Monday, April 05, 2004
Selig: Policy 'Best We Could Do'
Interviewed by George Will yesterday on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Commissioner Selig expiained that the owners settled for the current drug testing policy because it was the best they could get without a strike or lockout. Selig also denied suggestions that owners might look the other way at steroid abuse if it produced more home runs, and more fans:
"I would tell you that, as a group, the owners, I think, are as deeply troubled by the allegations of steroid use as any group possible, and there is nobody that will condone the use of steroids to jack up home run totals."
More important than the interview, though, is the fact that George Will was allowed to conduct it. This AP article notes, that Will was "selected by the commissioner last year for his marketing task force, a fact disclosed during the broadcast," but fails to mention that Selig also appointed Will to serve on his Blue Ribbon Economic Panel. Earlier in the day, Will's annual spring baseball column had planted a sloppy, wet kiss on Selig's cheek:
"Selig has been -- baseball is a game of inches, but this is not a close call -- the greatest commissioner."
Quite a change from what Will wrote nine years ago, when in the course of describing the consequences of the injunction which ended the 1994-95 strike, he hoped the future would soon bring "an end to the imprudence of an owner, Bud Selig, serving as commissioner -- the compounded imprudence of the owner being from a low-revenue team, the Milwaukee Brewers." (Quote from "The Strike: A Postmortem," 4/6/1995.)
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Interviewed by George Will yesterday on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos," Commissioner Selig expiained that the owners settled for the current drug testing policy because it was the best they could get without a strike or lockout. Selig also denied suggestions that owners might look the other way at steroid abuse if it produced more home runs, and more fans:
"I would tell you that, as a group, the owners, I think, are as deeply troubled by the allegations of steroid use as any group possible, and there is nobody that will condone the use of steroids to jack up home run totals."
More important than the interview, though, is the fact that George Will was allowed to conduct it. This AP article notes, that Will was "selected by the commissioner last year for his marketing task force, a fact disclosed during the broadcast," but fails to mention that Selig also appointed Will to serve on his Blue Ribbon Economic Panel. Earlier in the day, Will's annual spring baseball column had planted a sloppy, wet kiss on Selig's cheek:
"Selig has been -- baseball is a game of inches, but this is not a close call -- the greatest commissioner."
Quite a change from what Will wrote nine years ago, when in the course of describing the consequences of the injunction which ended the 1994-95 strike, he hoped the future would soon bring "an end to the imprudence of an owner, Bud Selig, serving as commissioner -- the compounded imprudence of the owner being from a low-revenue team, the Milwaukee Brewers." (Quote from "The Strike: A Postmortem," 4/6/1995.)
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