KANSAS CITY, Mo. — For his final game as baseball commissioner, Bud Selig was able to see the low-budget Kansas City Royals compete with the high-spending San Francisco Giants for the title.

Game 7 of the World Series on Wednesday night featured a pair of wild-card teams that had already played during the regular season. In a finale hosted by the club whose league won the All-Star game. With managers able to contest calls by umpires, the final decision coming from a replay room far from the field.

All those innovations came during Selig’s 22 years in charge.

Yet his biggest imprint before departing in January may be the economic changes he helped usher into the tradition-bound game.

“It’s our job to provide hope and faith and have the system where teams can compete,” he said during the All-Star game FanFest last summer. “Not just on the size of the market, but on what they do.”

With the 19th-biggest payroll at $97 million, Kansas City had a chance to become the first team from among the bottom half of spenders to win the title since the 2003 Florida Marlins. The Royals extended San Francisco (sixth at $165 million) to a seventh game in their first postseason appearance since winning the 1985 World Series.

Then the Milwaukee Brewers owner, Selig took over as baseball’s boss in September 1992 after helping lead the group that forced the resignation of Commissioner Fay Vincent.

As chairman of the executive council, he pushed for a salary cap that led to a 7 1/2-month strike and the cancellation of the 1994 World Series. He didn’t get the cap, but revenue sharing and a luxury tax were in the labor contracts that emerged, and they helped the middle and smaller markets compete.

“The `90s were painful. We had to change the whole economic structure,” he said. “So today there’s hope and faith in Milwaukee, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, the Twin Cities, on and on and on. As a result, baseball is so much stronger and so much better.”