MLB: The Flaw in Bud Selig’s Logic

In a newly released book, the former MLB Commissioner provides perspective on the steroids era but leaves many questions unanswered

More than 10 years after the fact, former MLB Commissioner Bud Selig is sounding off about his feelings regarding Barry Bonds’ chase of Hank Aaron’s home run record. It is not a pretty sound.

In a new book, “For the Good of the Game,” co-written with Phil Rogers, Selig details his sentiments during the summer of 2007 as he watched Bonds approach and eventually pass Aaron’s 755 career home run total.

He was not a disinterested spectator; as commissioner of MLB, Selig essentially stalked Bonds and the San Francisco Giants from city to city in order to be present when the inevitable occurred.

A lot of baseball fans look down on the Bonds record due to the player’s association with steroids. In the book, Selig makes it plain he shares that sentiment. But in places, he comes across as harboring almost a personal animus against the Giant star for taking the record away from his friend.

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"“I had a lot of time to think about the differences between Barry Bonds, who simply wasn’t likable, and Henry Aaron, who had been such a giant on the field and now was the same way off the field, carrying himself with as much poise as humility,” Selig writes. “I first got to know Henry when I sold him a Ford at my family’s dealership in Milwaukee. … I was persistent in everything I did and it brought me many rewards in my lifetime, none I treasure more than my friendship with Henry.”"

Selig does recognize that the problem with the Bonds chase was its sense of artificiality. “Of course, by then we knew what was going on,” he writes. “This was an age when sluggers found extra power through chemistry, and, of course, Barry was one of the leading men in baseball’s steroids narrative.”

Yet while circumspectly accepting some measure of responsibility for the steroids era – “We didn’t get the genie back in the bottle in time to protect Henry’s legacy,” he laments – Selig passes on the chance to deal with the issue head-on. Why were the owners and MLB players collectively unable to more quickly legislate a more thorough solution that would have involved testing measures of the type that were subsequently implemented?

Given that the atmospherics of drug use were well known for a decade before anything substantive was done, what was the holdup? Was ownership, which certainly profited from the home run binge that followed the settlement of the 1994 strike, making a sincere effort to rein in drug use? If so, was the Player’s Union dragging its feet?

As an inside party to those talks, Selig should have informed, if partisan, opinions. He does not, however, share them.

These have never been, and are not today, abstract questions. More than mere records, players’ lives were affected by the widespread – and apparently tolerated – use of steroids. One need only think back to the sad story of Ken Caminiti, whose 2002 admission of steroid use was one of the factors eventually leading to the game’s first negotiated testing program, and who died just two years later at the young age of 41.

Selig is remarkably blasé about the impacts of this period, the resulting human tragedies, and his role, if any, in the game’s failure to deal with that problem. “Some will say baseball’s failure to limit the impact of steroids is my failure,” he writes. “They may even call me the steroid commissioner. That’s okay I guess.”

Whoa, there, commissioner. This isn’t some failed teen-age romance you’re walking away from. Steroids profoundly altered a chapter of baseball history, and you are either: a. responsible, b. partly responsible with others, or c. not responsible at all. Which is it? Why did it happen? And most importantly, what are the salient takeaways that can be applied moving forward?

How about writing that chapter?