Bush league

Solving baseball money woes is harder than being President

In his memoirs, Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner, recounted how much the Texas Rangers' owner of a decade ago wanted that job for himself. It was only after George W. Bush finally realized that Bud Selig was simply not going to step down as the perpetual "interim" commissioner that Bush finally agreed to enter politics and the Texas gubernatorial race.

Events of the last week in baseball made me wonder again how George W. Bush would have managed if, instead of then attaining the presidency, fate and Bud Selig had given him the more difficult job of baseball commissioner.

For instance, surely you'd recall that there was some controversy when Commissioner Bush tried to get all states to lower their sales taxes on baseball tickets in order to stimulate attendance. And yes, Commissioner Bush's appointment of Donald Rumsfeld to head up the umpires and Rumsfeld's subsequent reduction of the strike zone didn't please traditionalists. But certainly, the way Commissioner Bush handled the Montreal Expos situation could not be faulted. As you very well remember, the commissioner brought in the Halliburton Corporation to run the team and then moved it to the Alaska Wildlife Preserve.

But, really, could Commissioner Bush have done a better job dealing with the Yankees than has Commissioner Selig? There were the league-leading Yankees last week blithely adding a new All-Star third baseman to their $182 million payroll. It also seems the Yanks pick up a new reliever every week. Let 'em eat cake. Most teams have, say, a hitting problem or an outfield problem. Real problems. Here is the Yankees' problem: They don't have the perfect pitcher for the eighth inning. That's what they lack -- the ideal hurler to get the 22nd, 23rd and 24th outs in a game. So they scour the rosters of the little sisters of the poor, who make up most of the major leagues now, and cherry-pick whatever they want.

The few teams with the resources to temporarily try and keep up with the Yankees -- like the Red Sox -- do the same, and poor Commissioner Selig or President Bush or God in His heaven are powerless to stop the obscene imbalance that is baseball today. Fans in too many cities realize that the season really ends on July 31, the trading deadline -- the day that the weak teams sell their souls to the Yankees and the few other aristocrats.

You know what this is doing to baseball, the summer game? It's turning it into the July game. It was not all that long ago when national interest in baseball lasted into the fall. September was for pennant races. But for most fans now, September is for football. And as both the colleges and the NFL move up the start of their seasons -- even into August! -- attention is diverted from baseball season to football preseason. If your team has no chance, if the Yankees and their few rich brethren dominate, why keep caring, hopelessly? You know baseball has reached rock bottom when the good people of Cincinnati give up on the Reds and start following the -- ugh -- Bengals in training camp.

President Bush must realize how lucky he is having had to settle for his current job. He can deal with Iraq. He can deal with North Korea. He can deal with Congressman Tom DeLay -- well, maybe. But neither the President nor anybody else can do anything about the financial power and hubris of the Yankees and their few rivals of the moment who have made baseball such a hopeless imbalance.

Sports Illustrated senior contributing writer Frank Deford is a regular contributor to SI.com and appears each Wednesday on National Public Radio's Morning Edition. He is a longtime correspondent for HBO's Real Sports and his new novel, An American Summer (Sourcebooks Trade), is available at bookstores everywhere.

 

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