I hate Bud Selig. I do. I simply hate the man. And while I know he's done a lot of good for baseball -- instituting the wild card and interleague play, expanding the league and consolidating the AL and NL offices into the office of the commissioner -- I think that many times he's put his own public image ahead of what's good for the game.
Remember the 2002 All-Star Game? Both teams essentially ran out of players and were down to their last pitchers. Because nobody wanted to jeopardize the health of those pitchers and the playoff chances of their respective teams, Selig ended the game in a tie.
This, in my mind, was the right thing to do. But Selig drew heavy public criticism from fans and analysts for allowing such an anti-climactic ending that an MVP was not even named.
So what was his solution? He decided to make the All-Star Game "more competitive" by giving the winning team home-field advantage in the World Series. This is a typical Selig solution: do something that on the surface looks like it will make a difference, but underneath really doesn't address the problem at all.
The All-Star Game's always been competitive, even when it meant nothing. The only issue was that managers would scorch through their lineups and bullpens in an effort to get everybody in the game. And guess what? That still happens! If the All-Star Game were to go into extra innings again, there's no doubt that Selig would be confronted with the same dilemma of how to end it -- the only difference is that this time, his decision would affect home-field advantage in the World Series (which should just go to the team with the best record. Baseball has a 162 game schedule -- that should mean something).
Selig pulled the same type of move when he oversaw the Mitchell Report. Severe penalties had already been instituted for steroid users, and Barry Bonds' run had finally ended. Baseball, it seemed, would finally move past the whole steroid era. But no. Selig wanted to make sure that nobody thought that he was part of the steroid problem (even though, like everyone else at that time -- from managers to executives to the union to the media and even to the fans -- he most certainly was).
So he hired George Mitchell to research and rehash the entire steroid situation, just leading to more controversy and more focus on the very issue that baseball was trying to forget. And do you know what the worst part is? Yes, some players were genuinely outed, but others were named for absolutely nothing. Larry Bigbie told Mitchell that Brian Roberts once said he used steroids "once or twice." So Brian Roberts was in the Mitchell Report. There was no standard of evidence or corroboration. If you were rumored to have done steroids, you were in the Mitchell Report. It wasn't meant to serve any justice; it was just meant to clear Selig's guilty conscience.
So what's my point? The other day, Selig said, "I don't want to hear 'The commissioner turned a blind eye to this' or 'He didn't care about [steroids].' That annoys the you-know-what out of me. You bet I'm sensitive to the criticism."
And yet he went on to say that if he could go back, he wouldn't do anything differently. How could anyone involved with baseball possibly say this? How could the commissioner, of all people, say it?
Because Selig didn't actually care about the problem. Everything he's done has been motivated not by fairness or morality, but by his own standing in history. That's why he even mused over the possibility of re-writing the record books this week -- an idea that's clearly absurd. Looking back, there's only one thing that should be erased from the history books: the contention that Selig is one of baseball's best commissioners. He may have done more to promote the game than anyone before him, but he also did much more to hurt it.
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David Heck is a junior majoring in philosophy. He can be reached at David.Heck@tufts.edu.
