One More Time: Bud Selig Must Be Replaced as MLB Commissioner

One more time, I am going to ask the question: How is Bud Selig still the commissioner of baseball?  

How much damage can one person do to the reputation and integrity of a sport he supposedly is in charge of running, yet still remain the leader of the sport? 

Put as simply as I can, every day he remains in his job is a disgrace to baseball.

What has set me off this time on Selig?

It is the usual ignorance and indifference he repeatedly displays when it comes to what performance-enhancing drugs have done to the sport. 

I just read this article that ran in the Chicago Tribune last week. Selig is disappointed that another player has been linked to performance-enhancing drugs. But more so, he is angry that a player’s name has been leaked.

That is what really bothers Selig. Not the cheating. 

When it comes to Selig, that is just par for the course. A paragraph toward the end of the article is really what reignited my anti-Selig rage. The author writes, “The original list (of players who tested positive) was made available only to one representative from the union and one from MLB, and Selig has said that he never wanted to see it."

Are you kidding me? Selig did not want to see it.

How does a man say that and keep his job? 

This was a list of who in the game he runs were cheating. Shouldn’t he have demanded to see the list?

There is only one reason for Selig to refuse to see that list—so he could continue with his head-in-the-sand charade of how he didn’t know steroids were a big problem. If he saw the list and saw the names of Alex Rodriguez, Sammy Sosa, and I am sure other top players, he would have had no choice but to acknowledge that steroids were prevalent among the game’s biggest stars. 

Seeing that list would have either forced him to do something or eviscerated any later attempt to claim (as he has) that he just did not know steroids were that big of a problem.

This morning I saw a clip from when Selig and Donald Fehr went before Congress to discuss steroids. There is Selig, in 2005, whining to Congress that it isn’t his fault; it is Fehr’s. 

I’m not saying Fehr doesn’t deserve his share of responsibility, and he should have been ousted a long time ago for protecting the guilty at the expense of the innocent and at the expense of the sport in general.

But what type of leadership is that from Selig? 

Does anyone remember Selig or anyone from MLB arguing for tougher steroid policies in the sport prior to 2005? 

He is as responsible as anyone for what has happened to baseball. Those hearings before Congress were in 2005. It is 2009, and the game is just as tarnished today as it was then.

How many seasons are we going to have to go through where steroids are a major part of the discussion?  

How many future Hall of Fame votes are going to be impacted by deciding whether or not a player who cheated, or may have cheated, deserves to be selected? 

These steroid debates will rage on, and at the center of any such debate is Selig, whose inaction, willful ignorance, and indifference permitted performance-enhancing drugs to tarnish so much that is important about baseball.

As fans, how are we to believe anything we see, or anything we have seen over the last 10 to 15 years?

When a player does amazing things on the field, how can we take it at face value?

The sport has been irreparably harmed, and Selig, who at the very least turned a blind eye while the damage occurred, is still allowed to cash his multimillion-dollar paycheck year after year.

Something is terribly wrong with this.

ESPN, sports radio, and sports columnists around the country will spend countless hours and column inches tearing apart the players who cheated—and rightfully so. With Fehr’s retirement as head of the MLB Players Association, these outlets will again spend time placing blame at Fehr’s feet. 

But where is the outrage toward Selig?

Are we going to have to wait for when he retires to hear anything?

By then, it will be far too late. Because if you are building a Mount Rushmore for the Steroids Era in baseball and all those responsible, the first face to be carved would be Selig’s.