Baseball commissioner Bud Selig is seriously considering reinstatement for banished former player Pete Rose.

Lobbying for the move began five years ago but died when Selig became convinced Rose was not “reconfiguring” his life, the newspaper report said, part of the late commissioner Bart Giamatti’s demands on Rose when he was ruled ineligible.

“I think a lot of the guys feel that it’s been 20 years now for Pete, and would lean toward leniency and time served,” an unnamed Hall of Famer said, according to the Daily News. “If he had admitted it in the first place and apologized way back then, he’d probably be in the Hall by now.”
If Rose were to become eligible, it stands to reason he would have to be voted into the Hall of Fame by the 65 living members that make up the Veterans Committee.

Inclusion on the writers’ ballot expires after 15 years, but Rose has never appeared on their ballot except by write-in.

“I know there are still guys who feel strongly against him,” said another Hall of Famer, according to the report. “And I don’t know if that would change even if Selig clears him.”

This might be like comparing apples to oranges, but to me, players using steroids is 10 times worse than betting on baseball when you’re a manager. I’m not justifying what Rose did, but compared to what these selfish players did in the steroid era, “Charlie Hustle” should get a reprieve.

Gambling never helped Rose accomplish what he did on the field. Was he a scumbag for gambling on games he was managing? Yes. But he would be getting into the Hall of Fame based on what he accomplished as a player, which was (in short) quite a lot.

Bud Selig wants a rule changed that allows suspended MLB players to sharpen up in the minor leagues before their suspensions are over. The latest example of this rule came this year when outfielder Manny Ramirez was able to play in the Dodgers’ minor league system before his 50-game suspension for testing positive for a banned substance was up.

“I believe that should be changed,” Selig said Tuesday during a one-hour question-and-answer session with the Baseball Writers’ Association of America. “Their logic was OK — look, guys get hurt, they can go out on rehab, and so on and so forth. But I think that’s something we need to really change in the next labor negotiation.”

The current rules are in place through December 2011. Rob Manfred, baseball’s executive vice president of labor relations, said management will not ask for a rules change before then.
“I’ll let them work that out. I don’t want to do our negotiating here,” Selig said. “But it’s 50 games and then go do what you got to do to get back into [shape].”

For one of the first times in the history of my existence, I actually agree with Bud the Slug.

If a player is suspended, he should have to serve the full length of that suspension before he’s allowed to partake in baseball on the major or minor league level. I was vilified by a couple of readers in this article for criticizing this rule, but it’s amazing how people don’t find a player being allowed to sharpen up in the minors (while they’re suspended mind you) a ridiculous concept. I understand that it’s baseball’s rule, but it’s a dumb freaking rule.

It’s like sending a kid to time out in the corner for 15 minutes, but for the last five minutes, he gets to play with Legos so that he’s ready to get back to building a Lego house with the other kids after his 15 minutes have been served.

According to Phil Rogers of the Chicago Tribune, baseball commissioner Bud Selig is upset that names from the 2003 list of players who tested positive for banned substances are being leaked to the media.

Apparently Selig and others around Major League Baseball believe that a lawyer with the U.S. Attorney’s office (either past or present) ignored a court seal in order to give Sammy Sosa’s name to Michael S. Schmidt of the New York Daily News, who reported yesterday that the slugger was on the ’03 list.

I don’t blame Selig for being peeved that someone is leaking names that were supposed to be kept anonymous. After all, the only reason the player’s union agreed to the ’03 drug testing was because the players who tested positive wouldn’t be punished and because their names would never be released.

That said – give…me…a…break. If Selig wants to be upset with anything, how about he get upset with himself, the owners and the player’s union that allowed us to get to this point. He turned a blind eye to the steroid issue and now he wants to play victim. I guess he has to put on this little front about being mad about the leaks in efforts to settle down the player’s union, but he has nobody to blame but himself for this mess.

What Selig should do is go back on his word to the player’s union and release the rest of the 104 names on that 2003 list before the media does. A-Rod and Sosa’s names have already been released – how much longer until more names are announced? If Selig thinks that the media is going to stop digging, he has another thing coming. He may anger the players and the union by releasing the names, but it’s well past time for people to start taking responsibility for what has happened to the game of baseball.

Joe Posnanski of SI.com wrote an interesting piece about why the MLB draft doesn’t work as a popular television event.

1. The vast majority of players drafted will never get close to the big leagues. Take the 1994 draft … 15 years ago. There were 287 players taken in the first 10 rounds, and 190 of them — two thirds — did not get a single at-bat or throw a single pitch in the big leagues.

2. Even the players who DO make it will not make it for years. If the NFL Draft is, as the cliché goes, like getting presents on Christmas morning, well, the baseball draft is like getting a savings bond from your grandmother that will mature when you turn 18.

I love the analogy Posnanski used in his second point.

Yesterday I DVR’d the MLB draft and was actually looking forward to watching it. The MLB Network had hyped the event up for a couple of weeks and being a Giants fan, I was excited to see who’d they take at pick No. 6.

But once Bud Selig (who was awful, by the way) read Zack Wheeler’s name at pick six, I realized that I could care less about the rest of the first round. Unless you’ve lived under a rock the past couple weeks, you knew that the Nationals were going to take San Diego State pitcher Stephen Strasburg with the top pick and there was a good chance the Mariners would select North Carolina’s Dustin Ackley (arguably the best position player in the draft) at No. 2. So outside of hearing whom your favorite team picked, there wasn’t much excitement to the draft.

Posnanski is right – the MLB draft as a televised event doesn’t work. I applaud MLB for trying to make the event even a smidgen as popular as the NFL draft, but there just isn’t enough quality substance in the end. As Posnanski points out, most (and that’s not an exaggeration) of the players drafted in the first couple of rounds will never see the big leagues and even if they do, as a fan you have to wait three to four years before that happens. By that time, most casual fans have forgotten where those players came from.

