With increasing frequency, world events make me wonder how so many seemingly brain-dead people have ascended to positions of profound consequence.

If you've read about the crumbling financial sector—specifically the banks—you've run across some truly gifted decision-makers.   Executives who've pulled literally catastrophic strings and levers, triggering a historic economic collapse while feathering their own nests with really nice feathers.

My favorite is former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain.

You really gotta hand it to a dude who spends over a million dollars redecorating his office while his company is hemorrhaging money so badly, it will basically cease to exist within the year.  Just excellent recognition of opportunity and application of common sense.

I point to sleaze like Thain because, on a much smaller and more trivial scale, the sports world regularly burps up men and women whose path to influence demands serious inspection.  And then explanation.

The latest example comes to us courtesy of Major League Baseball.

Bud Selig, Donald Fehr, and the other empty suits perched atop the Big Leagues have allowed the performance-enhancing drug issue to become so tired, even pointing out the tedium has become tedious.

The "no name should surprise us anymore" angle makes two dead horses—although some in the media seem a little slow on the uptake.

Think of what that means.

This is one of the larger "scandals" in the history of America's oldest major professional sport, at least in terms of pervasiveness.  At this point, considering the number of names linked to PEDs and the various tiers of stardom from which they come, it's tough to argue steroids et alia weren't in every clubhouse and on every diamond across the Show.  For years.

Additionally, they've seeped into baseball's history books.

We've seen the new Home Run King, arguably the greatest pure run-producer of all-time, one of the greatest pitchers of all-time, the all-time greatest single-season performance by a closer, both participants in the Great Home Run Chase of 1998, and Neifi Perez all painted with the PED-brush (Neifi's gotta be the weakest hitter to ever hit the juice).

And yet, the story is so boring, the process has been drawn out for soooo loooooong, we're even sick of the arcs trying to move on from it.

How can that be?

Well, it can 'be' because the idiots at the top of the professional baseball ladder, on both sides, have been staring at their small intestine walls for over a decade now.  And they don't seem to be getting sick of the view.

I don't know if the List of 104 should've been destroyed.  I don't know if it should've been revealed.  There are ethical implications to both that I'm neither prepared nor interested in discussing here.  Instead, I want to emphasize what I do know.

One of the two options should have been selected.

Either read the names in one fell swoop or shred the damn thing.

Get the nonsense over with quickly or bury it forever so that baseball and those who love the game can move on.  Any leader with oxygen flow to his or her brain should know the primary goal is the progress—to leave the episode in the past.  To do so as soon as possible.

Instead, we get these periodic leaks and the ensuing blather about new betrayal, blah, blah, blah.  We get new firestorms just as the old flames seemed to be extinguished.

Can you imagine a worse scenario than slowly bleeding the names out, one-by-one, over the course of days, stretching to weeks, stretching to months, and now stretching to years?  A worse scenario than slashing the game, letting the wound heal to the point of mild scarring, and then ripping it open again?

Over and over and over.

Does it take a genius to realize this is not a sage course of action?

Originally, this list had to be in the hands of a group being hurt by the debacle because it's hurting everyone.  The repeated resurrection of the PED problem does no favors for the players nor for the game (for obvious reasons).  Since Selig and his cronies have been entrusted with the game's protection, any smear on it is a smear on them.

So I don't know who really is to blame—whether the MLB Players Association had the one original copy or whether the league office had it or whether there were multiple copies floating around.

The story's become so muddled and the sides so crooked, I frankly don't care.  In my mind, they're both culpable—either directly or indirectly and the difference is negligible.

The list was created as part of a joint action between MLB and the union, which means they cooperated to create the live grenade and they should've cooperated to dispose of it.

Except they didn't—they decided against discretion, in any form.

It turns out inaction is the better part of valor in the Show.

In which case, Major League Baseball has the perfect men in charge.

**www.pva.org**

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