Bud Selig Won’t Stop Saying Stupid Things About Instant Replay, Is a Rhetorical Genius

It’s been forty whole days since Commissioner of Major League Baseball Bud Selig has said something stupid about expanding the use of instant replay, so I suppose we were all well overdue for a strong dose of nonsense. Consequently, it’s been forty whole days since I last wrote a Call to the Pen post making fun of him for being an out of touch old fool, so I think that officially makes me a sucker. So it goes. We all have our blind spots in life. Selig’s seems to be rational thought, mine is thinking that the words I write have any importance whatsoever. But don’t worry about me, I’ll be fine. At least I feel a bit better for a few minutes after hitting “Publish.” It’s the little things, you guys.

Selig’s latest gem comes from yesterday afternoon during a little media time. Real Life Baseball Reporter John Shea was kind enough to pass along a few words that Selig spoke in order to form a couple of sentences. Those sentences look like this:

"People in our sport don’t want any more. Given our attendance and everything we’re doing, we’re in the right place with instant replay."

That’s just good science right there. I don’t think it’s even necessary to spell out the many reasons why this makes absolutely no sense, but remember, I’m a sucker, so what the hey: Bud Selig is arguing that MLB’s success in regards to attendance, that’s the number of people who pay money for baseball tickets in order to watch the game live and in person (let’s repeat that one more time: live and in person), correlates in any way to people’s desire or lack thereof for expanded instant replay in baseball. In this case Selig is claiming a direct connection, and not only that, he’s using this connection as evidence people are against such a thing. People go baseball games. People like baseball. People no like instant replay. That’s one (dickish) way to simplify this line of thinking. And it’s gibberish no matter the syntax.

Selig’s statement is so inane, so illogical, so insulting to the feeble intelligence that I desperately cling to, that I think he might just be a rhetorical genius. Look, Selig doesn’t like instant replay, it doesn’t take a rocket surgeon to figure as much. And so he ducks, and he weaves, and he deke’s the opposition the best he can. And this may be his most brilliant strategy yet. To hell with combating instant replay head on. No one ever wins arguing against the truth. Instead, why not distract, why not shift the conversation to a different topic? A topic like, oh I don’t know, about how the Commissioner of Baseball is a babbling addlebrain who thinks Franz Ferdinand or whoever invented baseball and that attendance figures have anything to do with instant replay. It’s confounding, it’s preposterous. It just might work.

Kyle writes baseball nonsense at The Trance of Waiting. You can follow him on Twitter @AgainstKyle.