This is Bud Selig’s favorite time of year. Of course, it’s World Series time, and the World Series should be the favorite time of the year for the baseball commissioner.

But it’s not just the World Series. It’s what the World Series represents. Since 2003 the World Series, with the All-Star game, has represented the most infamous baseball linkage since McGwire and Sosa.

It matters not that homefield advantage hasn’t meant a thing in this post-season and that the link with the All-Star game hasn’t done a thing for Fox’s television ratings, which were supposed to benefit from the link. Now Selig has a different reason for liking the link.

“They’re playing hard and everybody looks like they want it,” he said. “That’s why I think players are aggressive.”

Selig was speaking by telephone from Milwaukee before leaving for San Francisco and Wednesday night’s start of the World Series. The World Series was starting in San Francisco and not Texas because the National League won the All-Star game.

That is the link Selig (he will tell you it was the owners) created in 2003. Until then the start of the World Series alternated between the two leagues. But beginning that year the commissioner decided, with approval from the owners, that the World Series would begin at the homefield of the representative of the league that won the All-Star game. Thus, homefield advantage.

Selig, in his 18 years as commissioner, has made significant contributions to Major League Baseball, but the link of the All-Star game to the World Series wasn’t one of them. In fact, it’s probably the silliest idea he has come up with.

If I recall correctly, he said it was actually the idea of Bill Giles, the former managing partner of the Phillies, and he merely carried it to the other owners. But he could have let the idea die, and M.L.B. would have been better for it.

If homefield advantage is important, it’s too important to be determined by the outcome of an exhibition game. That is, after all, what the All-Star game is. Despite the number of glamorous players who play in the game, it is a mid-season exhibition game.

Yet for the past seven seasons, the All-Star game has decided where the World Series will start and which team will have the potential of four home games. The impact of homefield advantage has been mixed. American League teams have had the advantage each year and have won four times.

Homefield advantage took a major hit in the division and league series of this year’s post-season. Of 27 games, the home team won 10 and lost 17. The unexpected outcome was especially severe in the American League, where the home team won only 4 games and lost 10. Perhaps those numbers do not bode well for the Giants.

Still, the commissioner said, “If you were a club, you’d still want to be at home.” This post-season’s experience shouldn’t influence anyone’s thinking, he added. “You’d still take it,” he said.

Nor is he concerned about television ratings for the World Series between the Rangers and the Giants. “Everywhere I go,” he said, “people say ‘I like having different teams in the World Series.’”

The people Selig talks to, however, likely aren’t on the Nielsen roll of viewers who determine television ratings. For the Rangers-Giants series, those ratings are expected to be down considerably from the ratings for last year’s World Series between the Yankees and the Phillies.

Television ratings usually  don’t mean anything to me, but the ratings for the All-Star game are meaningful because it was Fox’s falling ratings for the game that prompted the network to ask Selig to do something to spice up the game and Selig to come up with the World Series link.

Let’s see what the link has done for Fox and its ratings. This year’s game drew a 7.5 rating, lowest of the eight-year link and down 21 percent from the 9.5 rating in the first year (2003).

The ratings and audience share for each year’s game: 

What will the commissioner do next to help boost the Fox ratings?

Speaking of the commissioner, another commissioner made some news the other day, and David Stern, the National Basketball Association’s major domo, made me laugh. Stern has always received higher commissioner ratings than Selig, but they have been unmerited.

Stern was the beneficiary of the N.B.A, confluence of Michael Jordan, Magic Johnson and Larry Bird. That trio of players was responsible for the remarkable growth in the league’s popularity, and Stern rode the wave to personal wealth and N.B.A. prosperity.

Selig has had no similar good fortune. On the contrary, steroids have threatened to undermine both Selig and M.L.B. But they continue to overcome the steroids stain and watch fans flock to ball parks (attendance this year was down only 4/10ths of 1percent in difficult economic times) and revenue keeps rising, up to $6.6 billion at last look.

In addition, baseball is enjoying an unprecedented period of labor peace, something Stern and the N.B.A. don’t have. That brings me to what made me laugh.

Stern held a conference call with reporters last week about the status of the league’s labor relations with its players, and he sounded like an old version of Selig. According to a report of Stern’s conference call in The New York Times, Stern said that contraction – eliminating teams – could become an issue in the negotiations for a new collective bargaining agreement.

That’s a negotiating ploy that Selig used with the baseball union in 2001 and 2002, but he was never serious about it, as developments demonstrated.

The 2002 agreement gave the clubs the right to eliminate two teams for the 2007 season, but by then baseball was flourishing and no one was talking about contraction.

Now David Stern is. As a commissioner, he makes a good comedian.