Bud Selig Adds Oriole Victory to His Record of Ineptitude

Bud Selig's record includes allowing a World Series to be cancelled and failing to do anything about baseball's PED usage until after it became a PR disaster.

But those immense screw ups alone do not define the boundaries of Selig's incompetence. Indeed, Selig's reign of ineptitude is on display nightly. Because very night there seems to be some truly atrocious call. Which, statistically seems to be the case: according to Jeff Passan, in 2010 MLB's director of umpiring says there is a bad call every 12.2 games. (And this excluded calls on balls and strikes!)

Think about it - MLB can predict that on average, each night fans who have poured their time and hearts and hard-earned cash into following a team are going to experience a head explosion over an umpiring error. And yet Selig just twiddles his thumbs instead of showing some leadership for a change and fixing the damn problem.

Now a few years back, Selig did make a token acknowledgement to reality by allowing reviews of HR calls. But even that was poorly implemented in that the review process wastes time - a manager has to protest, the umpires have to gather together, then go off the field to review. Jeff Passan wrote up an excellent description of the real solution, which is to add a fifth umpire to each game whose sole job is to use replay to overturn bad calls.

Until that happens, we almost nightly experience something straight out of a satirical novel: here in the 21st century, the umpires are virtually the only parties involved that do not see a replay. Every fan watching at home sees replays that confirm what the naked eye saw; the players and the coaches and the bat boys and the managers see the replay; fans watching the game on smart phones see the replay; the radio audience hears the announcers disgustedly describing the replay.  Only the 4 guys who have the power to correct the error that do not see the replay,

It is hard to describe the stupidity of this situation. It is like a law that would allow every one see your X-Ray results except your doctor.

Bud Selig could easily fix this. A real commissioner would have done this years ago - if nothing else, the availability of video on the Internet means that every time an umpire makes such a blatant error, hundreds of thousands of fans can see the error - note the 600,000-plus YouTube hits on the Galarraga play - so you would think the Commissioner would fix this for the embarrassment factor alone.

But Selig is clearly beyond embarrassment. His own words reveal this - here is his attempted self-defense of his inaction in either word or deed regarding PED usage in the 1990s:

"I don't want to hear the commissioner turned a blind eye to this or he didn't care about it. That annoys the you-know-what out of me. You bet I'm sensitive to the criticism. The reason I'm so frustrated is, if you look at our whole body of work, I think we've come farther than anyone ever dreamed possible.... I'm not sure I would have done anything differently. A lot of people say we should have done this or that, and I understand that. They ask me, 'How could you not know?' and I guess in the retrospect of history, that's not an unfair question. But we learned and we've done something about it."

Someone capable embarrassment would have apologized and explained why he said and did nothing, instead of whining and evading the issue. But this quote is Bud Selig in a nutshell; and the lack of ownership it reveals explains why the Yankees' 9th-inning rally was snuffed out last night by an incredibly bad umpiring call.