U.S. vs. Japan: Can Bud make this idea work?

Even the empty-headed can sometimes find the smarts to take ownership of a good idea now and then, and that applies to the most know-nothing executive in the history of team sports. For Bud Selig is to intelligent leadership what Tiger Woods is to fidelity or what Bernie Madoff is to wise investing.

But the baseball tsar -- His Royal Budness -- has hit a home run with his interest in taking the sport to global heights it hasn't reached before. Selig has held talks with Ryozo Kato, commissioner of the Nippon Professional League, about a real World Series: the best team in the United States against the best team in Japan.

Not that the idea was Selig's. How could a fresh idea come from a mind that hasn't had one since the turn of the 1600s? Yet Selig deserves a tip of the ballcap for recognizing a good idea when he sees it.

And this is a good idea whose time has come: the Major Leagues vs. the Japanese League for a"world" championship.

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Facing hard truth: This 'Bud' not for you

He made mistakes -- egregious mistakes over the years. Yet his mistakes never cost Bud Selig his job, which was a pity.

So please excuse me now for standing and yelling "Hallelujah!" after hearing reports Selig is stepping aside in 2012 as baseball's czar. He should have quit 10 years earlier, because he has lorded over baseball like "Bozo the Clown."

The game should be better served under whomever the 30 owners select as Selig's replacement.

For it has been under Selig's leadership that owners and baseball fans have watched the "Steroids Era" flourish; it has been under his leadership that the ban on Pete Rose, an iconic figure in the game's history, has become a lifetime one; and it has been under Selig's leadership that the playing field has become uneven: The rich teams rule.

It is the latter that disappointed me most about Selig's reign. Not that I grant him a pass for allowing steroids to taint sacred records, but no good comes from dwelling on Selig's myopia on this subject. He's tried to bury what steroids did to the game in a hole deeper than the Pacific. It hasn't worked, not with purists. The sanctity of these records matters.

But if pressed on it, I could live with the taint on the record books if the alternative was a playing field that allowed all teams to compete. People can end all the talk about small-market teams having won here and there; the facts remain that teams with the deepest pockets are the teams that compete, from year to year, for championships.

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If McGwire is back, why isn't Rose too?

I was in Las Vegas early last month when a friend told me and some of our buddies that Pete Rose was signing autographs at a memorabilia shop inside Caesars Palace. My friend suggested we walk over there with him and get a glimpse of Rose.

I declined. I didn't want to see Rose like this, prostituting his signature on any piece of junk a baseball fans slips in front of him.

But that's the plight of a baseball pariah. Banned for life for betting on baseball, Rose finds himself in the nether regions: on the fringes of the sport yet connected with its army of baseball faithful.

I had long ago pleaded for Commissioner Bud Selig to lift Rose's ban. To me, Rose has served his sentence in purgatory. He also has confessed his mortal sins, so it is time the commissioner set him free. Selig has said nothing about Rose's case, which makes me think Rose will continue to make a living glad-handing at Caesars.

Rose has too much value to the game to be left standing on its margins, and I see no purpose in keeping him there when Selig and the rest of baseball can extend their arms to welcome Mark McGwire into the game's fold.

I have no misgivings about this at all," Selig said in an article on ESPN.com. "Mark McGwire is a very, very fine man, and the Cardinals are to be applauded."

Applauded? For what?

I can't defend what Rose did. His actions did besmirch the game in ways that border on unforgivable. Yet what Rose did palls in comparison to what McGwire, who the Cardinals hired as their hitting coach, and all the other ballplayers from the Steroids '90s did to baseball. Their deeds threatened all that's sacred about sport.

None of these wrongdoers hurt the game as much as McGwire. He was a larger-than-life hero, almost Bunyanesque, some might say: the baseball strongman who hit homers so far that some of them might still be orbiting the earth. He crushed the most hallowed record in baseball when, during the 1998 season, he broke Roger Maris' total of 61 homers in a season.

More than a few baseball fans have argued that McGwire's race to 61, a contest he waged throughout the summer with Sammy Sosa, helped Major League Baseball, still trying to mend the ill-will that grew out of the '94 strike, restore its standing in the public's eye.

McGwire's assault on the home-run record transformed him into an icon. He was the toast of the sport, the megastar of stars in the home-run era.

