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There’s an old cartoon where a guy checks into a hotel and finds a mouse in his room. <\/span>He calls down to the front desk, and the innkeeper says he can get rid of the mouse…for a fee. <\/span>The customer agrees and suddenly the guy has a cat in his room; the innkeeper can send a dog up…for a fee. <\/span>This of course continues—getting rid of one problem only creates a bigger (and more costly) problem—until eventually our guy has an elephant in his room. <\/span>As baseball fans, we are stuck in this room and we have two options, we can leave the inn (and the pastime that we love)…or we can get rid of the innkeeper. <\/span>Fans, we need to impeach Bud Selig. <\/span>He was placed in charge of our sport and we can’t let him keep doing this to us; we’ve had an elephant in our room for too long.<\/p>\n Unless you’ve been hiding under a rock for the last few weeks you’ve already heard that Alex Rodriguez used steroids during his time with the Texas Rangers. <\/span>Never mind that he said in a 60 Minutes interview that he never used them; never mind that while A-Rod was admitting to Peter Gammons that he used them for 3 years, his agent was telling everyone it was only one year; never mind that he claims to have stopped using steroids at the exact same time as he entered the locker room of Jason Giambi, Roger Clemens, and Andy Pettitte. <\/span>Frankly those details are irrelevant; the more salient detail is the number 104. <\/span>One hundred and four players tested positive, secretly, in 2003. <\/span>Remember: we can’t test for HGH (arguably the most widely-used steroid). <\/span>We don’t know how many “masking agents” there are out there that could hide steroid-use. <\/span>And we know that these players knew when they were going to be tested. <\/span>And yet 104 players still peed in the cup and got caught. <\/span>That’s one in seven big leaguers. <\/span>If one in seven got caught, it certainly has to make you question how many more were actually smart enough not to get caught. <\/span>And at this point it begins to seem futile to blame individual players when in fact they weren’t breaking any baseball rules. <\/span>If every student in a classroom cheated, there comes a point when you need to blame the teacher. <\/span>And yet Bud Selig has the gall to claim that A-Rod “shamed the game.” <\/span>No, sir, A-Rod did something that you not only allowed, you encouraged. <\/span>You know what A-Rod did, and he learned it by watching you: he screwed up.<\/p>\n Bud Selig’s ascension to the Commissioner’s office never should have happened. <\/span>The Commissioner is supposed to be a mediator, an independent branch, between the Owners and the Players. <\/span>Except that not only was Selig an owner, he was found guilty of colluding with other owners to keep certain free agents from being signed. <\/span>Twenty years later, I am still astounded that any player ever trusted Bud Selig. <\/span>Can someone please explain to me how it is a conflict of interest to be Commissioner and own a team, but that conflict goes away just because now it’s your daughter who owns the team? <\/span>Can someone with a daughter please tell me how impartial you are when she’s involved? <\/span>We shouldn’t have been surprised that it didn’t take Selig long to screw the whole sport up with the 1994 strike. <\/span>The first World Series canceled in 90 years; the first major sport to lose an entire postseason to a labor dispute!?! <\/span>How was he allowed to keep his job then?<\/p>\n Then of course there was the massive chasm developing between big market and small market teams—the Yankees started 2008 with a payroll of nearly $210 million, the Marlins started that same day with a payroll of $21 million. <\/span>Can you think of any other competition in the world that would allow one team 10 times the resources of another and dare call it a fair-fight? <\/span>That would be like Manny Pacquiao fighting an infant.<\/p>\n Somehow the owners looked around and decided there was nobody better for the job. <\/span>There are of course many other mistakes Selig has made. <\/span>Remember when we thought the worst thing he did was to let there be a tie in the All-Star game? <\/span>That was like us thinking the President Bush choking on a pretzel was going to be the worst thing in his administration; it was almost as if we laid down a challenge to these two men and they accepted—Oh yeah, just wait till I really screw up. <\/span>But none of Selig’s many other mistakes are going to matter in history’s eyes. <\/span>All that will be remembered about this era is that we can’t trust it. <\/span>Performance-enhancing drugs, or at least the search for them, are not new. <\/span>As long as there have been competitions, there have been people looking to be the best, even at the expense of the rules. <\/span>But Bud Selig has allowed it to go too far.<\/p>\n Steve Trachel gave up Mark McGwire’s 62nd home run. <\/span>I remember that because at the time it just seemed so important, like it would be the answer to a trivia question for years. <\/span>Now, of course, it seems embarrassing. <\/span>But I remember the Summer of ’98: before everyone had iPhones, before ESPN would text us during each at-bat, before we knew any better—it was just two guys, two good people, whom we wanted to inspire us again. <\/span>It wasn’t black vs. white, American vs. foreign. <\/span>It was beisbol’s been berry good to me vs. the guy whose kid was the batboy. <\/span>Baseball had become all about the money, and suddenly we found a reason to believe it was more than that again. <\/span>There will always be cheaters in sports, but Big Mac and Sammy were supposed to lift us up above all that. <\/span>They were Sportsmen of the Year, these guys were the reason we loved sports in the first place. <\/span>Of course they were going to lift us up: I mean, did you see how big their biceps are? These guys are so talented they are more than mere mortals…it seems pretty ridiculous in hindsight.<\/p>\n A-Rod was supposed to save baseball from the tarnish of Bonds; McGwire was supposed to save baseball from the strike. <\/span>The ridiculous All-Star plan—to have the exhibition game decide home-field advantage in the World Series—was supposed to save us from another tie game. <\/span>Looking back over the last 20 years, you can’t help but realize that each new cure has caused the next disease, and you then begin to understand that the only course of action left is to amputate. <\/span>Bud Selig has to go. <\/span>But if we’re going to take the next step we have to look in the mirror too. <\/span>Baseball got to where it is, in part, because we as fans wanted to see home runs. <\/span>Singles and stolen bases still had a place in our game but not when a clean-hitter was at-bat. <\/span>We didn’t question that all of our favorite hitters became bigger and bigger to the point that they became…well, elephants. <\/span>Which brings me back to our guy, with his room at the inn—ultimately the only way to get rid of the elephant in the room was to go back to having a mouse. <\/span>If we want to keep our inn, our pastime, we might have to be okay with that.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n \n <\/p>\n