Bowie Kuhn, who died yesterday at 80, was commissioner of baseball in a time of change as tumultuous as any in the game’s history.

The biggest challenges came in the structure of the game’s labor arrangements, as players and umpires struck, owners locked players out, and the reserve clause that bound players to a single team their whole career was overturned in a court challenge by Curt Flood. Kuhn was on the losing side of that battle and somehow the game survived, despite his contention that the integrity of baseball depended on it.

But that other hoary institution of the game, the anti-trust exemption that preserved Major League Baseball as a congressionally established monopoly, survived. Chalk up one for Kuhn and the owners.

Although the distance to first from home remained 90 feet, other basic principles of the game proved less sacred. Most salient of these was the designated hitter rule, whose asymmetric application — only the American League uses it — outraged purists.

The year Kuhn became major league baseball’s fifth commissioner, 1969, was also the first year of divisional play and hence of the playoffs, not his idea but a tremendous success for baseball.

Unrest off the field exploded even as — or perhaps because of — attendance at games exploded. Lucrative national television contracts brought baseball to prime time. As free agency came into force, individual player salaries topped $1 million for the first time.

While often perceived as taking the owners’ side — and indeed, he served their pleasure — Kuhn was hardly their cat’s paw, and he engaged in epochal battles with some. He suspended Ted Turner of the Braves and George Steinbrenner of the Yankees over various infractions. He feuded with Charlie Finley of the A’s, who labeled Kuhn “the village idiot.”

He likewise forbade Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle from consorting with their old teams over gambling. And he gave the All-Star Game vote back to the fans.

Perhaps there was no event that signified Kuhn’s attempt to personify integrity than his attendance at a very cold World Series games in only a sports jacket. After all, it had been he who instituted night World Series games in the 1971, despite complaints of late-October chill. There he would sit, his 6-foot-5 frame a perfect Gibraltar of insulated integrity in a field-level box, as all about him shivered. Later, it emerged that he wore long underwear.

Bowie Kent Kuhn was born October 28, 1926, in Tacoma Park, Md. His father was a retired oilman, and his ancestors included two governors and Jim Bowie, the fabled frontiersman and inventor of the Bowie knife. A baseball fan from childhood, he worked the scoreboard at Washington Senators games at old Griffith Stadium.

He was president of his high school class, was voted “most likely to succeed,” and generally excelled at everything except athletics. He graduated from Princeton University and the University of Virginia School of Law, where his excellent grades gave him his pick of law firms. In 1950, he began working at New York’s Willkie Farr & Gallagher because it often represented Major League Baseball.

Over the next two decades, Kuhn — “Boots” to friends — served as legal counsel to several baseball teams and represented club owners in a fractious dispute with players over pensions in 1968. Owners were simultaneously deadlocked over the election of a new commissioner. In the end, Kuhn was appointed pro tempore commissioner for a year. He immediately moved to force an amicable settlement to the pension dispute and then acted decisively in several disputed player trades. He forced owners to sell interests in Las Vegas casinos. Happy to have a firm hand on the tiller, the owners offered him a seven-year contract in 1970.

Kuhn often seemed a man of rock-like convictions.

“At no time was there put forth by the owners or Bowie Kuhn the slightest modification of the reserve clause — not a comma, not a concept, not a thought,” the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Marvin Miller, said in 1983.

Kuhn’s relations with the owners were always rocky, and he narrowly avoided a Finley-led putsch in 1975. Kuhn had blocked Finley from dismantling his world champion A’s in a fire sale that the commissioner deemed not in baseball’s best interest. Wrote the Washington Post’s Shirley Povich, “Finley didn’t have anything against Kuhn that wasn’t personal.”

It was his failure to prevent a players’ strike of 1981, which cut 50 days out of the major league schedule, that seemed to damn him most in the eyes of owners. At any rate, when the owners refused to renew his contract in 1984, Kuhn boldly resigned a few days before his term was ended.

His law career had an odd denouement. After leaving baseball, he teamed with lawyer Harvey Myerson to form a new law firm, Myerson & Kuhn. The firm went bankrupt in 1989. Myerson was indicted and Kuhn hurriedly moved to Florida, where the bankruptcy laws were more generous.

In retirement, he continued to watch baseball and rooted for changes he said he had supported as commissioner, such as interleague play, revenue sharing, and more lucrative contracts with cable television.