Players Taking The Heat For Selig And Fehr

With the PED Scandal in Major League Baseball now reaching feeding-frenzy status it seems that only the big player names will keep everyone's attention. However, there are two names we all know that should have been at the forefront of it all from the beginning.

Before we ever had the chance to curse the names of McGwire, Sosa, Bonds, Clemens and A-Rod, the names of Selig and Fehr should have been searing under the spotlight. MLB Commissioner Bud Selig MLB and Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players Association Donald Fehr have been the chief caretakers of the game for too long to avoid responsibility for PED's getting out of hand in baseball.

It is well documented that steroids began proliferating Major League clubhouses in the mid-1980's, a time when labor strife was overshadowing the game itself. So while the collective bargaining process had everyone riveted, steroids and the first versions of HGH spread unnoticed into the bloodstreams of more and more MLB players. And during that time there were rumors around only one player: Jose Canseco.

I got the chance to meet a rookie on the 1988 Oakland A's who confided that Canseco was on "the juice" as he put it. And now that and all the other rumors have been regretfully confirmed. Now if a rookie that has been in the American League for a few months knows about it, how could it have remained a secret from trainers, coaches, his manager, team executives and league operatives?

The labor problems in baseball hit their zenith with the cancellation of the 1994 World Series and the game's popularity plummeted. In the aftermath only Cal Ripken's breaking of the consecutive games played record boosted fan interest and that was only minimally. But that little bump in attention seemed to give way to the only sure-fire cure for empty stadium seats: tape-measured home runs.

The first sign of the times was Brady Anderson's 50 home run season in 1996. This from a guy who had been mistaken for a bat boy on the road in his rookie season. Then 1998 unfolded with Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa both eclipsing the single season home run record. No one at the time even questioned the fact that only two men in the history of the game had ever reached 60 home runs, not to mention 66 or 70. Then Barry Bonds didn't like being third banana and pumped himself full enough to shatter the record that shattered the record in 2001.

There are dozens of other examples, some admitted and some speculated, that can be sited ad-nauseum. But they all are just the breadcrumbs that make up a trail endingat the heels of the very expensive shoes that Bud Selig and Donald Fehr stand in today. Fehr has been the Executive Director of the MLBPA since 1985 and Selig the Commissioner of Baseball since 1992 and neither have faced the scrutiny they deserve for what has occurred on their collaborative watch.

Selig went before Congress in 2005 and stated that he had no idea that there was a PED problem building in the industry in the 1990's. Yet, in the wake of the Alex Rodriguez revelations, Selig himself said that he proposed a steroid testing program to the player's union in 1995. Fehr has claimed no knowledge of the problem yet his underling, Gene Orza, was going around major league clubhouses in 2004 informing players that they had failed drug tests and then warning them that they would be tested in the next few weeks.

They knew. What other conclusion is there to be reached? They did and said nothing about it until called to the carpet in Congress at least, by Selig's recent admission, ten years after the subject first came up. And both of them have lied about their knowledge of the situation to keep the heat on the users rather than themselves, the enablers.

Players are getting suspended, crucified in the media and denied Hall of Fame selection for their parts in the PED culture in Major League Baseball. Why do Bud Selig and Donald Fehr still hover above the fray? Why do the two men most responsible for the proliferation of PED's in baseball still avoid the attention they deserve? And what's most, why do Bud Selig and Donald Fehr still have the same jobs they held when all of this was going on?