AJC > Sports > Columnists > Archives > 2007 > December > 18 > Entry
DEL.ICIO.USSalesman holds statesman’s job
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Furman Bisher
No doubt, major league baseball is robust and healthy to its financial core. It bores into the future looking neither right nor left, changing its rules as it goes. Estimate is that the two leagues took in six billion dollars last season, and that makes headlines in Fortune Magazine.
But, in reality, it is a headless monster, and has been since the day A. Bartlett Giamatti died. Tragedy is that Giamatti was able to serve only 154 days.
Here was a man who was as much a curator of the game as he was commissioner. Here was a man who preferred to be commissioner of baseball rather than president of Yale University.
He was your kind of commissioner. He preferred real grass to artificial, he disliked the designated hitter, preferred day games to night and wooden bats to the steelies colleges use.
If you were looking for a man to care for your game, here he was, Bart Giamatti.
He had exercised his authority by putting the ban on Pete Rose, but nine days later he died. He was only 51.
He had been moving ahead with grace. The deputy commissioner by Giamatti’s own choice, Fay Vincent, succeeded him, but the owners were lying in wait. He took his authority seriously. He was commissioner, behaved like a commissioner.
Baseball politics began to bore in. He put a ban on George Steinbrenner. He got cross-legged with the owners over divisional alignment - the Cubs and Cardinals were set up to be in the Eastern Division, Atlanta and the Reds in the West. Made no geographical sense to him. The air thickened, Vincent’s back stiffened, and in time he finally threw in the towel. The owners finally had their game back and they’ve been jacking it around ever since.
They had their own insurance policy right in their midst. They picked one of their own, the one least likely to make waves, and made him pseudo-commissioner. The original title was “interim,” but it was one of the longest interims on record. Allan (Bud) Selig was a car salesman who also owned the Milwaukee Brewers, but it is on record in Wisconsin that the Brewers eventually became the property of his daughter.
So baseball sailed merrily along. A World Series was canceled, the All-Star Game was remodeled, all roads led to the commissioner’s office. Bud Selig became every owner’s pal. No fuss-budget protector of the game to deal with.
Now, I don’t know that that includes the road paved with steroids, and other such body pollutants. I don’t know that any commissioner could have foreseen that, or that he could have intervened. Somehow, though, I have a feeling that Giamatti, and later Vincent, might have sensed it coming and moved into a preventive mode. Giamatti himself had such a grip on his place in the baseball corporation, and enjoyed such popularity with the owners, that it might have been a different kind of game. He moved with diplomacy. Vincent tried to rule with an iron hand, and the contrast created rebellion.
Bud Selig now finds himself in a whirl of contamination. He appointed a senator to check out the drug scourge in the major leagues, and George Mitchell came up with a boatload. Two major league power hitters have come clean, Jose Canseco and Jason Giambi.
Ah, but Mitchell Report has broken the ice. Not just some middle reliever or closer, but the big cheese himself, Roger Clemens. Andy Pettitte, friend and neighbor, has made a confession, and now Clemens is on an island of his own.
He’ll take each case at a time, the commissioner says, and that’s one that arouses deepening curiosity. It leaves him a hanging target, which way to go and how? Too late to call off the senator now, even if his major sources appear to be no more than shady clubhouse figures, most important of whom has been Clemens’ personal trainer.
Oops, Clemens just issued a denial.
Roger and out.
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