Bud Selig – The Statue

The good people of the city of Milwaukee are going to erect a statue at Miller Park to honor MLB Commissioner Bud Selig. This according to a recent article by the world wide leader in sports ESPN.  The statue will be designed by the same guy who designed the current statues at Miller Park for Hall of Famers Henry Aaron and Robin Yount.

Let me say that again.  Bud Selig.  Henry Aaron.  Robin Yount.  Statues at Miller Park.  Bud Selig? Mentioned in the same breath as Henry Aaron?

The baseball gods are not smiling.

I can see it now.  Children of all ages will flock to Miller Park to see the Bud Selig monument.  Oh, they will come, and they will hand over their money.  Oh, wait, now I’m sullying Field of Dreams.  Never mind.

So, what precisely has Bud Selig done to deserve such an honor?

He bought the Seattle Pilots from bankruptcy court and moved them to Milwaukee.  In other words, he did an Al Davis.  Except for the fact that Seattle got another team almost immediately, I am sure the fine folks from Seattle are not too fond of Bud.

The owners love him.  Why wouldn’t they?  He’s one of them.  What in the wide world of sports is going on here?  An owner named commissioner?  Mr. Fox, the henhouse is right over there.  Step right in.

He presided over tremendous growth at a time when sports has gone nuts in the US of A.  So has football, so has basketball, hockey and NASCAR.  I would opine that even though the sports financial growth and fan attendance has increased during his tenure as Commish the love of the game has decreased tremendously.

Why?  Well, Bud Selig presided over the game while the unthinkable happened in 1994.  The World Series was cancelled.  The World Series was cancelled on his watch due to labor management issues.  I have to repeat that one more time.  The World Series was cancelled on his watch.

Because of this baseball was totally screwed and lifelong fans were turning away in droves, the steroid era was ushered in.  He used steroids to boost the game as much as or more than the players did.  Remember the commercial, Chicks Dig the Long Ball? Yeah, the long ball put butts in seats.  But really only for the casual fan who would rather see a 15-14 mashing than a 1-0 classic.

He sat idly by and let Donald Fehr, the players union president, bully him into no steroids testing in the majors until 2004.

In congressional hearings, he stammers more in one meeting than Ronald Reagan and Jimmy Stewart did in their whole careers combined.  I’ve never seen him be succinct and to the point.  Do you know how you can tell when Bud Selig is lying?  His lips are moving.

He fiddled while the steroid era burned.  The sport is in a mess because of it and there’s no way out of it.  The Hall of Fame is sullied.  All records broken in the era are sullied. All post season awards as well.

We want our heroes back.  And they ain’t coming back.  Everyone is suspect.  And that happened on Bud’s watch.

Remember way back in the day when people erected monuments and statues to those heroes?  Bud Selig is no hero in my book.

The only reason to erect a statue in Bud’s likeness is so that the pigeons have a place to go.