Bud Selig Should Be In Jail

This will go down as one of the worst weeks in baseball history. But, for all the wrong reasons…

In less than three days’ time, baseball’s two most prominent figures both go down to failed steroids tests.

Reports of several failed drug tests take out both the man who broke the home run record, and the man slated to be next in line to break the new one. Rodriguez and Bonds, the two league’s two biggest players, both caught cheating.

For serious baseball fans, it appears that there is yet another reason to hate A-Rod and another reason to asterisk the career of Barry Bonds. But as I continue to watch coverage of the steroids scandal, I sit in genuine disbelief when I see that the media has totally missed the image of the most prominent man in the picture: Bud Selig.

Every year, it appears that a new big name takes the fall over a failed steroids test. Deservedly so, they get the blame. They are cheating after all, so they deserve to be exposed as such.

But the man who deserves to be exposed for profiting off of all of this, and more or less promoting the continuation of steroid abuse, has gotten away with little damage to his reputation. In fact, most media networks paint some sort of picture implying that this is a problem that Bud Selig simply can’t control.

Oh contraire. In fact, it is Bud Selig’s fault this is happening.

The first piece of information that needs to be worked out here is where these tests are coming from. Every baseball fan needs to understand that when someone says “Bonds failed a drug test,” or “A-Rod failed a drug test,” that they are referring to the MLB drug tests. It’s not like A-Rod walked into Costco and was offered the opportunity to take a complimentary piss in a cup; followed by some hotshot journalist breaking into the Costco files years later.

These are the tests that Bud Selig’s administration has been administering. Once that is understood, there is only one question you should be asking. Why did it take five years to find out that these guys failed a drug test? And that, ladies and gentlemen, leads us to the biggest travesty in all of sports. Bud Selig and his henchmen have buried all of these test results.

But it isn’t the fact that he buries all of the results that pains me. Rather, it is the time that these results “miraculously surface.” It genuinely appears that Bud Selig will milk his alleged drug abusers for every penny right before he lays them up for a public chastising.

If Bonds is supposed to be the biggest culprit here, it should only be fitting that Bonds made Selig the most money. Despite rumors of steroid abuse stemming as far back as Bonds’ 70-plus home run campaign, Selig kept the results totally at bay. This of course allowed Bonds to smash every single home run record available to him, while Selig counted the dollars.

Let us also not forget Sir Rafael Palmeiro, whose quest for 3,000 hits came second in media coverage only to his steroid related downfall that transpired only weeks later.

It appears now that A-Rod was ridden as long as he could be as well. Perhaps he had statistically peaked. Perhaps he really had finally grown out of favor with the league. But something has to be going on when I hear the news that he failed a drug test and all I can think to myself is “well it must have been his time.”

It is easy to blame the collective bargaining agreement and the players themselves. After all, it is the CBA that has kept Selig and company from devising a much more strict testing policy. But the timing of all of the drug tests should be the first indication that Selig is absolutely petrified of what he would see if he adopted an NFL style testing-policy. By now, Selig would simply see his league in flames.

The NFL may be worth mentioning again, because it is their process of drug testing that also puts Selig in the wrong. Despite a lengthy appeal process that is far from perfect, every NFL test result is publicized. One of the incredible successes of the NFL has been the fact that this league, for as long as I have been alive, has been a league that presented itself with nothing to hide. Right now, you are hearing about a MLB drug test that was just plucked from the bottom on an ocean.

Meanwhile back on Planet Earth, I am expected to sympathize with Bud Selig because his league is tainted and he has no control over his players? Bud Selig was the reason it got this way. Home runs and big-hitters saved his league after a strike nearly destroyed it. And in turn, steroids became to MLB what weed became to the NBA. You can use if you want to, just don’t let the cops find out.