Both are despised by a commissioner who believes Hank Aaron's homers are sacred.Yup. The commissioner of baseball not only actively plays favorites, but basically has an active vendetta against anyone who threatens the record (well, now, ex-record) of his favorite.
By contrast -- Hank Aaron himself was a class act throughout the Bonds record chase. Despite all kinds of pressure from reporters to be a jerk...well, the reporters didn't see it that way, but the reporters were jerks and wanted Aaron to lead the parade. He didn't.
But back to commish-for-life Selig: he's a disgrace, and has always been a disgrace. And as long as he's commissioner, the integrity of the game is, alas, in a lot worse shape than it should be.
And we've lost several seasons of getting to watch some of the greatest players ever.
Just terrible.
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I never knew this before five minutes ago, but prior to buying the bankrupt Seattle Pilots and moving them to Milwaukee, Bud Selig, otherwise smalltime local immigrant car leasing guy, went to great lengths to bring/keep baseball in Milwaukee - even staging several highly successful White Sox games at Milwaukee County Stadium (and attempting to move the White Sox to Milwaukee).
ReplyDeleteWhich star slugger was obviously the centerpiece of that effort on Selig's part?
Question: who'd be your dream commish? If there isn't a specific name, just a vague description of how they would behave in the job would be great.
ReplyDeleteFurther, it probably seems odd, especially to a Giants fan, that the difficult issue of what to do with Bonds/Clemens/et al is left to a guy who cut his baseball teeth on the injustice of the great Hank Aaron (and team) being taken out of Milwaukee to Atlanta.
ReplyDeleteBeyond the fact that Selig has been in the Commissioner's seat, I think that's how these things tend to go. When the other owners receive happy emails that the new brand of cheaters have been put in their place, those owners write back "you're welcome". When they receive angry emails that everyone was a cheater, and Bonds/Clemens (at least) were nevertheless stupendous, they simply forward those to the commish.
I have a hard time buying that the homerun record has anything to do with Arod's suspension. With his injuries and fall off in playing ability in recent years, he doesn't seem like any kind of threat to hit 756 homeruns.
ReplyDeleteI love JB's passionate defense of these guys. I am no fan of Selig, nor hater of Bonds or A-Rod, but despite there being no rule on the books, I believe that Bonds and Clemens cheated the game. And no I don't think it's the same as what Mantle, etc did because they were just mixing a cocktail of stuff hoping it would work, not injecting highly targeted pharmaceuticals. I don't buy that argument for a second. I think the commissioner's an idiot and is trying to make up for looking the other way when he was riding that size 16 head during the recent boom, but I hate what those Bonds, ARod, Clemens and Selig did to the game.
ReplyDeleteAlso just to respond to one of JB's favorite things to retort, I don't think what Bonds did was amazing, any more than I think a Cheetah running a 4.2 40 would be amazing.
Also, it's not a witch hunt if there's evidence he's a witch. http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2006/baseball/mlb/03/06/news.excerpt/
Why is effective treatment more wrong than ineffective treatment?
DeleteThere's dozens of things that players do to boost their effectiveness; some work, some don't, some legal, some grey and some not. It just seems to me we're picking and choosing at random.
Also I've heard it argued that HGH gives eyesight a large boost, and therefore many users OBP goes up considerably upon taking it.
ReplyDeleteJB, at least Selig is hanging it up and trying to take the mess that he created with him. Baseball's losing its market share by the second and ridding the game of "cheaters" will go a long way to restoring that.
Why would it?
DeleteI have to go with Charlie Pierce on this: "It is no accident that the Dominican Republic, where you can buy the evil PEDs over the counter like candy bars at Home Depot. . . functions as the Northern Marianas Enterprise Zone for major-league franchises. (Zirin also points out that a lot of the players who are currently selling out their fellows in the public prints are the products of the suburbs of the United States, and that this ought to be noticed more. He's right.) The tattered children who survive this system and managed to hit the major-league lottery are then expected to give up the potions that got them noticed once they get to Yankee Stadium because a lot of sportswriters had some Moral Outrage lying around the garage that they weren't using.
ReplyDeleteRead more: Alex Rodriguez Suspension - The A-Rod Question - Esquire
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What an odd metaphor.
DeleteWho goes to Home Depot to buy candy bars? Yes, they sell them, but still....