Sports

FEHR’S TACTICS A BAD JOKE

IN 1892 England, the death of Alfred, Lord Tennyson left an opening for Poet Laureate. Sir Lewis Morris openly and incessantly lobbied for the title. He figured he was a lock, but he heard nothing back.

Complaining to worn-out friends, including fellow author Oscar Wilde, Morris insisted that there’s “a conspiracy of silence against me, a conspiracy of silence. What ought I to do, Oscar?”

“Join it,” said Wilde.

That advice should be taken by Donald Fehr, who this week, like Bud Selig just before him, began to speak as if both he and Selig should be regarded as frontline fighters in Major League Baseball’s victorious war on drugs.

“Everybody understands that there were things which happened in the early part of the decade which we wish hadn’t,” Fehr said from spring training. “That’s not the case anymore. We fixed the problem and we need to look forward, as Bud has said many times.”

That’s right, Bud and Don – Starsky and Hutch – still together, and together again. Think of them as the men who saved baseball from drugs. Yep, almost immediately after learning that The Game is infested, they jumped into action. Didn’t take either more than, oh, 15 years.

And only because modesty prevents Fehr from dwelling on his past deeds, he now joins Selig in urging us to “look forward.”

Yep, only in the “early part of the decade” did Fehr recognize the presence of a little problem, one that might grow worse – into something ugly, even – unless he took firm and preemptive action. All fixed!

What a guy!

Good thing for Fehr and Selig that we’re too stupid to know better. Except, we’re not quite that stupid. We know that the two authority figures who could have done the most to avoid the calamity did nothing.

We know that for 15 years – and likely more, and maybe more to come – and on the shared watches of Selig and Fehr, integrity was removed from the game and replaced with money, drugs and drug money.

Many of the biggest stars in the late 1980s, throughout the 1990s and well into this century – Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa, Rafael Palmeiro, Roger Clemens, the late Ken Caminiti, Miguel Tejada, Barry Bonds, Alex Rodriguez, Jose Canseco, David Justice, Wally Joyner, Eric Gagne, Mo Vaughn, Jason Giambi and Gary Sheffield, for starters – have their successes attached to cheating, to drug use.

And now Fehr has joined Selig in urging you to look upon this extended era as some fleck in time, as a cough they quickly recognized and treated before it got out of hand.

On their lengthy watches and with their steady assistance, RBIs, ERAs and MVPs were to some large degree predicated on PEDs.

On their watches, malfeasance ruled; baseball became a money-at-any-cost cooperative, and the stench of organized neglect became so powerful that those whose careers were placed at the greatest disadvantage became the clean players. Selig and Fehr helped turn the honest players into saps.

And Fehr, who allowed the integrity of his constituents and their careers and reputations to become something that might be negotiated when the collective bargaining agreement expires, is now claiming credit as a reformer!

If Selig represented factory owners instead of team owners, and Fehr was head of the factory workers’ union, and both men silently indulged criminal activity among some workers because those workers made the most money for everyone – everyone except the honest workers – it would be called what it is: organized crime.

What does it tell us that Fehr and Selig both remain in their highly paid offices? Both continue to run baseball because money, by hook or by crook, remains the only object of The Game. And both clearly meet that term of engagement. Beyond and above that, nothing better has been learned.

Hell, even after the obvious and inevitable were attached to Barry Bonds, team owners, with Selig’s compliance, whacked up the price of tickets to Giants’ road games; they were still eager to grab their cut of every dirty dime.

There’s no evidence that, had it been up to Fehr, there’d have been a fix to the couldn’t-miss-it drug problem that he now takes partial credit for having fixed. What problem?

And now their sin is being taken for a spin. Yeah, Bud and I fixed that little problem baseball had a couple of years back. All fixed. Now it’s time to “look forward.”

To that end, Fehr’s right – Selig and Fehr were very much in on the fix. And both should borrow Wilde’s advice to Sir Lewis, and just shut up.

phil.mushnick@nypost.com