In Defense of Bud Selig

The rage of the baseball fan is a scream of impotence. He lives and dies with his teams, his favorite sport, and he can do nothing to alter the outcome. For six months, every day can start beautifully, or end in disaster, depending on the score he's just heard. Gets worse: though he may flirt with beauty, he's married to disaster. Anyone whose team (unless it's the Yankees) has 29 chances out of 30 to end the season as a non-champion is pretty much obliged to be a pessimist, a manic-depressive, accent on the depressive. His lows have to be starker than his highs. Or as some baseball sage (Sparky Anderson?) eloquently opined: "Losing hurts more than winning feels good."

I felt pretty good about Tuesday's All-Star Game. My favorite team, the Oakland A's, had two players who acquitted themselves honorably: Miguel Tejada by getting a hit and scoring a run, Barry Zito by efficiently getting an out on three pitches. The game was exciting — considering that it was an exhibition and therefore didn't matter. It had lots of offensive artillery, a fabulous catch (Torii Hunter of Barry Bonds' sonic blast), a couple of late lead changes and, because the score was tied at 7 after nine innings, a tenth and 11th inning. A nice freebie for the fans: midnight baseball.

But then, because both managers had exhausted their allotment of pitchers (nine for the American League's Joe Torre, 10 for the National's Bob Brenly), they and Bud Selig, the Commissioner of Baseball, decided that the game had to end. Some of the fans at Miller Park, home of the Milwaukee Brewers, the team Selig used to own, angrily chanted, "Let them play!"

I said, "Let them go home." It meant that the A.L., which had lost all eight of the previous extra-inning All-Star Games, would emerge from this one with a sister-kissing tie. That's no fun in a real game, but in an All-Star exhibition, it's like your sister is J-Lo. From the fan's perspective, what's the point of the Midsummer Classic? Not who won or lost, but how many gifted multimillionaires he gets to see face the best of their peers.

Wrong! I didn't anticipate fan furor at this wanton desecration of the All-Star shrine. Since Tuesday night, the airwaves, newspaper columns and sports websites have collectively shuddered at the horror, the horror of it all. "Tie Score, and Baseball Loses," the New York Times headline mourned in the scolding tone it used to reserve for Al D'Amato. In almost every forum, the sentiment was the same. Play it again, Bud. The fans got screwed again.

Boo hoo. Nobody got to receive the first-ever Ted Williams Award. Well, that post-mortem bauble could have been given anyway, to the best damn hitter of the evening. The award doesn't require a team to have won, anyway, since its namesake never was on a team that won the World Series. (That's what he gets for spending his entire career with the Red Sox.)

Some saw more somber lessons. It's bad enough for us, this 7-7 9/11 ... but what will we tell the children? Honest. One sports-radio host, Kate Delaney of WFAN in New York, had grievance in her voice when she remarked that many ordinary Americans spend lots of money taking their families to All-Star games — and that those parents would now have to explain to their tearful tots that there would be no winner this year. I say that (1) life is like that; (2) this argument comes from the same people who complained that playoff and World Series games end too late for the kids to watch till the last out; and (3) if the little ones are sitting in a ball park at 1 a.m., their parents have some explaining to do themselves.

Baseball pundits and fanciers should be grateful. The calling of the All-Star Game gave them something new to complain about. But I was not grateful. As my own ire at this overreaction soared, I realized I would have to do something distasteful: kind-of defend Bud Selig.

Bud, Brew and Baseball: that trifecta ought to sing, in a drunken choral tenor from the Wrigley Field bleachers. But the baseball lower-archy thinks this Bud's for boooooo! They wish something could make Bud wiser. They'd like to see him in a Bud bier. For many fans, Allan H. Selig is the least popular office-holder this side of Saddam Hussein. And like George W. Bush with the Black Jack from Iraq, fans know they want to get rid of Selig, they announce elaborate plans for his forcible and expeditious removal — but the reprobate just won't go away. On second thought, maybe baseball fans aren't the President of the United States. Maybe they're the Kurds.

Bud is an ass, of course. His mien suggests a fellow both sour and baffled, like an accountant who's not used to the glare of ignominy ... though after nearly a decade in the job, he should be used to pariah status. His former, only slightly less embarrassing status — as the owner of the piss-poor (both pissy AND poor) Brewers, a team now owned by his daughter — clouds whatever partial impartiality the baseball commissioner might be expected to possess.

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