In a memoir published in 2019, former MLB commissioner Bud Selig writes that “[h]ad things been different, he could have been the ninth commissioner, not me.” Yes, George W. Bush wasn’t so far from leading Major League Baseball, as opposed to the world’s most powerful country. In this counterfactual history, the implications for baseball are rich. But the much bigger question is what he would not have done for the nation and the world. Will and LZ talk about an alternate universe in which George W. Bush stuck to sports, with repercussions on the World Series and performance-enhancing drugs — and of course, on the course of the post-9/11 world.