Selig always misses the point, By: Scott Brown
May 7, 2006
Fighting steroids more important than choosing another owner
Bud Selig "agonized" over it.
So much so that the Major League Baseball commissioner said it woke him up at night.
Steroids?
No, which billionaire boys club to sell the Washington Nationals to.
Seriously.
"I don't think there's any issue that I have really agonized over like this one," Selig said about his recommendation that MLB should sell the Nationals to a group headed by Ted Lerner.
It's too bad he didn't stress like this over steroids.
Everything Selig has done in regard to what should have really troubled him has been reactionary.
His appointment of an outside person to investigate steroids' effect on the game (and baseball's cherished records) came after the release of the book, "Game of the Shadows."
The book, written by two San Francisco Chronicle investigative reporters, deconstructs Barry Bonds' alleged use of performance-enhancing drugs and the alarming rise of renegade chemists, among other things.
It makes a convincing argument that Bonds was more juiced than an orange grove during his transition from a good power hitter to the greatest home run hitter of his generation and maybe all time.
Selig, to be sure, has done his share of good deeds as commissioner.
The addition of the wild card has made baseball's races much more exciting and produced World Series winners (1997 and 2003 Florida Marlins, to name two) out of teams that wouldn't have made the playoffs under the old system.
MLB continues to set new attendance records, and the advent of the World Baseball Classic will only fuel the game's popularity and growth in foreign markets.
Even on how prevalent steroid use became in the game, Selig is hardly the only one to blame.
The Major League Baseball Players Association is the strongest union of all of sports, and its leader, Donald Fehr, showed no inclination toward adopting a drug-testing policy that did more than provide joke material to folks like David Letterman -- until Congress threatened to get involved.
The news media have howled about how steroid use has besmirched the game, but we were enablers too, caught up as much as anybody in the feel-good "Home Run Chase" in 1998. We chronicled it without the kind of cynicism that has become our calling card.
But Selig's talk about what a tough decision he had to make in regard to the sale of the Nationals -- he said he sometimes would wake up at 3 a.m. and jot down pluses and minuses of prospective owners on a legal pad -- came off as insensitive.
If he wants to know what a sleepless night is really like, he should talk to the parents of Taylor Hooton.
Hooton, a high school baseball player in Texas, hanged himself in July 2003. His use of steroids was blamed for the suicide that occurred about a month after his 17th birthday, and his family since has formed the Taylor Hooton Foundation for Fighting Steroid Abuse.
It aims to educate kids on the dangers of steroids, and director Don Hooton (Taylor's father) has turned the group's mission into his life mission.
Hooton testified last year at the congressional hearing on steroids in sports.
That was the one in which Sammy Sosa suddenly lost all grasp of the English language, the one in which Mark McGwire did not want to talk about the past, the one in which Rafael Palmeiro wagged his finger and said, "I did not have sex with that woman."
Actually, Raffy denied ever taking steroids and later failed a drug test.
Goodbye Cooperstown, hello Duperstown.
As in duped, which we all have been by what is destined to go down as "The Steroid Era."
No one still knows who did what, and we probably will never know the whole truth.
Or how much damage it caused because kids such as Taylor Hooton came to the conclusion they needed to use steroids if they wanted to succeed in baseball.
That is not something Selig should lose sight of, even when his attention is consumed by other matters, such as having to tell the other groups bidding for the Nationals that they were not selected.
"This was painful," Selig said, "because the groups were so well-qualified and so good. I agonized over it."
Here is real agony:
Don Hooton having to spend the rest of his life telling his painful story, so other families don't go through what the Hootons have endured.
