PORT ST. LUCIE - Would you like to know a sure-fire way to ensure that my e-mail inbox will fill to overflowing by the time breakfast gives way to brunch this morning? By typing the following sentence:
Bud Selig should be in the Hall of Fame someday.
Yep. That would unleash the hounds. That would get some blood boiling but good, because there is nothing - and I mean nothing - that gets a whole lot of baseball fans as riled up as the idea that someone might actually defend the good that Selig has done during his tenure, even if that good is significant.
Even if, on Selig's watch, baseball has expanded its playoff system to three tiers, ensuring a wall-to-wall October. Even if the advent of the wild card has kept more teams every year believing in glory later in every year. Even if the game's coffers are more swollen than anything anyone could have imagined even 20 years ago, because MLB's business is booming just about everywhere, even in a bust economy. Under Selig, baseball has been ahead of the curve in just about everything - new media, minority interviewing and hiring and, yes, even drug testing - when you line it up against the other sports.
It's a hell of a resume. It really is.
Now, we could stage a whole other debate whether commissioners should even be inducted into Cooperstown. There are four of them presently enshrined in baseball's hallowed hall, and you could argue against just about all of them.
Kenesaw Mountain Landis is credited with re-establishing baseball's credibility after the 1919 Black Sox scandal, but he also was as responsible as anyone for keeping the game lily-white until 1947. Happy Chandler did strong-arm certain Dixified players to keep playing during the game's initial hours of integration when some of them were grumbling about boycotting games involving Jackie Robinson, but it hardly seems right that "doing the decent thing" should be a requirement for gaining a plaque. Ford Frick is in, and if anybody deserves an asterisk for anything, it should be for this: "Ford Frick, Hall of Famer*." And Bowie Kuhn somehow was elected last year, and I'm still not sure that wasn't some kind of drunken practical joke gone awry; the idea that Kuhn is in and Marvin Miller isn't is as appalling a miscarriage of sporting justice as there is.
OK.
So if you are going to include commissioners in the Hall of Fame at all, and you already have four awfully dubious precedents, it's almost impossible not to conclude that Bud Selig, for all his bad press, for all his PR gaffes through the years, merits at least strong consideration from the men who will evaluate his credentials whenever the time comes.
But here is the thing, and it is a thing that likely will save my e-mail server from blowing a fuse this morning:
Bud Selig can't be in the Hall of Fame. Not now. Not after what we know about steroids. Not after the way we have treated every other perp in this sad conspiracy.
And here's why: because if we are going to randomly and wantonly administer frontier justice for now and for the next 25 or 30 years when it comes to evaluating the conveyor belt of steroid cheats - including both those who actually have been caught and those (such as Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, whom Selig all but formally adopted 11 years ago) who simply have been strongly linked to the juice - then the same rules and standards must be applied to the man who allowed all of this madness to go on, unchecked, unpunished, for so many years.
If we are going to treat steroids as a death-penalty offense for legends and their legacies - not a shoo-in, but that certainly does seem to be where we're all leaning judging by the leper treatment Mark McGwire has gotten thus far - then we have to extend those same discourtesies to the sheriff who looked the other way. Extend them to the man who saw what was happening to his post-strike game and not only raised no flags, but asked no questions. None for the record, anyway.
Now, every time another cheat is exposed, we get another round of angry rhetoric from the commissioner. "What Alex did was wrong and he will have to live with the damage he has done to his name and reputation," he said of A-Rod's public revelation and subsequent concession, and that's all fine and it's well and it's good. But it comes up a few bucks shy and a few years short.
Look, the thing I always have admired most about Selig was the fact that he is, at his core, at his heart, a fan. He really does bleed for the game. You can accuse him of anything you want. You can talk about World Series games that end past midnight and some that wind up washed out in a rainy haze, you always can reference the canceled '94 postseason, and every time, especially early in his tenure, when he came off as a stooge for ownership. But everything he has ever done has been with a love of the game in is heart.
And maybe that's the problem. Maybe if he had loved the game less, and sought to protect it more, he could have done something about the stain of steroids that stays with us now, that hangs around like the stench of a rancid meal. It's a shame. He should be in the Hall of Fame. But, then, so should a lot of baseball people who did their best work during the Steroid Era.
Another purpose of a union is to PROTECT their members from hazards. In that regard, Fehr failed since he and his conspirator Gene Orza liken it to smoking. 
Yes, Selig is an idiot, but Fehr is just as (if not more) complicit.
Yes, Selig is an idiot, but Fehr is just as (if not more) complicit.
