An Asterisk for Selig
This article is from the archive of The New York Sun before the launch of its new website in 2022. The Sun has neither altered nor updated such articles but will seek to correct any errors, mis-categorizations or other problems introduced during transfer.

I’t’s not only very premature, it’s very unfair,” said the commissioner of baseball. “None of this should ever diminish from Mark McGwire’s extraordinary season.”
This was back in 1998, when the world was falling in love again with baseball through the exploits of the All-American slugger. Bud Selig was not going to allow something as trivial as a legalized steroid called androstenedione to spoil the reconciliation.
So important to baseball was McGwire’s pursuit of one of the cherished single-season home run record, that Selig was moved to issue a joint statement with his ostensible archenemy, Donald Fehr, in defense of better hitting through anabolics.
“The substances in question are available over the counter and are not regulated by the Food and Drug Administration,” the joint statement read. “In view of these facts, it seems inappropriate that such reports should overshadow the accomplishments of players such as Mark McGwire.”
Added Gene Orza, lawyer for the players association: “This is a legal substance. [Players] take aspirin. It seems terribly unfair to Mark McGwire to be discussing it at this time.”
Not long afterward, the FDA classified andro as a full-blown steroid and ordered it removed from the shelves of health-food stores, where impressionable and insecure teenagers had been stocking up on it to be like Big Mac. Baseball was forced to pull its head out of the sand and follow the lead of the IOC and the NFL, which banned andro long before the FDA did.
But still, the problem was out there, and Selig, Fehr, and Orza were doing nothing to stop it. Worse, they encouraged it, simply by looking the other way.
In 2001, Barry Bonds went McGwire three home runs better, and just like that, a record that had stood for nearly four decades had now fallen twice in three years. No one in baseball really wanted to look at how a 36-year-old man, who had never hit more than 49 home runs in a season, could suddenly manage to hit 73. Nobody wanted to look at Bonds’s incredible physical transformation, or his burgeoning hat size.
That, of course, would be “terribly unfair” to Barry Bonds’s accomplishment. As Selig had said during McGwire’s magical season, “We want to do everything we can to enjoy a great moment in baseball history.”
Last week, the steroid-fed chickens came home to roost on Bud Selig’s front lawn. It was revealed first that Jason Giambi, and then, Bonds had in fact lied to everyone but a San Francisco grand jury about their steroid use.
And now, suddenly, Selig, Fehr, and Orza mean to get really, really tough about this steroid problem that seems to have cropped up in baseball. And all the purists out there, the ones who cherish numbers as if they were loved ones, are wringing their hands over whether they should break out the asterisk once again, the one they used to belittle Roger Maris’s accomplishment in 1961.
The answer is yes, of course there is a place for the asterisk. But it should go next to Bud Selig’s name, not Bonds’s.
How many times have we been told that players will take any edge they can get in order to compete? Well, Bonds was merely acting as players do. It was Selig & Co. who gave Bonds and everyone else in baseball the opportunity to take the biggest edge of all.
We all know that since Fay Vincent was forced out, the commissioner of baseball has been reduced to an owner’s lackey. But Selig is supposed to ensure that the best interests of the game are upheld, not just the owners’. His contract even contains a clause to that effect.
It was his responsibility to cut this thing off back in 1998, before it got out of hand. Instead, he and his toadies wasted five years denying, justifying, and enabling the Bondses, the McGwires, the Giambis, the Sheffields, and who knows who else to juice up their bodies so longed as it juiced up the game.
Then, when Selig needed a bargaining chip during the 2002 labor crisis, he suddenly turned against the substance, and the players, he had used to recover from the last work stoppage. Only he half-stepped it, because he didn’t really want to do anything about steroids. Like a careless bodybuilder, baseball fattened up on ‘roids and now suffers the side effects. For that, it can thank Bud Selig.
For Bonds, there is an appropriate punishment that doesn’t involve an asterisk. When he becomes eligible for the Hall of Fame, baseball writers across the country should deny him the honor of a first-ballot Hall of Fame election. If enough voters leave Bonds off their ballots – and I certainly will – he might get dropped altogether, since a played must receive 5% of the vote to remain in contention.
Then, Bonds would have to wait 15 years for the Veterans Committee to consider his election. By then, the scandal might have cooled off to where he will get in, or intensified to where he never will. Either way, it will be justice for Barry.
Not so for Selig. Next to his tenure as commissioner, the highlights of which include the cancellation of a World Series, the aborting of an All-Star Game and the rampant use of illegal performance-enhancing drugs, there should be affixed a scarlet letter so that future generations will never forget just what happened here, and who ultimately was to blame.
Mr. Matthews is the host of the “Wally and the Keeg” sports talk show, heard Monday-Friday from 4-7 p.m. on 1050 ESPN radio.