This is not to say his image was not celestial before the '98 season, because that would be inaccurate. McGwire had built a reputation for himself with the Athletics, teaming with 'roids-abuser Jose Canseco in the late 1980s to give the A's two of the most powerful sluggers in the game.

Yet McGwire never had a season like '98, when his bat powered the Cardinals into the playoffs. He would never have another season quite like this one either. He wouldn't need to, though; McGwire had already elite numbers as a power hitter.

A few years later, he was out of baseball. He fled the game with rumors trailing him out the ballpark. He became the human billboard for what sullied the game. His bulging biceps and power hitting were, people were saying, the result of chemical enhancements and not of night after night in the weight room.

McGwire never answered those rumors. He didn't answer them in front of Congress when he was called to Washington, D.C., in 2005 to testify. He gave the politicians vague responses about his past, saying it is the future that counted now.

After his testimony ended, he became a recluse, disappearing into the California countryside. He severed his connection to the game, and unlike Rose, McGwire didn't seem to want one -- until now.

Somehow, he persuaded Cardinals manager Tony LaRussa to hire him as hitting coach.

Why LaRussa did isn't a question I've heard answered. He's been as unclear about the reason as McGwire has been silent about his past. Not even LaRussa can claim McGwire is the best candidate for the job, because as a "pure" hitter, he wasn't much.

I do believe in giving a man a second chance. I also know men make mistakes -- every man does. What man living can throw stones at glasshouses and not have stones thrown at his?

To get that second chance, I expect a man to repent first, including McGwire. I would like to hear him own up to his mistakes; I want him to set the record straight, which he refused to do in front of Congress. I implore Bud Selig to demand McGwire does so in front of baseball.

For if that's what he demanded of Pete Rose, Selig should accept no less from McGwire.

The fact is that while Rose, baseball's all-time hits leader, compromised the game, he didn't do nearly as much harm to its integrity as McGwire. Selig shouldn't give McGwire a free pass for turning baseball into a carnival freak show and then continue to ban Rose.

Can't Selig, the guardian of what remains of the game's integrity, see how unfair that is?

Hey, Bud, on further review ...

I’m a closet purist about baseball, but even I have to admit that full use of instant replay might be the only rational option baseball officials have to save their game from the blundering men in blue.

As a former baseball writer, I sat in ballparks and watched too many games decided – or altered -- on a call the umps missed.

But no blunder was more clear – or more egregious -- than what I saw the other day in the Angels-Yankees game. Umpire Tim McClelland, his ability to reason having been left in the umpire’s locker room, decided a base-running mix-up wasn't double play but one out, a ruling that allowed a Yankee base-runner to remain on third base even after he was the first of two runners tagged out at the bag.

McClelland butchered the call, something he acknowledged postgame upon seeing a video replay. Had baseball allowed him to use replay, he would have spared himself the public ridicule of explaining the unexplainable.

For there was no disputing that video. It could have done what McClelland and fellow umps couldn’t that night: get the call right.

Replay has been a contentious topic. I have weighed in on the subject. I know baseball has never been perfect and never will be. The sport relies on humans, and humans make mistakes – plenty of mistakes. Baseball is, at its essence, a game of failure – as an Albert Pujols or a Derek Jeter 0-for-20 slump can prove.

Failures and blunders aren’t in the same ballpark, and to see games turned upside down because of the latter worries a purist, particularly when the blunder affects the team they root for.

Throw out the clowns in blue. Send in the cameras.

Now, I’m not really suggesting that umps have no place in baseball. I wouldn’t wantdronescalling balls and strikes. Technology can take away the game’s humanity. But technology does have its place – a bigger place than Commissioner Bud Selig has given it.

Grudgingly, Selig dipped the sport into the technological waters when he approved instant replay for disputed calls on balls hit along the foul lines and for home runs.

"I said at the time when replay was instituted -- It was limited to that, and it will stay that way," Selig said in a recent Wall Street Journal article. "I think the human element is vital to baseball."

To bring replay into the sport at all took a truckload of disputed calls. Selig, a purist like me, had to admit the umps missed some of them. All along, his concern, as well as mine, was replays would slow the game. But he had seen replays in pro and college football, and the systems those sports put into place had worked well.

The NBA turned to replay as well, using it for shots that raised questions about whether they beat the clock. Replay has sorted out these dispute, the game no worst for its use.

