"ESPN LETS BUD INJECT 'ROID SPIN"--NY Post

March 30, 2008 -- "Either Bud Selig has become deep-end delusional, or he thinks we have.

Either ESPN doesn't know a stunning story when it's dropped into its lap, or its business with MLB prevents it from pointing to Selig with the cynicism and derision he has earned.

In the fourth inning

• of MLB's The Price Is Right Opening Day from Japan, Tuesday morning,

Selig entered ESPN's booth and spoke as if he recently reached down and with his firm hand, pulled baseball from the depths of degradation. He spoke as if his is not-a-minute-too-late heroism rescued big league baseball from forever being stained by a drug scandal.

Not only did Selig portray himself as a dogged crime hound, way ahead of the pack as he relentlessly pursued the scent, the uninitiated would have thought that he must be the fellow who recently replaced the Commissioner who fell asleep at the wheel.

• Selig actually congratulated himself for assigning the Mitchell Report. "You bet I'd do it again!" he proudly crowed.

Was it lost on Selig that George Mitchell concluded it was the profit-minded neglect of MLB's leadership that allowed steroids and human growth hormone to become epidemic?

• Or was Selig hoping we wouldn't know any better?

If Selig had been so resolute and so altruistic, the past dozen years,

• there wouldn't have been a need for The Mitchell Report.

"Steroids are not a baseball problem, they're a societal problem," Selig declared to Gary Thorne and Steve Phillips. "But we dealt with it."

Yeah, Selig came, he saw, he conquered!

• It was his idea to rid baseball of drugs!

Yeah, he dealt with it. He allowed the team owners to jack-up ticket prices when the anabolic sluggers hit town....

• Those Congressional sessions, grand juries and federal indictments

• are all monuments to just how well Selig dealt with it.

Steroids are a societal problem? Well, no fooling. But for a dozen years, while the society Selig was charged to protect muscled up on drugs, he did nothing but admire the cash receipts.

Yeah, Selig dealt with it so well that when Thorne brought up the issue Tuesday, he had to preface it with his regrets for having to bring it up. And then Thorne, once a practicing lawyer, no less, allowed Selig to paint himself as the sheriff who rushed in, guns blazing, to drive the outlaws out of Dodge.

"We dealt with it." For more than a dozen years everyone watched this hole form. And as it grew huge, so big that you couldn't miss it, what did the Commissioner of Baseball do about that hole? He looked into it."

• From NY Post by Phil Mushnick, "ESPN lets Bud Inject 'Roid Spin," 3/30/08

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