Conventional wisdom would lead me to place some of the blame for this whole steroids mess on Bud Selig.
After all, in his 17 years and counting as commissioner of baseball, Selig has kept a stance on the use of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball that's been inconsistent at best. A decade ago, he turned a blind eye to the antics of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, which made sense at the time. Those two men saved baseball in 1998; that's old news.
What's worth noting now is the complete reversal in Selig's stance.
Reports late last week indicated that Selig, all of a sudden so distraught at the emergence of performance enhancers in baseball, wanted not only to suspend Alex Rodriguez but to strike Barry Bonds' name from the record books, returning the all-time home run crown to its "rightful owner," Henry Aaron.
Conventional wisdom -- or should I call it common sense? -- would lead me to believe that Bud is guilty of much more than a colossal flip-flop. What he's actually done is actively fight against the integrity of the game for well over a decade. And far be it from me to question conventional wisdom.
OK, fine. That's what I always do. But not this time.
We can start with the obvious. Suspending A-Rod would be a colossally stupid idea. It's stupid first because the test he failed was supposedly confidential and meant to be destroyed; second because it happened six years ago when there were no penalties for positive tests; and third because it would only call more attention to baseball's biggest scandal this side of Pete Rose.
This is too easy. Let's go further.
Striking Bonds from the record books is similarly inane. Why discredit Bonds for home runs he hit while juicing off of pitchers who were probably doing the same? Do you take away all 762 homers, or only the ones that came after 1999, when his weight mysteriously increased from around 210 to 225 during the weeks leading up to spring training? Do the home runs not exist? How does that affect his team? Do we have to go back and erase 80 or 90 wins from the Giants' records over the past decade?
No, of course not. The truth is that Aaron hit 755 home runs and Bonds hit more. Nothing will change that -- no verdict in the court of public opinion, no verdict in his actual criminal trial for perjury and, for God's sake, no asterisk.
But the bigger problem is that Selig, in the midst of his massive overcompensation for his many past failures, has even further lost sight of the game's integrity. Of course he ignored the steroid problem in '98 -- the game was making money like never before, and home runs were the reason. But the fact that he's lashing out now is a sign of political pandering -- he ignored steroids when it was trendy to do so, and he's reviling Rodriguez and Bonds now that the fans demand it. In other words, he's being paid $18 million a year to be a glorified PR guy for Major League Baseball.
But suspensions and record book amendments are not the answer. These are petty ways to address the problem -- when hundreds of players were guilty of juicing, it makes little difference to isolate one or two and punish them. The sooner the commissioner acknowledges that a widespread epidemic spread across the game, the sooner baseball can begin to treat that epidemic.
The mature way to handle the Steroid Era is to admit that mistakes were made, apologize for those mistakes and move on.
In other words, instead of suspending Alex Rodriguez, Selig should emulate him.
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Evans Clinchy is a senior majoring in English. He can be reached at Evans.Clinchy@tufts.edu.
