Barry Bonds and Bud Selig

So just when everyone was getting close to forgetting about the steroid era, or the greatest era in baseball, the Barry Bonds case has to be plastered all over every media outlet in the United States. This case is sort of unfair. Normally, a jury is sequestered so that they don't know information about a case. So this means that for the Bonds case it is already unfair because the jury knows, or thinks they know, everything about the case and have been flooded with information for the past 5 years. Fair and just trial? I think not. This case just brings me back to Bud Selig, and how he can sneak around with no blame for such a long time and now retire just in time to never be blamed for his huge hand in this era.

So after the 1994-1995 lockout in the MLB, America's past time had taken a huge hit in ratings, and was struggling from a marketing and revenue standpoint. Bring in Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa. Arguably the most exciting season in baseball in the past 20 years because of the home run chase and Marist's record being broken. Baseball had its flare back, and everyone in America was intrigued. More than half of the league was juicing, and Bud Selig and the MLB front offices knew everything about it. If you were Bud Selig would you start drug testing when you're sport was on top of the world? I sure wouldn't and he didn't. That's fine, but when the issue hit the media, Selig found a way to sneak out like he had no idea and turn everyone else into the bad guy. He watched this go on and let it go on, and when it hit the fan, he jumped ship to the other side. Selig is the one to blame, yet he threw the blame in every direction but his own.

Now he'll retire and every one will forget what a huge hand he had, yet I don't see him sitting in front of Congress and having a Grand Jury grilling him on the events that happened. Instead they are taking it out on the players who made Selig all the money; he might as well have just put the needle in himself. I wouldn't be surprised if the guy gets in the HOF, when all the players during his era will never have a chance to get in. Think about a principal of a school letting his entire school cheat to get higher scores on standardized tests, and the kids all being punished while the principal is getting a promotion and being praised for his job. Pretty much the same situation.

It's about time that the blame is taken away from all the players and put right where it belongs: on Bud Selig and the MLB front office. Let the players who sacrifice every day and put their bodies on the line off the hook; put the blame on the administration that did nothing to stop or help the problem that was small, but they let grow into one of the largest sports stories of the last decade.