On Wednesday, in United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the federal government's seizure of computer files which implicated 104 major league players as steroids users violated those players' Forth Amendment rights. The decision sets the table for a possible review by the United States Supreme Court and it may also prove to be a game-changer as to whether baseball fans ever learn the identities of all 104 names.
When commissioner Bud Selig announced the No. 7 selection of the 2009 Major League Baseball draft, the Braves' pick of Vanderbilt lefthanded pitcher Mike Minor, the audience in MLB Network's Studio 42 erupted so heartily that Selig quipped from the podium, "He must be good, he brought his own cheering section."
By March 30, 2006, baseball commissioner Bud Selig, against the advice of many of his closest advisers, knew he had to take the risk of springing open the lid to the Pandora's box of the sport. It had been eight years since an Associated Press reporter saw andro in Mark McGwire's locker (the moment Selig described as his epiphany when it came to performance-enhancing drugs in baseball), five years since Selig pushed through a drug-testing program for minor leaguers, and three years since the major leagues adopted such tests. But when SI published an excerpt from Game of Shadows that March, yet another signal that the story and the discovery of steroids in baseball were not going to stop, Selig knew baseball could not keep running from its past.
I suppose lots of fathers have their own cat's-in-the-cradle-and-the-silver-spoon moment.* Mine came on Oct. 31, 2007, in Nagoya, Japan. That, of course, was Halloween. And, of course, because I was trying to show more intensity in Nagoya, Japan, I was not back home in Kansas City, Mo., when my young daughters were going door to door and getting matchbox size Krackel bars and those little Alka-Seltzer two-packs of SweeTarts.
We've had closers and setup men, LOOGYs (lefty one out guys) and the occasional ROOGY. So it seems fitting that the commissioner presiding over baseball's era of extreme specialization also is most effective in a limited role.
1. Give credit to commissioner Bud Selig and the umpires working World Series Game 5. They did their best to get the game played, given the weather forecast information available to them, made the right call to suspend the game when conditions grew unplayable -- the pelting rain continued for hours -- and sent people home quickly without wasting time trying to divine when the next "window" might be available to resume play. Too often we jump on baseball when things don't go according to script. But Selig has stepped up twice in this World Series with the right response to rain issues. He insisted Game 3 be played, even with a 10:06 p.m. start time after a 91-minute delay, in part because he knew of the terrible conditions forecast for Tuesday, the next available off day. The game was played in fine weather and field conditions.
MILWAUKEE -- Longtime beloved Brewers announcer Bob Uecker threw out the first ball for the first playoff game here in a generation, baseball commissioner Bud Selig spoke emotionally about his long-ago days as Brewers owner, then the current Brew Crew capped the great night by raising the quaint and nostalgic notion that they could possibly repeat their great playoff comeback of 1982.
Baseball steps forward on Thursday, flailing around a little as baseball always does with change, when instant replay is introduced for the first time in the game's long, well-chronicled history. And it's hard to argue that this isn't a good move for the grand but sometimes stodgy old game. Really, who's not for getting calls right?
The age of instant replay is dawning. Major league owners, with approval from the umpires and players, intend to begin using replay on so-called boundary calls before the year ends, allowing the next World Series to be the first to offer umpires technological help. It stands to be the most significant rules change since the addition of the designated hitter in 1973.
NEW YORK -- A farce was about to break out in the almost endless All-Star Game.
On Wednesday, in United States v. Comprehensive Drug Testing, the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit held that the federal government's seizure of computer files which implicated 104 major league players as steroids users violated those players' Forth Amendment rights. The decision sets the table for a possible review by the United States Supreme Court and it may also prove to be a game-changer as to whether baseball fans ever learn the identities of all 104 names.
When commissioner Bud Selig announced the No. 7 selection of the 2009 Major League Baseball draft, the Braves' pick of Vanderbilt lefthanded pitcher Mike Minor, the audience in MLB Network's Studio 42 erupted so heartily that Selig quipped from the podium, "He must be good, he brought his own cheering section."