Hockey and tennis use replay, because those sports care about accuracy. They know the shortcomings of humans. Baseball needs to recognize those shortcomings.

I would never expect Selig and baseball’s leadership to be on the cutting edge of a technological change of this kind, though. On some level, they still wrestle with the merits of the designated hitter. But if their choice is between slowing the game’s pace or ensuring a bad call doesn't taint a game’s outcome, Selig & Co. has no choice but to do what other forward-thinking sports tsars have done: rely on replay.

The integrity of the game is at risk.

Lords of baseball slight Buck O'Neil again

They've forgotten you already, Buck! I figured they would. I had no doubt Bud Selig and the lords of baseball would relegate you to an afterthought, just as they did in not allowing you to enter Cooperstown along with your brethren from "black baseball." They asked you to be the face and voice of the Negro Leagues. You obliged. Once you could no longer handle those high-profile duties, Selig and the lords forgot you. What did you expect from them? For they never embraced you during your life -- not really. To all the Negro Leaguers who couldn't get into the Major Leagues, the lords felt shame about the injustices you and your black comrades faced, but injustice carries a short memory. After your death, the lords offered token reparations to these black men who outlived you. Baseball trumpeted what it did, and then, as it always does, it moved on without finishing the messy business that comes with setting a wrong right. Remember some of the words the lords used to describe you? Buck O'Neil was the "greatest goodwill ambassador" the game ever had, they told anybody who would listen. You stood tall as a symbol of what can be good about baseball -- how the sport can bury its sordid past with policies that reflect enlightened thinking. They promised that, in death, you would be their guiding light, their beacon of hope for the game's future. That was an appealing prospect. Think about it, Buck: You would always be someone the lords would celebrate. That's what the lords promised, didn't they? But the third anniversary of your passing was three days ago, and the lords didn't make mention of you. Not a single word came in memory of you, Buck. Not a single acknowledgement that baseball had reason to mourn, because it remains a lesser sport with you not part of it. I wish, though, that this slight were the only one that the lords dealt you and your Negro League brethren this year. Three months earlier, they turned the annual Civil Rights Game into a real baseball game. The lords hijacked the game from Memphis, a Southern city with a hallowed history in black baseball. And where did the lords move the game? They had Kansas City, Chicago, Philadelphia, New York, St. Louis, Detroit, Cleveland and Pittsburgh to pick from. Any one of these places would have been an excellent choice. For they are urban cities where the Negro Leagues prospered, cities where civil rights shaped America in meaningful ways. The lords didn't select any of these cities, Buck. They picked Cincinnati. Do you remember how rich the history of black baseball was there? Neither do I, Buck; neither do I. Cincinnati is a lot of things, right? Some people say the city is the original home of professional baseball. The city is not, however, a beacon of hope; it is not a place that has celebrated the contributions black men like you and Jackie Robinson made toward integration -- on and off the playing field. That fact didn't seem to matter to Selig and the lords of the game. They ignored what Cincinnati had been, a place more noted for its racial intolerance as anything else. In picking Cincinnati, they ignored what you had been to the game. They did so even in the wake of promises they made not to. You would always live on in their minds, a public figure as big as the game itself. Selig and the lords said as much, Buck. Now, three years later, you know what they said were lies. Three years don't seem a long time. But if you multiply those years by five score, you will be almost 10 years into another century, and what are the chances you will even be a footnote in baseball history then? The game has a way of remembering the men it wants to remember. The lords see to it. They trumpet Jackie and Joe D. and the Babe and Gehrig and The Say Hey Kid and Hammerin' Hank. All deserve to be saluted from their contributions to the game. Did any of them do more than you did? Did Jackie, even as he was pioneering the dismantling of the color barrier? Yes, his was a hard lot. So was yours, Buck. That's why the lords had promised to remember you forever. Then you saw how short "forever" is. Three years, Buck. That's all it took for the lords of baseball to relegate you to the backrooms -- there along with Hall of Famers Pud Galvin, Bid McPhee, Rabbit Maranville, Candy Cummings, Kid Nichols and Old Hoss Radbourn. Three years, Buck; three years. That's not forever, man.

For Pete's sake, lift Rose's ban, Bud

I’m on a listserve with sports journalists who enjoy the give and take of talking candidly about life. Maybe that’s putting what we do far too politely, because our discussions can be as brutal as the time I sat with Michigan fans when my Buckeyes went to Ann Arbor. We wage verbal warfare over our differing points of view.

