Years later, he remains the Clown Prince of Baseball, the funniest man in The Game. Not Bob Uecker, Bud Selig.
As a self-serving revisionist historian, he’s a hoot. During this week’s All-Star break, he again praised himself as the intrepid commander of the forces that rid the game of performance-enhancing drugs, saying, “I’m as proud today of the Mitchell Report as I was then.”
Proud? It was Selig’s abject, money-first neglect that for years sustained and even grew baseball’s Steroid Era. What all could plainly see was going on in and to the game, Selig missed or chose to ignore.
There would have been no need for a 2007 Mitchell Report on MLB’s drug epidemic — a self-evident truth, regardless — had Selig, eight, 10, 12 years earlier served as a legit commissioner rather than a see-no-evil players’ union appeaser on behalf of the profit interests of his enablers, team owners.
Under Selig, money, and only money, ruled. Integrity became worthless. Every clean player at every professional level was put at a career disadvantage due to Selig’s blindfolded leadership. And now he wants us to think of him as a visionary, a populist, too!
Unless Selig would have us apply a laugh track to his continuing claims that he was at the forefront of MLB’s war on drugs — and that’s truly laughable — one is left to conclude that the man’s regard for the plain truth is nil.
This is the same commissioner who told us that he personally examined ticket pricing in new Yankee Stadium to find all seats affordable. How can that possibly be true?
This is the same commissioner who introduced interleague play as “a gift to the fans” when team owners quickly whacked up the price of interleague tickets. So how can that possibly be true? It was a gift to owners, not fans.
Even after Barry Bonds hit 48 more homers at 36 than he did at 26, and even after he was exposed as a BALCO lab rat, Selig allowed teams to profit from the lawlessness by hiking ticket prices when the Giants came to town.
Selig’s tenure, now 20 years, has been accompanied by a steady disregard for fans. Teams now rush to duplicate shameless money-grabs predicated on fabricated tack-on fees above the face value of tickets.
The Mets, for example, charge an extra $4 per ticket to pick up their tickets at their own box office! Not only do the Mets charge a “convenience fee” for purchasing tickets online — nothing could be more convenient for the Mets — but they also add a $6 “processing fee.”
Nearly all MLB teams, on Selig’s watch, have invented and applied such sucker fees. What has Selig done about it? Not a damned thing. If there’s one thing MLB team owners can count on from Bud, it’s that the “steal sign” is always on.
McCarver refuses to Harp on All-Star base-running mistake
Can’t understand why radio and TV people treat us as if we’re morons.
In Tuesday’s All-Star Game, after Bryce Harper tagged and went to second base, Fox’s Tim McCarver marveled at Harper’s ability to read and perform a simple task: “Such an awareness running the bases,” he gushed.
When the next batter, David Wright, hit a come-backer to pitcher Jered Weaver, Harper was tagged out in a rundown between second and third. McCarver, who could have had some good-faith fun with that, said nothing.
* Great moments in … applause: Fox missed the best scene from the All-Star Game — pinch hitter Chipper Jones stepping out of the batter’s box and removing his batting helmet to acknowledge a ballpark-wide standing ovation — because Fox stuck us in a series of four consecutive crowd shots. No tape shown of it, either.
Stats keep getting in the way of stats. At the top of Saturday’s Cubs-Mets, Howie Rose noted Chicago’s (and Manalapan, N.J.’s) David DeJesus leads all leadoff men in on-base percentage. Later, Rose noted DeJesus is hitting just .196 with runners in scoring position. DeJesus then singled in a run.
Instead of having Ron Jaworski spend so much air time rating the top 30 current NFL QBs — just a summer “busy work” assignment — why didn’t ESPN have him do something useful, say, sharpen pencils?
Knuckling under TV’s pressure
A Fellow with an extensive career as both a baseball marketing and sports TV exec, made this strong suggestion to me about Tuesday’s All-Star Game:
“Why, in an 8-0 game, was R.A. Dickey ‘saved’ until the bottom of the sixth, especially when he should’ve started?
“Someone tapped [NL manager] Tony LaRussa on the shoulder and said, ‘This game is a blowout. We’ve got to at least try to hold the New York audience.’ ”
Ya think?
“Absolutely.”
* Colleges that offer majors in broadcast journalism continue to commit fraud, accepting money — piles of it — under false pretenses. There is no broadcast journalism; it was executed on corporate orders.
The absurdities grow. Monday, WABC weatherman Lee Goldberg reported to New Yorkers the weather — in Kansas City. Kansas City?
Goldberg explained that the Home Run Derby would be conducted that night in KC, adding that it will be seen on ESPN, a Disney station, as is WABC.
Sunday, NBC’s “latest news from the world of sports” insert included Olympics info (Olympics on NBC!), Major League Soccer news (MLS now on NBC Sports Network!) and day-old baseball results.
That day’s Wimbledon’s men’s final (on ESPN)? Not a word.
* Rather than weigh Boston reliever Vicente Padilla’s claims of racism against former Texas teammate Mark Teixeira, the sports media, this week, might’ve questioned Padilla’s validity as a human being.
Padilla has not only upset both sides with his mastery of the bean ball — his teammates must suffer the return fire — he’s apparently a guy who has a rotten sense of circumstances.
This winter, he was chased by authorities in his native Nicaragua for non-payment of child support. But given that he has widely been reported to have 10 children from at least nine women, it’s understandable that he could lose track.
In 2009, Padilla was hospitalized in Nicaragua after what his agent described as an accidental, self-inflicted gunshot wound. One story was that it was a hunting accident, the other that it happened on a target range.
Why would Teixeira even be asked to defend himself against any charges made by such a man?