In last Sunday's Daily News, Dave Zirin argued that while no one should feel sympathy for Roger Clemens (and I certainly don't), there was a bigger crime committed against baseball - by the commissioner himself. Zirin contended that, while many players were being punished for having cheated the game, no owners or other league officials had yet been held accountable for their role in the steroids era.
Having presided over that era, Commissioner Selig ought to bear ultimate responsibility for an age that (assuming it's over) has been a black mark on the history of the game.
Therefore, Bud Selig should be barred from the Hall of Fame.
Hall of Fame voters have already set a precedent -- if you are tainted by steroids, you can expect to be blocked from Cooperstown. Beginning with Mark McGwire's first failed bid, in 2007, the Hall of Fame voters have made clear that steroids use is grounds to reject what would otherwise almost certainly be a Hall of Fame candidacy. And Sammy Sosa, Roger Clemens and perhaps Barry Bonds may face a similar fate. Why? Because McGwire and his ilk are said to ave cheated and created a blight on the game.
It is true that baseball has banned, since 1991, the use of illegal or illegally obtained drugs, including steroids. Commissioner Selig re-iterated more or less the same policy in a 1997 memo. But this was a ban with no teeth, since there was no testing for any of what we now call performance-enhancing drugs. That, combined with the meager efforts to educate players about the issue or publicize the problem meant that the ban had about as much force or meaning as one of those "sense of the Senate" resolutions, honoring Joe Paterno or condemning mating between humans and goats.
Baseball executives from that era have freely acknowledged that there was almost no reason to take the policy seriously. So, without defending McGwire's actions, to ban him from to the Hall on the grounds that he "cheated" concerning a policy that nobody tried to enforce is dubious. On the other hand, the larger sense in which he cheated -- by undermining the history and integrity of the game -- is far more significant, at least to the overwhelming majority of baseball fans. After all, fans wouldn't care whether McGwire smoked pot, though that would violate the policy then in force in exactly the same way that steroid use did.
On those grounds, shouldn't the man who presided over that now-disgraced era and cheated the game and its history also be denied Hall of Fame entry?
Bud Selig and his supporters have issued two principle defenses. Neither one stands up to scrutiny.
The first is that he didn't understand what was happening when it was happening.
In February 2005, Selig said that "he never heard" about the steroids "discussion" until 1998 or 1999.
This defense is a sick joke. Zirin quotes former Cleveland Indians' trainer Brent Starr:
"Here's the thing that really bothers me," Starr said in 2007. "They sit there, meaning the commissioners office, Bud Selig and that group...They sit there and say, 'Well, now that we know that this happened were going to do something about it.' I have notes from the Winter Meetings where the owners group and the players association sat in meetings with the team physicians and team trainers. I was there. And team physicians stood up and said, 'Look, we need to do something about this. We've got a problem here if we don't do something about it. That was in 1988.'"
In fact, in 1988, long-time Washington Post write Tom Boswell started writing about the prevalence of steroids in baseball and described Jose Canseco at the time as a "conspicuous" user. Boston Red Sox fans were known to serenade Canseco at that time with chants of "ster-oids, ster-oids."
In 1995, Bob Nightengale wrote about widespread steroid use in baseball for the Los Angeles Times in July, 1995. At about the same time, he penned a piece for The Sporting News, including this quote from then-Padres GM Randy Smith:
"We all know there's steroid use, and it's definitely become more prevalent," Padres General Manager Randy Smith says. "The ballplayers all know the dangers of it. We preach it every year.
Bud Selig also told Nightengale at the time:
"If baseball has a problem," Selig says, "I must say candidly that we were not aware of it. It certainly hasn't been talked about much. But should we concern ourselves as an industry? I don't know, maybe it's time to bring it up again."
An FBI agent says he informed baseball's chief of security, Kevin Hallinan, in 1995, that the bureau was pursuing numerous investigations into sales of steroids by major league players.
So, depending on when you ask him, Bud Selig says he didn't know about the problem in 1995 or 1998 or whenever, even though Tom Boswell, Boston Red Sox fans, numerous GMs, trainers, FBI investigators and others apparently did prior to that time.
There is simply no way that the man presiding over a multi-billion dollar business whose public image is absolutely central to the well-being of that business would simply not have the means at his disposal to acquire detailed information about a rampant and potentially very damaging practice in his sport.
Now, if Selig really didn't know, he is guilty of stupefying neglect and incompetence. But he did know, in which case he is guilty of having cheated the integrity and history of the game far more profoundly than any individual player ever could.
The second principle defense of Selig is that he tried to get the players' union to impose a tougher policy, but that his hands were tied. Following the 1994 strike, the next collective bargaining agreement to go into force was signed in 1996. The union and MLB didn't sign another one until 2002, an agreement which introduced the modern testing-regime (and which has been subsequently modified and extended).
The players' association did oppose random drug testing prior to the 2002 agreement (and this is crucial to remember -- the union's job s to represent its members interests. Whether it does that effectively is something we can debate. But it's the commissioner's express responsibility to act in the best interests of baseball).
Prior to the 2002, including the period from roughly 1994-2002, when the homerun-derby brand of baseball was bringing fans back to the game in droves ("chicks dig the long ball"), there is little public record of Selig making a stand on the steroids issue. The truth is this -- if Selig tried at all, it was a half-hearted effort, at best. And it's simply untrue that Selig didn't try harder because he had to yield to the players' intransigence on this issue.
Recall that, in 1994, then-interim Commissioner Selig was willing to deploy the nuclear option to try to change the financial structure of the game. Because of the collective bargaining impasse over the game's finances, Selig preferred to allow the season to shut down, including cancellation of the World Series, rather than to defer to the union's preferences on the economics of the game. It's hard to argue that there is a greater disaster to befall a sports league than a cancellation of its signature event, and also hard to deny the blow this dealt to the history and integrity of the game.
In other words, when Selig cared enough about an issue, he was willing to go to war over it. For the two years leading up to the 2002 collective bargaining agreement, the commish issued a steady stream of increasingly hysterical, dire and dishonest assertions about the future of the game, including the most egregious misrepresentations of his franchises operating profits and losses. He threatened to shutter up to four franchises because they supposedly couldn't compete (one of those franchises, the Minnesota Twins, was owned at the time by the richest owner in baseball and would manage to begin a string of division titles in 2002). So, he was not above a scorched-earth approach to negotiating with the players when what was at stake was ensuring maximum owner profits, particularly for franchises whose owners chose to invest little in their teams (in 2001, the final year of the old agreement, which was so unfair to small market teams, Bud's old franchise, the Brewers, recorded the highest profits of any team in baseball).
(Though, it's sort of beside the point, it's worth noting that Bud hasn't just been dishonest in a global sense about the game's finances. He has arguably been deeply corrupt).
In sum, the argument that Bud had no choice when it came to testing is a bogus argument that ignores his willingness to go extreme lengths to secure collective bargaining provisions that actually matter to him. And the bottom line is that, while he knew full-well that his game was over-run by steroid use by the mid to late 1990s, cared about something, it wasn't until public ridicule and mounting federal investigations forced his (and the players') hands. Rather than owning up to that fact, he's either lied about what he knew and when he knew it, or whined about how his hands were tied. Or both.
If the new standard is that players tainted by steroids are not Hall of Fame worthy, then the voters must bar the man who was most singularly positioned to take a stand against that taint and failed to do so. Whether due to lack of vision, cowardice or indifference, Bud Selig failed the game at a critical juncture in its history, creating a legacy and (a record book) that will cause baseball fans to wince for decades to come. Therefore, when the time comes, Hall of Fame voters should do the right thing.