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Selig Must Go

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The Tampa Tribune

Published: January 28, 2008

Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig should have been fired long ago for his incompetence in handling the game's steroid era.

Instead, baseball's owners earlier this month unanimously awarded him a three-year contract extension. That blatant disregard for the integrity of the game speaks volumes about owner interests. It also explains why Congress took the extraordinary step of holding hearings to investigate the game's ineffective response to the steroid era.

Congress certainly has more important things to do than ask star players such as Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens what they had been doing in locker rooms for the past few years. But because baseball has an antitrust exemption, only Congress or the courts have the authority to step in and force the game to alter its ways.

Based on past reports and testimony from this month, Congress should tell baseball's owners to accept an independent commissioner or lose the game's antitrust exemption, ending owners' monopoly of the sport.

It's obvious why the owners are enamored of Selig. He essentially looked the other way while stars such as Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Bonds juiced up to such a degree that they smashed all of the game's most cherished home run records. That created an unprecedented economic boom for the game. Baseball's revenues jumped from $1.6 billion in 1998 - the year McGwire broke Roger Maris' single-season home run record - to $6 billion last year.

The sad truth is that the owners have been willing to line their pockets while thumbing their nose at those who care about the integrity of the game.

Only a truly independent commissioner's office can restore what the game has lost.

A panel of baseball experts - including representatives from the owners, players union, umpires, the game's fans and the Hall of Fame - should be charged with choosing a new commissioner and establishing a new model for how the game is governed. And there should be clear punishments - from significant fines to suspensions - for owners who knowingly allow their players to violate the game's rules, including those against steroid use.

The San Francisco Giants' Peter McGowan is among those whom Congress cited as not taking action despite learning firsthand that Bonds had taken steroids.

McGowan should be credited for playing a large role in keeping the Giants in San Francisco and giving the city its beautiful baseball stadium. But his unwillingness to confront and take action against Bonds makes him, along with Selig, one of the chief scapegoats for baseball's biggest scandal since the 1919 Black Sox betting fiasco.

Selig told reporters during the owners meetings in Scottsdale, Ariz., that "by the time I leave, you won't recognize the sport."

Unless Congress takes bold action to clean up the game, we fear he'll be right.

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