By March 30, 2006, baseball commissioner Bud Selig, against the advice of many of his closest advisers, knew he had to take the risk of springing open the lid to the Pandora's box of the sport. It had been eight years since an Associated Press reporter saw andro in Mark McGwire's locker (the moment Selig described as his epiphany when it came to performance-enhancing drugs in baseball), five years since Selig pushed through a drug-testing program for minor leaguers, and three years since the major leagues adopted such tests. But when SI published an excerpt from Game of Shadows that March, yet another signal that the story and the discovery of steroids in baseball were not going to stop, Selig knew baseball could not keep running from its past.
I suppose lots of fathers have their own cat's-in-the-cradle-and-the-silver-spoon moment.* Mine came on Oct. 31, 2007, in Nagoya, Japan. That, of course, was Halloween. And, of course, because I was trying to show more intensity in Nagoya, Japan, I was not back home in Kansas City, Mo., when my young daughters were going door to door and getting matchbox size Krackel bars and those little Alka-Seltzer two-packs of SweeTarts.
We've had closers and setup men, LOOGYs (lefty one out guys) and the occasional ROOGY. So it seems fitting that the commissioner presiding over baseball's era of extreme specialization also is most effective in a limited role.
1. Give credit to commissioner Bud Selig and the umpires working World Series Game 5. They did their best to get the game played, given the weather forecast information available to them, made the right call to suspend the game when conditions grew unplayable -- the pelting rain continued for hours -- and sent people home quickly without wasting time trying to divine when the next "window" might be available to resume play. Too often we jump on baseball when things don't go according to script. But Selig has stepped up twice in this World Series with the right response to rain issues. He insisted Game 3 be played, even with a 10:06 p.m. start time after a 91-minute delay, in part because he knew of the terrible conditions forecast for Tuesday, the next available off day. The game was played in fine weather and field conditions.
MILWAUKEE -- Longtime beloved Brewers announcer Bob Uecker threw out the first ball for the first playoff game here in a generation, baseball commissioner Bud Selig spoke emotionally about his long-ago days as Brewers owner, then the current Brew Crew capped the great night by raising the quaint and nostalgic notion that they could possibly repeat their great playoff comeback of 1982.
Baseball steps forward on Thursday, flailing around a little as baseball always does with change, when instant replay is introduced for the first time in the game's long, well-chronicled history. And it's hard to argue that this isn't a good move for the grand but sometimes stodgy old game. Really, who's not for getting calls right?
The age of instant replay is dawning. Major league owners, with approval from the umpires and players, intend to begin using replay on so-called boundary calls before the year ends, allowing the next World Series to be the first to offer umpires technological help. It stands to be the most significant rules change since the addition of the designated hitter in 1973.
NEW YORK -- A farce was about to break out in the almost endless All-Star Game.
NEW YORK -- Baseball commissioner Bud Selig admitted he worried about Tuesday night's long-running All-Star Game dragging even deeper into extra innings, and the All-Star managers running out of pitchers. But Selig didn't worry that there might be a second tied All-Star game under his watch. That's because he decreed that there would be no ties.
There is a scourge upon the otherwise robust game that commissioner Bud Selig must do something about quickly. No, it's not the Seattle Mariners, the most wasteful $110 million ever spent in baseball. It is the daily danger caused by broken maple bats. Baseball has a full-blown safety threat on its hands and the commissioner, who needs the cooperation of the players association to address it, is confronted with an historically important decision.
It was a bad week for umpires, a bad week for tradition and a bad week for this increasingly strange affinity in some corners that getting a call wrong -- and not a judgment call, but a nuts-and-bolts call -- is somehow part of the mystique of baseball that ought to be preserved. In a six-day span in three ballparks, umpires ruled four times that a home run was not a home run, even though the rest of us, with the benefit of a second look, knew quickly and certainly that they were legit dingers. How exactly is this good for baseball?
Professional baseball is caught again, as it too often is, in a place between getting it done right and getting it done quickly. So baseball is doing what it always does: It's holding some meetings.
Prospective Cubs owner Mark Cuban got as far as the front row last week in Wrigley. But although it would be a treat to see the Dallas Mavericks' outspoken owner also own baseball's beloved 99-year loser, he still may never get any closer to the owner's box than he was the other day.
Andy Pettitte, Roger Clemens, Miguel Tejada and the vast majority of the 89 players mentioned in the Mitchell Report will not be suspended by Major League Baseball for their alleged steroid and HGH transgressions, and it remains possible that none of the 89 players will be banned, SI.com has learned.
