NAPLES, Fla. -- Commissioner Bud Selig told the owners gathered for their final quarterly meetings of the year on Thursday that Major League Baseball has never been healthier financially after a 2007 season in which the sport generated a record $6.075 billion in gross revenue and finished in the black.

He also said that his staff will spend part of the offseason reviewing various ways of accelerating the pace of the game, which has lagged, he said.

As far as a season of record revenue and attendance, which reached the 79.5-million mark, Selig said:

"I told the clubs, and I'm putting myself on the spot here, that I'm hoping to draw 80 million, plus," Selig said after the session had concluded. "I think the revenues are going to continue to go up. All of our areas of business are growing well."

That's certainly a far cry from where MLB was in 1992 when Selig, now 73, was named interim Commissioner, a position that was formalized on July 2, 1998, and which he's held ever since. When Selig replaced the deposed Fay Vincent, the sport's gross revenues were $1.2 billion a year. Now MLB is approaching the National Football League's $6.3 billion a year in gross earnings -- an unheard of figure, Selig said.

The economic extravaganza has been built on continued labor peace since the 1994 strike -- the longest such period of bliss since collective bargaining with the players began in the late 1960s -- as well as revenue sharing that has trickled down more dollars from the higher-revenue to the lower-revenue teams and the globalization of the sport.

"There's no other way of putting it, but I'm very proud," he said. "We started at $1.2 billion and I remember waking up in 1993, 1994 and 1995 and wondering how we were going to get to $2 billion. So here we are at $6.075 [billion] and if we just keep doing our work, stay out of controversies, at least keep the focus on the field, we'll get to numbers someday that will be stunning. And these are stunning."

As far as revisiting the pace-of-game issue, baseball officials became concerned when last month's Game 3 of the World Series between the Red Sox and Rockies at Coors Field took 4 hours, 19 minutes, setting a record for a nine-inning World Series game.

The average time of game during the regular season was 2:51, up about seven minutes since two years ago but still a far cry from the 3:02 of 1999.

The issue was addressed at last week's General Managers Meetings in nearby Orlando, and Jimmie Lee Solomon, who replaced the departed Sandy Alderson in 2006 as MLB's vice president of baseball operations, polled the 30 GMs.

Solomon said last week that baseball would review things like hitters repeatedly stepping in and out of the batter's box, pitchers delivering the ball within the already required 12 seconds, and managers and pitching coaches making fewer trips to the mound.

Solomon reiterated those points during a report he made to the owners on Thursday.

"I think we need to enforce some existing rules," Selig agreed. "We just need to speed things up a bit for everybody's best interest. There's no question about it. We'll think of some new rules if we need more coverage."