Yesterday in this space, I advanced the idea that Bud Selig is, if not one of our nation’s great men, at least someone who will be able to end his career proud of having done good things for baseball. Under his watch the sport has become far more popular than it has ever been, there is peace between labor and management, and Selig has helped to create fair structures to deal with economic and drug problems that could have proved ruinous if left unchecked. This is, I feel, a more impressive record than any previous commissioner has left.

All of this has to be balanced, of course, against the damage Selig has done. Space doesn’t permit a full inventory, but the man has done a lot. He canceled a World Series. He rigged the complex sales of the Red Sox, Marlins, and Expos in ways that made baseball look like a defendant in a RICO suit. He approved the use of scab players in 1995. He publicly claimed that many baseball teams were not profitable. He did nothing for years as performance-enhancing drugs corrupted the sport. He set up a shop in the commissioner’s office to inspect free agent deals, something that functioned awfully like a collusive mechanism. He hobnobbed with Fidel Castro. These are just a few random examples; you probably have your own grievances.

History moves quickly, though, and in 30 years no one is going to remember the details of 2002’s labor negotiations, or which commissioner palled around with a long-dead dictator. What people will remember are the broad contours of what Selig did, both good and bad. I don’t think the bad will outweigh the good, but it will be remembered.

Once we move past the specific mistakes Selig has made, we’re confronted with the central fact of his tenure as commissioner: Under his watch, baseball’s economic character has changed. It isn’t truly a rich man’s sport, and it almost certainly never will be. It’s moved in that direction, though, and it will be a long time before we’ll know the consequences.

The why and how of this is not particularly complicated. Like every commissioner before him, Selig has had one truly central concern: markets. About as long as there has been baseball, the men running it have schemed with and against one another, competing for the most lucrative markets and conniving to make as much money as possible from attendance and from transmissions of accounts of the game.

As overseer of two expansions, Selig has been the first commissioner to be faced with a new problem, which is that there are no new cities into which to expand. For many, many decades, baseball’s growth strategy was based simply around breaking into new markets and shuffling teams around to take advantage of the changes in various urban areas. Boston lost the Braves to Milwaukee, California stole New York’s National League franchises, Milwaukee lost the Braves to Atlanta , the American League expanded back into Milwaukee — it was a shell game, and the biggest payoff came in the 1990s with the hugely lucrative expansion fees charged to new owners in Colorado, Arizona, and Florida.

Profitable as this mine was, it’s now tapped out; only marginal cities now don’t have ballclubs, and any expansion in the foreseeable future will probably have to involve placing more teams in New York, Boston, and Chicago — something that’s presently unimaginable.

Happily for baseball owners, a very simple idea was at hand. Rather than expanding into new markets, after all, a business can always exploit its present markets more effectively, and that’s what baseball has done. Across the nation, virtually every ballpark in the game has been replaced or scheduled for demolition over the last 15 years; those few that haven’t, like Fenway Park and Wrigley Field, have been carefully renovated. The purpose of this new construction has always been the same: To build smaller, more intimate parks specializing in providing more high-end service to businessmen. Money isn’t made these days from the family out to take the annual trip to the local park; it’s made from clients who spend hundreds of thousands of dollars on luxury suites in which they entertain clients.

This is a broad conceptual shift, and I don’t think it was inevitable. There is a great tension in marketing a mass entertainment as a boutique product, and a different commissioner would have made different choices, handling that tension differently. Selig has come down on one side, firmly and consistently.

You can see the ultimate example of this in California, where the Athletics are moving from a football field in relatively low-rent Oakland to a 35,000-seat park in Fremont, which isn’t, by baseball’s historical standards, even a definable place. It’s the most extreme manifestation of the shift the sport has made toward valuing quality over quantity — to cater to the relatively few at the expense of the many. It was inevitable that baseball would move in this direction, but under Selig the sport has become totally committed to it. Even in New York, a city with enough passionate fans to support five successful teams, the new stadiums are limiting supply to increase demand and better serve the wealthiest patrons — the Mets’ new field, for instance, will have 10,000 fewer seats than Shea Stadium does, and that’s not because they have a problem moving tickets.

Only the years will tell, but I think this could prove to be a catastrophic choice. These things are relative, of course; baseball games are never going to be played before exclusive audiences of 5,000. When teams begin moving outside of the largest cities, though, or begin restricting ticket supplies as severely as the Mets are, there’s a real danger of choking off the broad based popular support that the sport needs to truly thrive, both economically and aesthetically. This, not a drug scandal that may not even be the worst drug scandal the sport has seen in my lifetime, has the potential to be Selig’s worst legacy — something worth remembering as the Barry Bonds circus, trailed (or not) by the commissioner, keeps rolling its way across the country this summer.