Mark Kreidler
In so many words.

A quick Sunday spin.

The things you aren’t hearing about Bud Selig right now, you’ll hear again in due time — and he deserves that much.  Selig loves the game of baseball, loves the league.  He certainly never set out to denigrate the sport.  Perhaps down the road he’ll be remembered for his enthusiasm and earnestness in difficult times.

In the here and now, though, no such luck.  It’s a disaster on stilts.  The Selig Era of commissionership has become one loud grinding of gears, with the black smoke and the oil on the roadway — the whole awful mess.  And this one has the look and smell of permanence.

Selig’s issue is that he can’t take anything back.  He, and by extension Major League Baseball, stood by and watched an obviously dirty Barry Bonds take down the all-time home run record, and even the nobleman from whom Bonds took it, Hank Aaron, says you can’t un-ring that bell.

“Barry has the record,” Aaron said, “and I don’t think anybody can change that.”

Pathetic — but utterly true.  Selig, played like a puppet by the franchise owners, made no move on Bonds when it might have mattered; instead, he waited in silent hope that a federal indictment of Bonds might somehow take the burden off the commissioner’s shoulders.

Now Selig is making noises about separating off the recorded achievements of this ‘roid-raged time in the sport.  It can’t be done, no how, no way.  There’s just no mechanism for delineating the cheaters from the clean producers, and there never was such.  There is no way-back machine.  We know — or we think we know — about Bonds and Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro and Roger Clemens and others, and that may color how any of us perceives their accomplishments.  But baseball, as a corporate and public entity, has no such latitude.  It can’t invalidate Bonds’ record any more than it can rewrite a box score from the drug years of the 1970s, when Dock Ellis famously pitched a no-hitter while tripping on LSD.

So, Bud, you’re stuck with it now.  As an industry, your league made hundreds of millions of dollars (and built at least one new ballpark, the one in San Francisco) by turning a blind eye, a deaf ear and a mute throat to the insiders’ suggestions of widespread steroid and HgH use over the past 15 years.  Baseball needed “saving” after the World Series cancellation of 1994 — a black mark on the game that, let’s be clear, also goes on your permanent record, Mr. Commish — and you let the Incredible Hulks do that for you.  They did the heavy lifting.  Wear it, without the bleating and the whining.

* Not to be forgotten in the drug debacles of this time in baseball: the union’s constant interference in, and unwillingness to get behind, a real testing program that had both teeth and punitive/deterrent measures.  Retired union icon Marvin Miller, a man rightfully credited with building baseball’s player association into the most formidable in sports, was quoted last week as saying that no testing should’ve ever been allowed because of the invasions of privacy and civil rights.  Laudable, but hopelessly out of touch.  Here’s the problem: Sports leagues thrive almost entirely on the perception that they’re being run on the up and up.  Even the gamblers want to know that the players aren’t cheating.  Otherwise, you’re the WCW, a great piece of entertainment with no enduring value.  Anyone who loves baseball would hope for a finer legacy.

* You’ve got to feel for Aaron, who certainly knows in his heart that Bonds didn’t take down his home run record cleanly.  There’s almost nothing he can say for public consumption that is going to change anything — and Aaron, above anyone else, knows that the number is the Number.  However it happened, Bonds’ 762 is in the books.  Even if Selig capitulated to MLB’s need to pretend nothing happened, the whole world knows how many homers Bonds hit.  Like it or not, it’s over.  And when Alex Rodriguez passes Bonds with his steroid-aided total, it’ll be twice over.  Guess Hank Aaron will just have to settle for his reputation as the best clean home-run hitter in history.

* It’s an afterthought on the weekend of the NBA All-Star Game, Lance Armstrong’s return to cycling and the old Crosby at Pebble Beach, but: Michelle Wie, right back in the game.  If not for a double-bogey at the 11th at Turtle Bay on Hawaii that opened the door for Angela Stanford, Wie very possibly wins her first official start on the LPGA.  As it is, she finishes second, collects a nice check, and serves notice to the women on the tour that she’ll be a force.  Because she’s so constantly in the media whirlpool, Wie is often thought of as much older than she actually is.  Don’t be fooled: She’s only 19 years old, with (it says here) the best of her golfing career ahead of her.  Keep watching.

* NBA commissioner David Stern says the league is in “a golden age of basketball,” but, look, there are no levels — none — on which an epic economic collapse is a good thing for Stern and his owners.  That goes double for the situation in Sacramento, where Stern has tied a bit of his reputation to the effort to build a new arena and keep the Kings in a growing market targeted by Forbes as one of the top “Next Sports Cities” in the nation.  With the Maloofs growing understandably edgy and local attendance shockingly terrible, Stern and his minions have to ride herd on the project to keep any momentum at all.  It’s the worst time imaginable to go looking for corporate money or taxpayer funds.

* Personally?  Absolutely no interest in hearing any details of how anyone, anywhere, stuck a needle into Barry Bonds’ over-plumped butt.  I understand the legal implications of such testimony in Bonds’ federal perjury case, but it’s just common sense that you’ve got a better chance of a productive day without that visual.  Thanks for the offer, though.

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This entry was posted on Sunday, February 15th, 2009 at 10:36 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.