ANOTHER RETRO COLUMN

This one still makes sense...

BUD SELIG IS AN IDIOT

by the world's least dangerous sports reporter

I've always wanted to see that headline. Okay, not always, but for at least the last 8 years or so.

Bud Selig is killing baseball. And anyone who denies it is (a) a shill for baseball management, (b) related to Bud, or (c) spent the last ten years on Gilligan's Island.

And yet, no one ever acknowledges that Bud's what's wrong with baseball.

All right, fine, a few columnists have challenged Milwaukee's 2nd most beloved dork ever (sit on it, Potzie!). But I'm trying to carve out some glory for myself, so let's ignore that. Most columnists try to balance their attacks on Selig's terrible business acumen, lack of PR intelligence and general shallow self-serving loony ideas with wonderful prose about how Selig grew up loving the game and is a true baseball fan at his core. The nicest thing I can say about Selig is that he's never sold me a car, or a ticket to a Brewers game (shudder).

It all comes back to one key question a friend once posed to me: How do you trust a man from Milwaukee, the home of Miller Beer, who's nicknamed BUD? Isn't that what they call you in Milwaukee when they don't like you?

Let me get one thing out of the way: I have no complaints about Bud Selig as an owner. The people of Milwaukee might not like the fact that his team made it to the World Series one stinking time and never sniffed the post-season otherwise, but I don't give a hoot. For all I care, Bud could have kept sending Dan Plesac, Teddy Higuera and Pat Listach out to toil in mediocrity forever, and I'd have my own far more pathetic baseball franchise to follow (the Phillies, for those of you wondering if I'm an Angels fan or something). Fonzie and Mr. C may not have liked Bud's usually bland and boring offering, but the rest of America has better things to do. Heck, people in Wisconsin have better things to do, like wear foam cheese on their heads.

But then Bud went and got himself appointed baseball commissioner, and started to screw up my life, and those of baseball fans nationwide. It's much like when Miller started selling Milwaukee's Best coast to coast, thereby allowing college freshman an alternative to Natural Light and Keystone Light in the "which beer tastes most like piss" wars.

In any case, Bud opened his glorious reign as commissioner with the 1994 strike. Think about this: a business sees its CEO open his tenure with a shutdown that poisons relations with its workers, costs the stockholders hundreds of millions if not billions, gives the entire business a historic black eye and embitters its customers to the point where many publicly declare they'll never patronize the business again. So what should the Board of Directors do?

(A) Send the guy on a fact-finding trip to Baghdad, wearing a shirt that reads, "Saddam is Gay."
(B) Demote him to assistant secretary in charge of relations with the Lost City of Atlantis.
(C) Hand him a nice severance package and put him in charge of the Committee to Hire Jay Leno to Speak at the Company Retreat; or
(D) Rehire him and keep him in place for the next ten years.

Under baseball's quaint logic, they re-hired Bud, and kept re-hiring him. Last year, they re-hired him, after the business piled up approximately $3.5 billion in debt and then set fire to $519 million in losses. By way of perspective, $519 million is enough money to hire the cast of Friendsfor two seasons, plus guest-shots on a very special episode of "Blossom" where Sixx gets knocked up by David Schwimmer. In honor of this accomplishment, the owners voted to give Bud a contract for $4.5 million through 2008. These guys are probably lining up a new job for former Enron head honcho Ken Lay right now.

Mind you, no one outside a mental institution (or baseball management, which is similar in many ways) believes Selig's claims of baseball's vast financial losses. Baseball's books would probably be improved by an audit from Arthur Andersen. Selig's $519 million in losses include some fun charges, like $112 million in interest (generally something they choose, because there's financial advantages to it), $174 million in amoritization (strictly a paper loss) and $44 million for Bud's haircut (all right, we're making that up, but how much do you think it must cost to get Bill Gates' barber?). On top of that, there's the minor issue that approximately $166 million of the $232 million in reported operating losses comes from four teams (the Dodgers, the Blue Jays, the Braves and Cubs) that are owned by media conglomerates that underpay for broadcast rights and benefit from owning the rights to the programming. The Braves lost $24 million last year. Does anyone think AOL/Time-Warner would keep around an asset that hemorrages money if it didn't actually produce profit elsewhere?

Selig tried to peddle his farce of a report before Congress, which treated him like the Yankees treated Byung Hyun-Kim last fall. For a former used car salesman, Bud's a terribly bad liar. Here in D.C., they teach classes in the art of lying (okay, maybe they don't, but we're betting Bill Clinton could get a tenured spot for that kind of course at Georgetown in a heartbeat). To be honest, we're pretty sure that the job description for "Commissioner of Baseball" includes "lying to Congress." And yet here's Bud, who had the same degree of success with the House Judiciary Committee that Richard Gere had when he tried to telepathically contact Deng Xiopeng.

Bud's performance before Congress rivalled some of the worst things we've ever seen on TV, and that includes Chevy Chase's late-night talk show, Barbara Walters' Givens/Tyson interview and Ross Perot's campaign infomercials. Selig pulled off the impossible: he looked shifty, dumb and dishonest in a room filled with United States Congressmen. There's got to be some kind of award, maybe named after Richard Nixon, that the country can bestow upon Selig for making our elected representatives look so good by comparision.

Bud had to step up to the House kleig lights thanks to his short-sighted decision to push "contraction" in the off-season, a plan where Minnesota and Montreal's teams would disappear and baseball's problems would be magically solved. We're not sure if Bud and his merry band of owners had a collective acid trip when they voted on this, but they forgot to explain HOW this solves the problem. It reminded yours truly of the South Park episode where the Underpants Gnomes explain their business strategy:

Step One, collect underpants.
Step Two, ?
Step Three, profit.

