Mike Celizic

Bud Selig is a good and decent man, and it’s clear he loves baseball. But if that qualifies him to be commissioner of baseball, then it also qualifies most of the game’s millions of fans. So keep being nice, love the game and maybe someday you can be commissioner, too.

When you do, don’t worry about all the pressure of running a multi-billion dollar industry. Just take it like Selig does. Wait for something catastrophic to happen, let the analysts tell you what you should have done to prevent it and the next day do it.

Then you have your public relations staff craft a cleverly worded press release that says, “I won’t make that mistake again.”

You don’t need to add, “I’ll make a different mistake,” because everybody already knows that. Instead, you go to your five-star hotel, put your feet up and congratulate yourself on earning your $15 million salary.

The aviation safety business has a name for this management style. It’s called “blood on the runway.” It refers to the fact that a safety issue is ignored as long as no one is killed. But as soon as something goes fatally splat because of a flaw in the system that had been pointed out time and again, the regulators install the fix that everyone had been telling them for years that they needed.

That, without the bodies and resultant lawsuits, pretty much sums up Selig’s reign as commissioner. No matter how obvious a potential problem is, he ignores it until there’s an awful mess to clean up.

It’s like the Game 5 fiasco. No World Series game had ever been shortened by rain. Therefore, in Selig’s flawless logic, no game ever would be. When it turned out that the weather could, indeed, intrude on the game’s crowing moment, he reacted as if flying monkeys had erupted from his closet and beaten him severely about the head and shoulders. In his universe, what happened was impossible.

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Not that he didn’t consider it. He even said he told both teams that if the rain got really bad, he wouldn’t allow the game to end before nine innings had elapsed. But none of the players on the field knew that. You have to wonder who exactly he told and how he told them. In this day and age, it shouldn’t be that hard to get a message that important through to the affected parties.

As Selig’s employers seem to be just fine with this style of management, it’s probably pointless to tell them to give Selig his platinum Rolex and send him off to a well-earned retirement so they can hire a commissioner who can actually commish. You keep thinking of somebody like the NFL’s Roger Goodell, who has got his game by the throat and is determined not to let go; somebody who tries anticipate problems and be ready to deal with them when they arrive; somebody who communicates his position loudly and clearly to one and all.

I’ve already ranted on Selig’s inability to figure out when to come in out of the rain, and there’s no sense revisiting Monday night in Philadelphia. Besides, he won’t make that mistake again, just as he won’t make the mistake of not having enough pitchers on hand to finish an All-Star game.

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