It was the juggling act of Bud Selig's lifetime.

To play or not to play? That was the question that rested on the commissioner's desk every day, that followed him to bed every night.

To play or not to play?

He awoke in the middle of the night, unable to sleep. He rose before the sun, to wander and reflect.

He found himself reading and re-reading a 59-year-old letter from Franklin D. Roosevelt to Kennesaw Mountain Landis -- a letter penned just five weeks after Pearl Harbor, a letter that included the famous sentence: "I honestly feel that it would be best for the country to keep baseball going."

	“	Was I doing the right thing? Do you know how many times I asked myself that question? A thousand times. ”
		— Bud Selig

He burned up the phone lines, dialing everyone from Paul Tagliabue to George W. Bush.

To play or not to play?

For the rest of his life and probably beyond, Bud Selig knew he and his sport would be judged by how he answered that question.

"Each day, ever since this all happened, I haven't been able to think of anything else," Selig said Thursday night, after announcing he was calling off all major-league baseball games until Monday. "I'd get up early. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and think and think and think about what to do."

He wrote out lists for himself, he said. Pros. Cons. Who was in favor of each possibility. And over and over he'd ask himself:

To play or not to play?

"Was I doing the right thing?" he said. "Do you know how many times I asked myself that question? A thousand times."

The first day, Tuesday, that was the easy day, he said. There was no doubt Tuesday that not playing games that night was the only proper thing to do.

Wednesday wasn't much harder. The images were still too fresh, the pain too excruciating, the reality too stark. No games Wednesday. No games Thursday.

But Fridays' games -- that was the source of that throbbing in his head and that knot in his gut. To play this weekend or not to play? Everybody had an opinion.

Selig continues to tap-dance around questions about what he was told by the folks in Washington. But baseball officials close to the commissioner make it clear the White House was not a force for darkened stadiums.

"The people in Washington wanted to get things back to normal," said one official. "They said, `It's your decision. You can do what you what to do -- but the sooner (you play), the better.'"

Selig talked daily with Tagliabue about the NFL's decision. He talked to high-ranking NCAA officials. He knew they were getting similar messages from the White House.

Bud Selig and President Bush are as close as any president and any major sports commissioner have ever been. So friends portray Selig as being, in some ways, anxious to have the administration lead the way and set the tone -- but troubled, in other ways, by whether he could balance the White House's preferences with what his own constituency wanted.

The clock continued to tick Wednesday. Teams were in limbo, wondering where they should go next and how they should get there. Selig had Sandy Alderson instruct club officials to look into ways to travel to the sites of their weekend series. The strong implication was that baseball was preparing to play games this weekend.

Selig now says, however, that if that was the impression everyone got, they misread him.

"I had to tell them to do that," he said, "in case that was the decision we made. I talked about that today (after the final decision not to play) with several clubs. And they said, 'It would have been silly not to prepare.' "

Nevertheless, there were indications that if teams had found, when they made those arrangements, that traveling to those destinations was more workable than it turned out to be in the end, Selig might well have given the go-ahead.

And the commissioner admits he had made decisions in his head over the last couple of days, then changed his mind "not just once or twice, but maybe a dozen times."

By late Wednesday, baseball officials believed strongly that the NFL was planning to play this weekend. They expected airports to open by early Thursday. Had both those developments played out, it is more likely than not baseball would have opened the gates, too, at least by Saturday.

But after he'd finished his meetings and a series of phone interviews Wednesday night, Selig sat back at home and began watching the reports on television.

He heard officials in Washington say it might take several days for the air-transportation network to get back to full operations.

He heard strong sentiments from NFL players -- and his own players -- that they weren't ready to play.

He knew several clubs were faced with an awful dilemma: Either ride a bus -- for more than 1,000 miles in some cases -- or charter a plane and give thousands of stranded travelers the impression that it's more important for baseball players to fly than for ordinary Americans to get home.

Suddenly, he could feel the winds of decision blowing in a whole new direction.

Several people, in all walks of baseball, said Thursday that when the NFL surprisingly decided not to play, they felt that caused baseball to rethink its options. But Selig says that while he'd conferred regularly with the NFL, he didn't base his decision on "what anybody else was doing."

"I didn't talk to anybody from late (Wednesday) night to the morning," he said. "But I knew, by the time I was driving to work today, what I was going to do."

As he huddled Thursday with baseball CEO Paul Beeston and with fellow owners Jerry Colangelo and Drayton McLane, the commissioner was convinced that teams had no certainty they could even travel to the sites of their next games. He knew players were unsettled about playing.

He had insisted from the beginning that whatever games were postponed would be replayed, so that wasn't an issue. He'd resolved television issues by getting assurance from Fox executives that they would adjust their television schedule to whatever postseason format was decided upon.

He even analyzed the potential playoff field and decided that as many as six of the eight playoff teams played in warm-weather cities or domes. So he felt that pushing back the World Series a week wasn't as much of an issue as it might be in other years.

So finally, Selig decided, it was clear what he had to do.

To play? Yes.

But to play before Monday? No.

"Frankly, I'm relieved," he said after announcing that decision. "I've agonized over this from the moment I had to consider it. Anyone who knows me knows I believe very deeply in our social responsibility as an institution. So it was very important to me to do what I thought was the right thing. I didn't want people looking back on this in future years, saying baseball did the wrong thing."

Decisions don't get much rougher than this one. There was no road map. There was very little precedent.

"There has never been a week like this," Bud Selig said. "There isn't anything that can begin to prepare you for something like this."

Not even FDR, Kennesaw Mountain Landis or his good friend, the president of the United States.

Jayson Stark is a Senior Writer at ESPN.com.