Baseball’s ex-leader Kuhn dies

Bowie Kuhn was baseball’s bespectacled Ivy League lawyer and looked the part every day of the tumultuous 15 years he ruled as commissioner.

Prim and proper with wire-rim glasses, he stood ramrod straight – all 6-foot-5 of him.

Despite his regal bearing, he was as ornery as the owners and players he feuded with and had the second-longest tenure among nine commissioners.

Kuhn, 80, who oversaw the sport’s transformation to a business of free agents with multimillion-dollar contracts, died Thursday at St. Luke’s Hospital in Jacksonville, Fla., following a short bout with pneumonia that led to respiratory failure, spokesman Bob Wirz said. Kuhn had been hospitalized for several weeks.

“He led our game through a great deal of change and controversy,” commissioner Bud Selig said. “Yet, Bowie laid the groundwork for the success we enjoy today.”

Kuhn loved baseball long before he moved into its main office on Park Avenue. He worked as a manual scoreboard operator at Washington’s Griffith Stadium.

When Kuhn took over from William Eckert on Feb. 4, 1969, baseball just had completed its final season as a tradition-bound 20-team sport, one with no playoffs, a reserve clause and an average salary of about $19,000.

Kuhn battled the rise of the NFL and a combative players’ union that besieged him with lawsuits, grievances and work stoppages.

Yet it was also a time of record attendance and revenue and a huge expansion of the sport’s television presence.