Bud Selig claims he had no knowledge about how prevalent steroids were/are in baseball.
"I don't want to hear, 'The commissioner turned a blind eye to this,' or 'He didn't care about it,'" Selig told Newsday's Wallace Matthews in a telephone interview. "That annoys the you-know-what out of me."
The national consensus is that he's a liar.
This from Jason Whitlock of the Kansas City Star:
"I'm still waiting on Selig and the owners (in all sports) to acknowledge their role in this mess."
Mark Kriegel, Whitlock's colleague at Fox Sports, berated Selig's pronouncement that the commish wouldn't "have done anything differently" to procure a treatment for the outbreak of steroids in the MLB.
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Before I forget, let's all take a moment to put our hands together for Bud. He did, in fact, do a hell of a job instituting a softball drug-testing program in a hardball league.
And for that, Phil Mushnick from the New York Post is, understandably, just as skeptical as the aforementioned columnists, stating that the commissioner and the team owners who appointed him were all "wink-and-a-nod dirty business partners."
As an outsider looking in, I don't have the sources, connections, experience or knowledge to diagnose whether there is an ounce of truth to what these writers are saying. If I were forced to place a bet, I'd venture to say there is a kernel of truth in their arguments.
But that's my whole point. I'm an outsider - I don't have access to the intricacies of the MLB. I have never spoken to a professional baseball player, scout, coach or the commissioner.
Selig can sign off on the same doctrine.
If the commissioner wants to insist that he was unaware of a performance-enhancing drug problem in MLB, let him spout off about his ivory-tower-CEO approach unabashedly. That craftily concocted rhetoric doesn't free Selig of his improprieties. Instead, it makes Selig seem aloof - about as baseball savvy as me. If that's true, in essence, it means that I'm as qualified to operate one of the most lucrative sports leagues as he is.
We can bicker all day about whether Selig is espousing fact. In light of Rodriguez's "60 Minutes" segment of mistruths, where he vehemently denied using 'roids, we'd be pathetic if we believed everything we heard. At the same time, those same comments came back to chap Roidriguez's butt far more than the prevailing October winds in the Bronx.
My suggestion is that we go off the comments we have from the Almighty One.
"They ask me, 'How could you not know?'" Selig told Matthews in the same interview. "And I guess in the retrospect of history, that's not an unfair question."
When you're the commissioner of a multi-million dollar corporation, everything is fair game. And Selig maintains he wanted to keep the game fair. In 1995, he pushed for the implementation of a steroid policy - or so he says. In the late '90s, when baseballs were being skinned by the bludgeoning bats of McGwire and Sosa, Selig informed Wallace that he met with Diamondbacks manager Bob Melvin, Braves president John Schuerholz and Yankees general manager Brian Cashman to determine the extent of the problem.
"They all told me none of them ever saw it in the clubhouses and that their players never spoke about it,'" Selig said. "(Padres CEO) Sandy Alderson, as good a baseball man as you'll find, was convinced it was the bat."
OK, Bud, if that's the case you want make, then you are guilty of being far too trusting. Let's be honest with ourselves for a second. You, too, Bud. Do you think those guys gave a spit about you?
You were the scapegoat - the fall man. For as much power as the king of baseball has, you were used as a pawn to set up a game-ending checkmate.
If and when a steroids scandal was unraveled, would reporters be knocking at Melvin, Scherholz and Cashman's office door? No. So, that triumvirate had incentive to not be forthcoming with their statements. I'm not saying that they lied, only that they didn't have to be truthful. Congress can't even determine which players used steroids, much less if you were being led astray.
Honestly, all we want is you to learn from your mistakes, Bud. Can you do that, pal? Don't make excuses about how you wouldn't "change a thing." Don't allow Donald Fehr to be so presumptuous.
"We fixed the problem and we need to look forward, as Bud has said many times," Fehr was quoted as saying.
Don't be so gullible, Bud.
