It is a good thing that through its history the office of the baseball commissioner has been almost entirely powerless. What power it has had has nearly always been used for idiotic or wicked purposes.

Take the very first commissioner, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, who cleaned up the game after the Black Sox scandal. This was an achievement along the lines of my achievement of successfully pouring a glass of orange juice yesterday . A hobo collared off the street and confronted with a thrown World Series would have instituted antigambling policies at least as harsh as those Landis did, and, unlike the craggy-faced old man, probably wouldn’t have let Ty Cobb and Tris Speaker off the hook for fixing games. The hobo also might not have used what power he did have to maintain the sport’s color line and keep the major leagues from absorbing the minor leagues, two of Landis’s major achievements.

Landis is regarded, rightly, as having defined the commissionership: The good he did came simply as a result of doing what obviously had to be done, and when he had choices to make, he usually made bad ones. His successors over nearly a century have followed his precedent faithfully. From Ford Frick, best remembered for affixing an asterisk to Roger Maris’s home run record and presiding over the ridiculous peregrinations of the Braves from Boston to Milwaukee to Atlanta, to Peter Ueberroth, who actively encouraged owners to illegally collude against free agents, baseball’s commissioners have traditionally been pompous, ineffectual boobs.

This seems natural to me. The commissioner is, after all, no more the head of baseball than the secretary general of the United Nations is president of the world. He’s an agent who acts on behalf of owners; owners who have generally been a wrongheaded lot throughout the game’s history. What seems strange and unusual is that this year, a consensus is building around the idea that our present commissioner, Bud Selig, is somehow uniquely tainted by the sport’s drug scandal.

Selig’s own ridiculous investigation into the scandal, headed by Senator Mitchell, and his dithering over whether or not he’ll be in attendance when Barry Bonds breaks Hank Aaron’s career home runs record, both sum up everything risible and worthy of mockery in the former used car dealer. Certainly there’s much else; from the All-Star game that ended in a tie to Selig’s bizarre 2002 contraction tour, in which he threatened successful teams like Oakland and Minnesota with annihilation, the man has plenty of which to be ashamed. So, too, though, has every commissioner from Curtis LeMay disciple Spike Eckert to Bart Giamatti, the penner of purple prose who once wrote that “There’s nothing bad that accrues from baseball.” Selig, at least, has also left a positive legacy with which to be reckoned — more than can honestly be said of any of his predecessors.

First, Selig can take a great deal of credit for an unprecedented and sustained explosion of the game’s popularity. In 1991, the last year before he took over as commissioner, total attendance in the National League was about 23 million — a figure the league has already reached this year. I violently detest the expanded playoffs and interleague play that Selig introduced, the offense-friendly climate he encouraged, and the mind numbing national broadcast style he’s allowed, but I’m obviously in the minority. The job of the commissioner is to make baseball more profitable and popular, and he’s succeeded.

Second, Selig has overseen the complete overhaul of the game’s physical infrastructure. Between the time he assumed the job and now, almost every team in baseball has built a new, publicly financed park. Again, I violently detest the use of tax dollars to build private infrastructure, but Selig is not a public servant; his job is to convince politicians to act in the interests of baseball’s owners. He’s done that more effectively than anyone could have thought possible. Blame the city councils, not Selig, for the waste of your money.

Third, Selig is the only commissioner in the history of the game to negotiate a collective bargaining agreement without provoking a strike or resorting to a lockout. He’s done it twice now, and it’s an enormous achievement, if an ironic one given that he oversaw the longest, most damaging strike in the game’s history. Their merits aside, perpetually recurring work stoppages eroded the public’s emotional investment in the game for a quarter century. Selig is the first commissioner who has proved able to compromise and work with union leadership for the good of the game without triggering a strike, probably because he is the first who doesn’t see himself as the head of the game as a whole. He deserves credit for this.

Fourth, Selig worked with the union leadership to create the most rigorous drug testing program to be found in any major sport. He is a long way from being blameless in the drug scandal, but in the end what matters is that under his leadership the owners were able to compromise with the union and deliver a stringent policy that protects the interests of clean players without going too far in violating their rights. This isn’t a problem that started on his watch, but the first real steps to end it were taken while he was in charge. No matter his complicity in the crisis through the 1990s, that counts.

Finally, Selig did one truly visionary thing when he oversaw the creation of Major League Baseball Advanced Media, an entity that provides for the equal distribution of all online revenues between every baseball team. In the 1950s, over the vocal objections of wise men like Bill Veeck, baseball created a policy that allowed each team to keep its own television money, a policy that led to the overstated but real competitive disadvantages faced by poor teams to this day. When Selig insisted that all Internet monies be split equally among the teams, he ensured that in the future the Yankees will have a lot less money and the Royals a lot more without unfairly stripping rich teams of natural advantages. In the end, this will probably be his most important contribution to the game.

Not one of these achievements is the result of Selig doing something that was going to happen with or without him. Selig’s mistakes will haunt the game for decades to come, and they may overwhelm the good he’s done for the game. But in a line of commissioners that encompasses the inept, the corrupt, the self-promoting, the well-meaning yet weak, and the deluded, Selig is something near a titan. He deserves the jeering he’ll receive all summer long as baseball begins to recover from its scandal-plagued years, but the very fact that the parks will be packed with jeering fans is itself a testament to just how much this eminently loatheable man has done right.

tmarchman@nysun.com