Today, I have a new appreciation for Bud Selig. He may be viewed as corrupt, he may be thought of as a liar, and he may owe the city of Montreal an apology it will never hear, but the man is not stupid. David Stern, commissioner of the NBA, is, by contrast, not only an utter embarrassment, but an idiot.

Yesterday, taking some time off from his busy schedule of freezing pingpong balls and dealing behind closed doors with superstar players who have run up millions of dollars in gambling debts, Stern proved it. In a press conference presumably meant to reassure people exactly like me — former basketball fans who fell out of love with the sport because of the plain, obvious fact that it is rigged — Stern feigned shock that a crooked referee with Mafia ties was officiating his playoff games. “I’m surprised, but I guess no more surprised than the head of the FBI, or the head of the CIA when rogue employees turn on their country despite the best investigative procedures in the country,” he said.

The CIA, here held up as a model of probity, is the same organization that was shocked to discover that Aldrich Ames was a Russian spy; this being the same Aldrich Ames who drove around a Jaguar, wore custom-made silk suits, and lived in a $540,000 house, paid for in cash, on a $70,000 CIA salary. It was, of course, the perfect analogy, and the fact that Stern was utterly unaware of how perfect it was confirmed for all time what an imbecile he really is.

Meanwhile, Selig — no fool, he — was crafting the perfect response to the imbroglio over whether he’ll be in attendance when Barry Bonds breaks Hank Aaron’s career home runs record. He will, it seems, be at the game, but he’ll decline to take part in any on-field celebration of the tainted achievement. It is a perfect solution, guaranteed to placate everyone just enough to get them to stop talking about this ridiculous nonissue and focus on the more consequential issues raised by Bonds’s mastery of modern chemistry, such as whether it undermines the integrity of the sport and so on.

Of course, if we think about it for even a moment, it’s clear that it not only doesn’t undermine the sport’s integrity, but it doesn’t even come close, which is why Selig hasn’t done anything about it.

Major sports are, by their nature, pretexts for gambling. If it weren’t for bookies, the audience for pro football would consist of four guys in Winnetka, Ill., and six disillusioned basketball fans. The recent rise of mixed martial arts has been fueled by Las Vegas action. Baseball feels so strongly about getting a cut of the gambling profits it generates that it bought some legislation last year that helps it do so.

For this reason, “the integrity of the sport” has always been code associated with gambling, just as the diplomatic phrase “all options on the table” has always been a code associated with nuclear weaponry. There are three scolds in America who care at all about the integrity of actual on-field competition in the major sports, two of whom are obscure officials working for central baseball who wage a fierce campaign against the use of pine tar by pitchers. The other is a professor of ethics. When we talk about integrity in sports, we’re talking about whether the games are on the level — whether we can wager on them safely.

At this point, it’s probably worth noting that if sports leagues want to maintain confidence in their integrity, they should be working feverishly to legalize gambling in this country. No one is better at sniffing out corruption than regulated Las Vegas bookmakers, who will pull an event off the boards at the least hint of suspicious betting flows. If you legalize gambling, self-interest and the power of the market will make it essentially impossible to fix games.

Short of that, though, you can’t do much better than baseball does. Ever since the Black Sox scandal, it has been understood by everyone with the most tangential association with baseball that the one crime for which there is no forgiveness is association with gamblers. Try to run children down with your car? No problem. Threaten to kill your wife and child? No problem. Savagely beat a teammate? Who cares? Inject yourself with every chemical compound found in a 500-mile radius, so you can hit with more power? Don’t get caught! Gambling, though, is something else. Gambling on games will get you banned from the game, outright. Even playing cards will see the long arm of the law reach out and tap you on the shoulder.

One of the great baseball urban legends, hopefully true in every detail, finds Lenny Dykstra on a gambling boat in 1991. Pressed with the urgent needs of nature, he makes his way to the men’s room, and takes his place at a stall, where an investigator working with the commissioner’s office sidles right up alongside him and advises him that he might want to stop being quite so serious about hold ‘em. However things actually happened, according to Fay Vincent, who was commissioner at the time, Dykstra volunteered that Vincent’s men could check on him every week, just to make sure he was clean. And he was.

That’s what the integrity of the sport is about — tossing Pete Rose out on the street like a bum and harassing Dykstra in a men’s room. That’s all it’s about, people wanting to be able to watch and illegally bet on games in full confidence that mobbed-up no-necks aren’t handing bags of cash to the players and referees in dark alleys. The rest of it, from the fevered hand-wringing over Bonds’s physique to the revulsion over Michael Vick’s alleged habit of performing acts of animal cruelty, is all so much sanctimony.

Integrity, in the normal everyday sense of the word, means very little in sports, except as it relates to the integrity of money. Selig understands that, and for all the scandals he’s ever overseen, there isn’t one person in this country who thinks baseball isn’t on the level. Say what you will, but that, and not Bonds’s hat size, is what counts — a lesson I suspect David Stern is going to learn very painfully over the next few months.

tmarchman@nysun.com