Last Chance Wasted

We all thought that this would be the big retirement party for Bud Selig. He’d go around the league and get gifts like rocking chairs and cruises and pen and paper sets to write his memoirs at Wisconsin about the 1994 strike, the 2002 All-Star Game, and the exact fertility drug that Manny Ramirez was using. But the owners have offered him a contract for an extra two seasons, and Selig accepted.

Selig is like the Thing That Wouldn’t Leave, always threatening to retire and never doing it. $20 million a season in salary will make a guy change his mind, even one as old as Selig. But it seems to me that Bud is forever concerned about legacy, creating the World Baseball Classic for no real good reason except so that people can talk about him 50 years from now when they ask “who started this thing?”

I thought maybe, and I started to write as such in this space last night, that Bud had a final chance to cement a lasting legacy over the next two seasons. Think about it: The current CBA lasts until 2016, so there’s no reason to stick around an extra two seasons to negotiate a deal. The extra playoff team he wanted is already a lock to be in place, so he’s really not needed for that. So what else was Selig kept around to do? Retire another number? Award home field for the World Series to whoever wins the Home Run Derby or the World Baseball Classic, or some other arbitrary nonsense? The one final act that would have made Selig a hero to baseball fans would be to forget about friendships, and force Fred and Jeff Wilpon to get out of the baseball business and help restore a strong National League presence in the country’s biggest market. And yes I say baseball fans and not just Mets fans. Because let’s face it, if you’re in Philadelphia, Los Angeles, Chicago, or any other N.L. city, your baseball experience is enhanced when you’re hating the team in New York rather than just lobbing scuds at them and pitying them. You know it, I know it.

Selig could have used the extra two seasons to make sure that happens. However, it doesn’t look like it’s going to come to fruition:

“He’s everything you’d want in a local owner.” -Bud Selig on Fred Wilpon

Sure, everything I want. Massive debt, forcing a shoestring budget, and being tone deaf. That’s everything on my checklist.

Selig’s extension was voted up by a 29-1 margin. Jon Heyman reports that it would have been 30-0 if Padres owner John Moores wasn’t so pissed off. I’d guess that it would have been 31-0 if the Mets were allowed to vote twice. (“Ooh, ooh, daddy, can I vote for Uncle Bud too?”) Because now this allows the Wilpons to burn at their own pace without any lighter fluid from the commissioner’s office. That’s unless Selig’s endorsement of the Wilpons was the same type of endorsement the Jets gave Brian Schottenheimer before he, umm … “quit”. I can’t see that happening. So we’re back to the slow, painful death we all feared. And we’re now familiar with the fact that this new contract for Selig through 2014 isn’t a contract at all … it’s a glorified severance package. Maybe by 2014 Selig can announced that he’s really retired for real this time … but only in Venezuela. (Brett Favre must have read that and said “oh this guy’s good”.)