Also in this column: • Theories on the Santana delay • Thoughts on Selig's extension • More news and notes
One of the controversies in the wake of Tuesday's Congressional hearing is over the existence of a viable test for human growth hormone. Commissioner Bud Selig told the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that he would support a test for HGH "when a valid, commercially available and practical test for HGH becomes reality, regardless of whether the test is based on blood or urine."
Major League Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig received a three-year extension through 2012 at the owner's meetings in Scottsdale, Ariz., today. Selig, 73, appeared before Congress this week to testify about the Mitchell Report, which he authorized to examine the history of steroids in baseball.
WASHINGTON -- Major League Baseball is toeing the foul line. Members of the congressional Committee on Oversight and Government Reform are still far from convinced that MLB can wage a successful, long-term war on performance-enhancing drugs, but the consensus among committee members following Tuesday's hearing was that they heard just enough so that legislative intervention will not be immediately forthcoming.
Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, union head Donald Fehr and former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell testified about baseball's steroids issue before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Tuesday. SI.com's Michael McCann answers the key questions.
In the opener of Congress' baseball/steroids doubleheader, baseball commissioner Bud Selig, union head Donald Fehr and former Senate majority leader George Mitchell are to testify before the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform on Tuesday. SI.com's Michael McCann answers the key questions.
When Bud Selig and Don Fehr once again face up to Congress next week, the occasion won't hold anywhere near the drama and intrigue that next month's high-stakes, finger-pointing, lawyered-up Capitol Hill showdown between pitching great Roger Clemens and his one-time trainer, Brian McNamee, promises.
Only through a tiny keyhole could George Mitchell view the dimly lit room of performance-enhancing drugs in baseball, his scope constricted by a stiff code of silence among union members and a drug policy crafted and administered by the commissioner's office and the union to be opaque where convenient rather than fully transparent. Even thus blinkered, the former U.S. senator got as roguishly ugly a glimpse of baseball as ever has been seen.
After three news conferences, almost 80 named players, more than 300 pages and just one brave soul in an entire union, what are we to make of the Mitchell Report? Glad you asked. Here's the nuts and bolts of it.
If baseball commissioner Bud Selig was hurt by the claim in Sen. George Mitchell's report that Selig didn't respond quickly enough to the sport's steroid problem, it certainly didn't dissuade Selig from embracing almost every detail of Mitchell's report.
At this point, now that George Mitchell has finished administering baseball's public and self-appointed flagellation, the easy thing for Bud Selig to do would be to head back to his office, lick his wounds and look forward to making more gobs of money next season. Discipline the drug cheats named in Mitchell's voluminous report? Drag out this thing more? What good would that do? Can't we all just move along already?
With the release of the Mitchell Report today, here are some key legal questions facing Major League Baseball and the players named in the report.
Twenty months after former Maine Senator and statesman George Mitchell accepted the responsibility to investigate baseball's steroid problem, he is set to release his findings at a 2 p.m. news conference on Thursday. Early indications are that the long-awaited Mitchell Report will be a bombshell, with somewhere in the neighborhood of 50 to 70 players to be named as steroid users, according to several high-ranking team officials.
We have seen, you have to think, the last of Barry Bonds on a baseball field. Who would touch him now? Who would hire a tainted slugger mired in legal quicksand, facing a high-profile trial with a chance of a decent-sized prison term at the end of it? Who would fork over millions of dollars for an aging and bitter pariah who, even if he clears all those legal hurdles, may yet get stomped on by the big boot of baseball's commissioner?
Commissioner Bud Selig, a staunch opponent of instant replay in baseball, will reconsider its place in the game after baseball general managers voted 25-5 in favor of exploring its use on a limited basis. Jimmie Lee Solomon, executive vice president of baseball operations, said Selig's position on replay "seems to have softened," keeping it on track to eventually be presented to owners, players and umpires for approval.
Regarding your NL MVP candidates, how about those two guys in Florida? Yes, the Marlins are not in playoff contention, but it's hard to ignore Hanley Ramirez and Miguel Cabrera, especially considering they're first and second, respectively, in the NL in VORP, and rank in the top three in Runs Created. It looks like you went through all the playoff-contending teams, and chose a "good" player from each. Let me ask you: If Cabrera were on a playoff-contender this season, would there be any doubt who the MVP was? -- Carolyn, Boca Raton, Fla.