I think the gnomes actually got $200 million in venture capital for that business plan in the late 1990's, but that still doesn't make it reasonable. And yes, I wrote this entire article so I could compare George Steinbrennar to a gnome.

Seriously, the contraction idea sounds so damn stupid only baseball would conjure up something like this. They're losing hundreds of millions of dollars, so why not pay Twins owner Carl Pohlad $250 million to take his share of the balls and go home? Yeah, that makes perfect sense... if you're confined to a mental institution. Baseball expanded by four teams in the 1990's, raking in $360 million or so in fees from that process (a process where they determined the expansion fees by throwing names in a hat... well, maybe it is better than hiring Andersen). It's perfectly acceptable to let teams fold if the owners want to bail out, but the owners aren't doing that here. Even the Expos, who should fold or move, aren't dying; owner Jeffrey Loria accepted a payout from baseball so he could move to Miami and get the Marlins as his punishment for running the Expos even further into the ground... hey, wait, isn't this stolen from the plot of Major League or something?

Bud foisted contraction on baseball only two days after the World Series ended last November, as entertaining and emotionally-draining a World Series as we've ever experienced. Bang, a week later, and the brilliance of Curt Schilling, Randy Johnson, Derek Jeter, Roger Clemens and all the rest is buried by a nightmarishly dumb move, one which wasn't remotely realistic. The Players Association, the state of Minnesota, the people who run the Metrodome, the peanut vendors who work there, Pete Rose, the San Diego Chicken... everyone's got a lawyer ready to sue Major league Baseball to tie up contraction until hell freezes over, or Bud starts making sense. Yet it took until this week for Selig to admit his plan has no shot in hell of coming to fruition in 2002. Hey, Bud had a succesful off-season; he arranged the game of musical ownership chairs so his favored group (headed by Tom Werner and former Marlins owner John Henry) won out on the auction bid to buy the Red Sox. Sure, they didn't accept the top bid, but there's nothing crooked there. Baseball owners have far too much integrity to interfere in the process to its detriment. Besides, Werner's dating Katie Couric, which means, for the first time since Ted Turner and Jane Fonda broke up, that we'll have a consensus choice for "Annoying Couple You'd Most Want to Beat Up in the Parking Lot after the Game." If we're real lucky, Matt Lauer will be available for beatings as well.

Selig's defenders usually point to the success of the wild-card and interleague play, which supposedly are brilliant brainstorms. Hey, football has added two wild-card teams in the last decade as well, and I don't see Paul Tagliabue buffing up his resume with the credit for that one. Plus, the wild-card was made necessary by expansion, which is supposed to be solved by contraction... someone help me out here (and don't get me started on the TV schedule for baseball's divisional playoffs, guaranteed to help us miss as many games as possible). Interleague play was cool the first time around... until they decided to keep it the same, year after year. It's still cool in New York and Chicago when the cross-town rivals square off, but does anyone think a Pirates-Royals series means any more to Pirates fans than a visit by the Padres? And before we anoint Bud for suspending baseball games for a week in the wake of Sept. 11th, let's remember that he also waited until Tags and the NFL made their decision before dropping the weekend games.

Some of you may think it's unfair to rip Selig when the rest of the owners and the players share the blame for the entire mess that is baseball business and labor relations. That's great, except those parties are supposed to act like selfish, egotistical louts who are looking out for themselves. Selig is suppose to take actions in the best interests of the game of baseball, and his status as a current owner (please, drop the charade with his daughter running the team; even if she is, this is a conflict of interest so blatant it makes Don King look aboveboard) prevents him from doing so. Selig even yanked a potential labor deal off the table last summer when MLB exec Paul Beeston and Union honcho Don Fehr almost had a deal completed. That was in the best interests of the hard-line, small-market owners and no one else.

Would I like to see a more level playing field in baseball, where the Twins and the Yankees, the Expos and the Braves, the A's and the Cubs, all compete with approximately the same amount of resources? Sure, but baseball's solutions so far are worse than the problem. Every solution they've presented has either fallen by the wayside, or has, in the estimation of the owners, failed miserably. Has revenue sharing succeeded? Have the owners done anything to convince the players union that they're not trying to screw them, so the players might even consider a salary cap or an NBA-style luxury tax?

Understand, I'm not excusing Fehr, Gene Orza and the guys who run the union from their share of the blame. Don Fehr resembles the unfunny '90's version of Dan Ackroyd, only more dour in his facial expression (quick aside for my take on the Super Bowl: does anyone else thing that Mike Martz as a kid looked like the little goofy dork from Jerry Maguire? Since I told everyone the Pats would easily cover and might even win, I think I'm entitled to pay no attention to the game itself). Fehr's not that likable a guy on TV, but he's not paid to be likable; he's paid to represent the players, and they seem to like the work he does. The owners, meanwhile, have fired every rep they've ever hired in labor negotiations, which may be the only good thing if Bud is their rep this go-round.

Hey, he can go back and run the Brewers; maybe they can finish third in the NL Central next year. But it's time for Allen H. "Bud" Selig to step down from the commissioner's seat. He's fond of reveling in baseball's mythical status as America's pastime (no matter that the NFL and NASCAR are far more popular). Well, it's well PASTtime for Bud to leave. Ask yourself one question: is Bud Selig solving the problem?

The answer is no. And that's why it's time for Bud to go.