With playoff baseball raging in Atlanta and Seattle, Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig for some reason found his way to Cincinnati last week.

        Speaking Thursday night to a combined meeting of the ultra-elite Commercial and Commonwealth clubs, Mr. Selig continued his drumbeat for revenue sharing to enable low-budget clubs such as the Reds to compete.

        “He said the survival of baseball is at stake,” one local executive in attendance said.

        St. Louis Cardinals owner Bill DeWitt, who lives in Cincinnati, introduced Mr. Selig. Reds owner Carl Lindner, who has hitched many of his hopes for the small-market Reds to revenue sharing, was in full view even after several months of bad health.

        According to several executives at the Queen City Club event, the commissioner noted that two-thirds of Major League clubs are losing money and pledged again to try to close the disparity.

        He noted that big-payroll clubs such as the New York Yankees and Arizona Diamondbacks had dominated the playoffs to that point (and, now, those two teams are going to the World Series).

        “His point was that baseball is struggling as a whole, and we've got to find some way to deal with that,” another listener said.
       

Women's health show

        The Cincinnati group that sponsors dozens of women's health conferences around the country is about to go national — national television.

        Lifetime's Speaking of Women's Health will premier Nov. 10 on Lifetime Television, officials there confirmed this week.

        Taped in Los Angeles, the show will be hosted by ABC News correspondent JuJu Chang, the Health Network's Dr. Winnie King and Hollywood nutritionist Carrie Wait, and cover topics ranging from exercise and stress to heart disease and breast cancer.

        Cincinnatian Dianne Dunkelman started the women's health program in 1995 as a fund-raiser for WCET Channel 48. It has expanded to about three dozen conferences.
       

Sinking Ivory means bucks

       

        As part of a celebration of Ivory soap's 122-year history, Procter & Gamble Co. will distribute 1,051 bars that sink. One thousand of them will bring a $100 prize to customers that return a certificate inside the package, while 50 will bring $1,000, and one lucky consumer will win $100,000.

        Ivory has built its reputation as an American icon on floating soap. Today, P&G will donate some original Ivory advertising and packaging to the Smithsonian Institution in Washington. And from now through March, Ivory will bring back packaging based on the original 1879 design.

        As the oldest P&G brand, Ivory is an integral part of U.S. history as well. For example, its first TV ad was shown on a 1939 telecast of a Cincinnati Reds-Brooklyn Dodgers game — the first televised baseball game.

        Contact Cliff Peale at 768-8573; fax 564-6991; or cpeale@enquirer.com.
       

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