Also in this column: • Yankees, D-Rays sign top picks • Final Bonds chase report card • Padres fail to get Igawa • More news and notes
Also in this column: • Glavine won't be last to 300 • Work ethic gives A-Rod shot • Oakland's promise to Piazza • More news and notes
In a manner that can only be described as "grudging," Bud Selig on Tuesday did what he should have done three months ago, ending discussion of whether he would attend Barry Bonds' pursuit of the all-time home run mark with a press release and a flight to San Francisco. As is his wont, Selig put his personal feelings ahead of the game's best interest, choosing to issue a release that neither honored Bonds nor the moment, and put the controversy that surrounds Bonds -- his alleged use of performance-enhancing substances -- front and center.
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) -- Baseball commissioner Bud Selig was at home watching Barry Bonds and the Giants play when he decided he needed to be at the ballpark to see San Francisco slugger break Hank Aaron's career home run record.
Sports fans have considerable forbearance. Year after year they endure escalating ticket prices, the abomination known as seat licensing and the implied mandate that taxpayers should foot the bill for the new stadium or arena that will absolutely revive downtown. They watch their favorite players come and go through free agency and trades, and see their managers and coaches get shuffled like playing cards. They cringe as the news crawl on their screen reports a heinous transgression committed by their son's hero, whose replica jersey just lightened their wallet considerably. But they come back, because the games matter to them, and because sports fosters a sense of hope.
SAN FRANCISCO -- The oh-so-obvious dance of discomfort between soon-to-be all-time home run champ Barry Bonds and baseball commissioner Bud Selig continues.
Bud Selig has lived through the cancellation of a World Series, an embarrassing All-Star tie in his hometown and a couple of feet-to-the-fire grillings on Capitol Hill. He's been raked over the public-opinion coals for everything from his willingness to kill two franchises -- that brain burp he called "contraction" -- to his propensity for bad haircuts. Old-time lovers of baseball loathe him for tinkering with the game. Others hold him responsible for baseball's slide into maybe the biggest scandal in its existence.
Bud Selig, in a Humphrey Bogart kind of way, is putting the screws to Jason Giambi. That might sound like some 1940s private eye flick, complete with the good guys in fedoras and Giambi under the hot glare of an interrogation lamp. But truth be told, it's probably not that far off.
Commissioner Bud Selig may be the public face of Major League Baseball, but Bob DuPuy is the man behind the scenes getting things done. As president and COO, DuPuy, 60, who joined the league in 199...
Interleague play, that bane of baseball purists, that favorite of millions of fans, that Bud Selig baby and money-making machine, steps briefly into the light this week. More interleague fun -- much, much more of it -- is to come in June.
Also in this column: • Bonds a fan of A-Rod • Hunter's gift gaffe • More news and notes
Yankees shortstop Derek Jeter has an idea that seems to make sense, especially after a trying first week in baseball in which the Indians had seven games either snowed out or relocated to a different time zone, stars such as Johnny Damon, Hideki Matsui and Victor Martinez were hurt trying to play baseball in football weather, and fans, when they bothered to show up at all, sat through miserable conditions to watch something that did not pass for major league-quality baseball.
Also in this column: • Selig's golden parachute • Moreno a big fan of A-Rod • More news and notes
Baseball commissioner Bud Selig has been making his rounds at Spring Training camps in the past few weeks, and his unwavering message is this: The Game is Good.
Bud Selig's worst recurring nightmare is entering its fourth season: a man with connections to a federal steroid investigation, who faces the possibility of indictment, is the face of baseball and is on the cusp of breaking one of the game's most cherished records.
Baseball commissioner Bud Selig, who picks up an award or honor almost every other week now, recently was named Sports Executive of the Year by the Sports Business Journal. And no one even thought about snickering.
If he's ever inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame, Bud Selig would be one of my least favorite honorees. But he certainly would be a worthy one.
It's pleasingly difficult to remember when Major League Baseball seemed to be in a perpetual state of labor war.
What we've got here, to quote the noted labor economist Yogi Berra, is deja vu all over again. Major League Baseball is on the brink of its ninth labor war since 1972, with owners and players singi...
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