Being irreverent isn't beneath us; neither is being politically incorrect nor downright goofy, such has the two- or three-day discussions on soul food and fried chicken. (Popeye’s and KFC didn’t get a mention in this freewheeling chitchat.)

One of the listserve’s topics recently was Pete Rose. We kicked around whether Rose was a better leadoff hitter than Rickey Henderson. We never did reach a consensus, though I reminded my comrades that Henderson’s speed made him far more dangerous than Rose. I made headway with that reasoning.

Yet what livened the discussion most was the position some people took about Rose’s not being in the National Baseball Hall of Fame. One person argued that how can a Hall of Fame hold any credibility if the man with the most hits in the sport’s history isn’t worthy of enshrinement.

Actually, worthiness has nothing to do with the doors to Cooperstown being closed to Rose. He’s absent from baseball’s holiest temple because he flouted its most sacred rule: no betting on the sport.

Evidence that he did brought Rose a lifetime ban in 1989, and it looks as if the ban will last his lifetime, which is a pity. Pete Rose deserves to be in the Hall of Fame.

There, I’ve said it.

For me, the position reflects a 180-degree turn. I thought Commissioner Bud Selig, or whoever has kept Rose on the banned list, might rightfully be waiting for Rose to die before lifting the ban. At one point, I agreed with Selig; his reasoning made sense.

Now, I believe Selig does baseball and its faithful a disservice by keeping the greatest goodwill ambassador the sport has ever seen ineligible for election to the Hall of Fame. For no player, banned or not, has traveled to more baseball venues, signed more people’s autograph books, shaken more hands and taken more photographs than Pete Rose, yet he remains in baseball’s purgatory.

With another season behind Rose, Selig should commute his sentence to the 20 years served. He should do so not for Pete Rose’s sake but for the men and women, boys and girls who think keeping Charlie Hustle outside the family of baseball hurts the game more than anything he did when he bet on it.

Leaking names as bad as PED abuse itself

Journalists preach about integrity and transparency, two noble principles that have long been the hallmark of the profession. Yet those principles can collude head-on with the issue of privacy.

When it does, privacy should seldom lose.

But privacy took a trouncing when journalism steamrolled it with the ongoing leaks of names of ballplayers who used performance-enhancing drugs (or steroids). Their names were supposedly on a “secret” list. Yet it seems as if each day another player whose name made the list is outed, much to the consternation of the player and his union leaders.

They had agreed to the testing under the condition players who tested positive for using PED would have their identities kept secret. The agreement also satisfied people at the highest levels of the Commissioner's Office.

Deals like these, however, are as shaky as a house built with Popsicle sticks. They fall apart because a well-kept secret is as rare as a game-ending triple play. So, of course, such a deal had no chance of holding up, and it didn’t.

Not that I have one ounce of sympathy for men like Alex Rodriquez, David Ortiz and Miguel Tejada, men whose names made the users' list. For what they did was stain the game’s integrity, and no American sport has put a higher value on its integrity than baseball.       

I do, however, think the PED abusers are owed more than a bad bargain. To leak their names cast a spotlight on them that is unwarranted. To leak their names, by all accounts, was illegal, too.

Illegality outrages journalists. They pour endless hours and as much of their newspaper’s money into setting a wrong right. Yet I have not seen a single newspaper or Internet company or newsmagazine take aim at the man (or men) who leaked these names. 

The leaker has become baseball’s version of “Deep Throat,” though comparisons between the two are as absurd as comparing Morton’s to McDonald’s. Both serve meals, but does anyone want to build a gourmet dinnerl around a bagful of Big Macs?

Somewhere out there is a journalist who sees the injustice of what has happened to these ballplayers. I would like to think that an investigative reporter for a media company with pockets deep enough will explore the matter: find the person who leaked the names. The reporter might find a Pulitzer Prize in it for him.

I hope he uncovers the person’s name not to vindicate the PED abusers but to make certain that people in positions to keep secrets, keep secrets. For to assail the behavior of Rodriguez and Ortiz on one front leaves no choice, as unseemly as it might be to people, but to do likewise on the legal front.

As bad as what the 104 PED abusers did, it pales in comparison to breaking the law in leaking names. The man who did deserves more than public scorn. A caning sounds about right.

Or, better yet, a prison cell next to Bernie Madoff.