Adam Rountree / AP

Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig’s steroids proposal, made to the union last month, calls for a 50-game ban for first offenders, a 100-game penalty for second offenders and a lifetime ban for a third positive test.

Following the end of the quarterly meeting, Selig said he was bothered by accusations that owners turned a blind eye toward steroid use in the 1990s, calling that revisionist history.

“I keep reading and hearing ... that owners must have known and so on and so forth,” he said. “I’ve spent a lot of time talking to general managers, scouts, trainers, a lot of people, and of course they take umbrage to that, as do I.”

“I think everybody’s been besmirched, starting with me,” he said.

He said he made the proposal to ban amphetamines because “we need to put an end to all whispers. This sport is too good to allow itself to be subjected to whispers when they can do something about it and clean it up.”

“There’s a lot of anecdotal stuff that’s gone on,” he said. “I was a young kid who walked into the Milwaukee Braves clubhouse and I heard about it, and that was 1958, so that’s 47 years ago. You can talk to people that go four, five and six decades back.”

As for the international tournament, the commissioner’s office is in the process of issuing invitations. Baseball will invite Cuba and is working with the U.S. State Department. The commissioner’s office hopes both current Cuban players and defectors will be on a Cuban team.

“We’re hoping people can lay politics aside,” said Tim Brosnan, baseball’s executive vice president for business. “The basis for this event is the best players in the world, period. Political affiliation, etcetera, not a consideration.”

Baseball hopes to stage the tournament again in 2009 and every four years after that.