Selig Offends with Each New Promise

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The New York Sun

If it was not known before, this week’s baseball owners meetings have made it clear that Bob DuPuy is an American treasure. Why else would Bud Selig, whose contract as commissioner of Major League Baseball was extended through 2009 yesterday, keep him around?


Selig’s longtime personal lawyer, and presently the chief operating officer of Major League Baseball, DuPuy is a figure fit not for baseball, but for one of H.L. Mencken’s Chrestomathies. Coming out of a meeting of baseball’s relocation committee Wednesday, DuPuy briefed the press on the status of the Montreal Expos, which MLB owns and which MLB, for various reasons, is having a devil of a time getting rid of.


“We’re continuing the process of trying to get things clarified,” he said. “Eventually, these discussions are going to have to evolve to a point where either we say or the municipality or governmental entity says, ‘We’re as far as we can go. This is the deal that we’ve got before us.'”


Sports are rarely blessed with men of this caliber. There is a reason, though, why he is the manservant and commissioner Selig the master. While DuPuy has mastered the art of speaking at length and saying nothing, the Commissioner has found the path of true wisdom. He says nothing by saying nothing, sending DuPuy before the cameras while he cuts deals in the figurative smoky back room and leaves the real issues unaddressed.


Ownership of the Expos can’t be transferred pending the resolution of a racketeering suit against the commissioner and his minions; this suit has a great deal to do with the interminable delays in the disposition of the franchise. You’ll never hear the commissioner say a word about that.


The recently scheduled meetings between MLB officials, government types, and potential ownership groups – which will, hopefully, evolve to the point where someone will say, “Yes, we are talking about a deal” – are a farce. Baseball has been dealing with these people for years now and no one has anything new to say. You’ll never hear the Commissioner address that reality. Mere words of explanation to the common fan are as nothing to him; he is a man of action, a man of progress, a man never afraid to boldly bring people together to talk about the possibility of potentially doing something at some point.


Given the habit MLB officials have had over the last two years of periodically announcing a deadline for a decision and then hoping everyone forgets about it when that deadline arrives and no decision has been made, there is no particular reason to believe DuPuy when he says, “I’m very confident that a decision will be made in time for a move.”


The notion is, in fact, absurd. Even assuming financing and government support are already in place – a dubious bet in this case – you can’t just sell and move a baseball team. Schedules have to be made, travel arranged, equipment shipped, a stadium made ready, highways and trains prepared, media deals struck, and so forth. The idea that a sale at some indeterminate point this fall would result in the Expos moving in time to play next season in their new city is ridiculous and insulting.


The commissioner doesn’t address any of these pragmatic difficulties, or his recent history of saying things that aren’t true. He seems to think that his word, passed on through his henchmen, should be good enough. Nor does he explain why, with his autocratic power over the game, he doesn’t simply tell Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos, the prime obstacle to moving the Expos to Washington, to shut up.


Instead, he makes statements carefully calibrated to reference nothing recognizable as reality and to project strength and resolve.


“We’re going to get rid of Montreal,” he told the Philadelphia Inquirer on Wednesday, in one of the few sentient quotes he has given this week.


While that’s a forceful thing to say, it’s also a really stupid thing to say, not only because it’s untrue in any immediate sense – MLB is not going to get rid of the Expos in time for the club to move by spring – but because it might be in baseball’s best interests to retain some shred of good will in Montreal. The residents of world-class cities tend to resent it when provincial hucksters speak of them as something to be scraped off the sole of a shoe.


And in that quote, as in his silence, you see exactly why this situation has become such a debacle. The commissioner is too limited a man even to see that Montreal is, after all that has gone on, still an asset to the game both as a place unlike any other major league city, and as a place with a long, rich baseball tradition that would still respond to real commitment from MLB.


He is too petty to realize that slowly alienating Washington in deference to Angelos, a man whom he will have to overrule at some point anyway, could leave the Expos in nearly as bad a state as they are in now. He is so small that rather than find any possible way to get out of what is probably the worst blight on the game in the postwar era, he’s willing to dicker around until some municipality reasonably near Washington coughs up a hideous mall park.


Bob DuPuy is a treasure for our nation. But the commissioner is a man for the ages.


The New York Sun

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