Again, I think it’s great that baseball has embraced the idea of making the draft more of an event. But the reality is that I would rather watch the entire third round of the NFL draft than just one pick in the first round of the MLB draft. And I think others feel the same way.

Miguel Tejada was sentenced to one year of probation for misleading Congress about the use of performance-enhancing drugs. Richard Justice of the Houston Chronicle writes that Tejada only regrets getting caught.

Nice going, Miggy. Way to represent The Good Guys.

Incidentally, who decided a $5,000 fine was any way to punish a guy making $13 million? Couldn’t the feds have ordered Tejada to pay whatever the government spent proving he’s a liar?

Anyway, about eight seconds after Tejada’s plea-bargain agreement was announced, the Astros issued a statement saying how happy they were to have this whole thing behind them.

In other words, let’s all forget that this guy is a cheat and that we got fleeced on this trade.
As for Tejada, he hasn’t exactly been forthright. He has confessed to what he got caught doing and nothing more. And there appears to be more there.

He played the contrite card when he showed up at spring training until someone asked about his use of steroids and HGH.

He bristled and said he wasn’t going to talk about it. Now that’s coming clean.

He doesn’t have to admit anything. The Mitchell Report does it for him. It’s right there on page 201 along with photo copies of checks to ex-teammate Adam Piatt for $3,100 and $3,200.
Piatt said he provided Tejada with steroids and human growth hormone, but he has no way of knowing if Tejada actually used the stuff.

Unfortunately Justice is right and even more unfortunate is that this is the way it’s going to be when it comes to the steroid era in baseball. The players that used will deny or only own up to what they were caught with. The owners will continue to look the other way and hide under the umbrella that is Bud Selig. And Selig will continue to act like the victim in all of this.

The players, owners and Selig will continue to ask to move on. And eventually, the fans will probably oblige because we’re not going to stop going to the parks.

“I don’t want to hear the commissioner turned a blind eye to this or he didn’t care about it,” Selig said. “That annoys the you-know-what out of me. You bet I’m sensitive to the criticism. The reason I’m so frustrated is, if you look at our whole body of work, I think we’ve come farther than anyone ever dreamed possible.”

“I’m not sure I would have done anything differently,” Selig said. “A lot of people say we should have done this or that, and I understand that. They ask me, ‘How could you not know?’ and I guess in the retrospect of history, that’s not an unfair question. But we learned and we’ve done something about it. When I look back at where we were in ‘98 and where we are today, I’m proud of the progress we’ve made.”

Selig said he pushed for a more stringent drug policy during the labor negotiations of 2002 but ultimately settled for a watered-down version out of fear that the players association would force another work stoppage.

“Starting in 1995, I tried to institute a steroid policy,” Selig said. “Needless to say, it was met with strong resistance. We were fought by the union every step of the way.”

Bud Selig the victim – now that’s rich.

Just like we question how athletes don’t know what form of steroids they took, we should continue to question how Bud the Slug didn’t know that players in his league were using performance-enhancing drugs right under his nose. A parent isn’t going to know about every little thing hiding in their teenager’s room and Selig isn’t going to know about what every player in every clubhouse is taking.

But to hear him try and spin what has happened over the past decade into a positive is laughable. He knew something was going on, but he waited until the situation grew so big that he couldn’t hide it in his back pocket anymore to say something. Now he wants all of us to look at the progress he and baseball has made since 1998? Come on. He should have squashed this bug from the beginning, but instead he saw that home runs equaled asses in the seats and he took a calculated risk that this issue would never blow up the way it has.

But Selig does have a point – the blame needs to be spread out. The players union felt that steroid testing was a violation of the privacy of players. They created an unnecessary shit storm by allowing players to essentially take whatever they wanted without fear of punishment. The union tried to protect the prisoners and the prisoners turned around and started running the asylum.

And where are the owners in all of this? If Selig wasn’t ready to make a better stand at the top, the owners should have done something on the ground floor. But they too were lining their pockets, so they turned a blind eye as well. They also get the luxury of hiding behind Selig as he takes most of the criticism on this issue from the media and fans.

The fact of the matter is that Bud the Slug, the players, the players union and the owners are all at fault for this. All of them should be held accountable but instead, we get to hear Selig talk about how this wasn’t his fault and how players like A-Rod shamed the game. Please.

For the first time Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig has said he would consider a move to strip Barry Bonds of his record for all-time home runs, according to a report.

Christine Brennan of USA Today called on Selig to alter baseball’s record book and reinstate Aaron as the official record-holder for the most career home runs. Aaron hit 755 in 23 seasons. Bonds broke Aaron’s record in 2007, and with his career seemingly over, he has 762 in 22 seasons.

In a telephone interview with Brennan on Wednesday, Selig said of altering the record book: “Once you start tinkering, you can create more problems. But I’m not dismissing it. I’m concerned. I’d like to get more evidence.”

Attempts to reach Selig and Aaron on Thursday evening were unsuccessful.

Not to rain on anyone’s parade here because there’s nothing I’d love to see more than the home run title go back to its rightful owner, but Selig can’t do anything to the record with Bonds never officially being tied to steroids. We can speculate all we want, but Bonds has never officially tested positive for any performance-enhancing drug and even if he did, there was no penalty against players using steroids until 2004. (We can all thank the previously mentioned Bud Selig for that.)

That said, if Selig were able to reinstate Hammerin’ Hank as the rightful owner of the home run record, then maybe it would be a small step in bringing purity back to the game of baseball, which has been dragged through the mud over the past decade. Then again, with this seemingly daunting task left in Selig’s hands, we can probably forget about the record ever going back under Aaron’s name.