Bud Selig, Reviled Savior
by David Propson

Commissioner Bud Selig is the dark lord of Major League Baseball. He tried to kill two teams last fall, and this summer he has sworn not to give into the player's union, even if that means provoking a season-ending player's strike. Fans, reporters, and players hate him. Even other owners hate him.

Clearly, the man must be a genius.

Attracting such universal disapprobation isn't easy. It takes hard work, years of studied malevolence and usually the commission of a few serious crimes. One doesn't become the scapegoat for everything wrong in the nation's putative pastime overnight. In most cases, people would view a Jewish man publicly derided as greedy and conniving by so many gentiles (Shawn Green and Gabe Kapler notwithstanding) as the victim of anti-Semitism. Selig has not received even that courtesy — probably because, like most extremely wealthy businessmen, he is kind of greedy and conniving.

But that doesn't mean Selig's wrong. He has been largely in the right on almost every issue in the current negotiations, making his status as Public Enemy No. 2 an even more amazing accomplishment.

Major League Baseball needs revenue sharing and something like a salary cap. The players already have agreed that some money should be distributed from rich teams to poorer teams in order to maintain (or restore) competitive balance. In the past, though, players have claimed that capping the amount of money a team can spend infringes on their right to earn as much as they can in a free market. But the NFL and NBA both have taken steps to limit the amount of money each team can pay its players, and so far no agents from the Federal Trade Commission have come knocking on their doors.

This year the player's union has even agreed, in principle, to a "luxury tax" that would penalize teams that spend more than a certain number of dollars. So there goes that argument. As former Reds second baseman and current Fox analyst Joe Morgan recently noted, "It's a business fight, not one based on ideology." Selig was prepared to suggest setting a "salary floor" as well, to keep owners from being skinflints, but the players opposed it — as, no doubt, did the owners of teams like the Tampa Bay Devil Rays, whose entire team put together makes only slightly more than Texas Rangers shortstop Alex Rodriguez.

On other issues, Selig even more clearly holds the higher ground. He wants to randomly test players for steroids and other illegal drugs, something every other major sports league already does. He also wants to institute a worldwide draft of prospects that might help cut down the underhanded, often illegal dealings that teams engage in as they chase after 12-year-old shortstops in Central American countries.

Even the most loathsome act of his tenure, the ongoing attempt to eliminate the Montreal Expos and one other team, can be defended.

The easiest mooted solution, moving the Expos to Washington, D.C., didn't happen because Baltimore Orioles owner Peter Angelos fears those up-and-coming kids from Quebec would steal fans from his hapless team. (Besides, Washington would have to build a new stadium.) And, outside of Montreal, relocating teams has never been a very popular proposal.

When the Giants and Dodgers moved to Los Angeles, fans never forgave the owners who had betrayed them. They continue to complain when owners employ the (admittedly shabby) tactic of threatening to move the team elsewhere. But while in recent decades hockey and football teams have swapped cities like square dancers at a hoedown, no baseball team has moved since the early 1970s, when the Washington Senators moved to Texas and the short-lived Seattle Pilots were lured to Milwaukee by — you guessed it — Bud Selig.

All this to say that if people complain when you try to move teams and complain when you try to contract them, those people must believe that any team started in a city must continue in existence there until the Final Judgment, regardless of changing demographics or financial developments. Which just can't be right. According to that logic, the Yankees would still be playing in Baltimore.

So why, given an agenda that at the very least seems reasonable if not necessarily wise, has Selig managed to become so hated? Maybe he wants it that way. He's slapped a $1 million fine on owners who speak out of turn during labor negotiations, not only to smooth along relations with the union but also to save teams from themselves. He wants all the criticism directed at himself. "The commissioner is a lightning rod," Selig has said. "But I've got a job to do."

Actually, that is his job. As the sport's designated scapegoat, Selig has an important ritual role to play. The scapegoat originally was a figure in the ancient Hebrew rituals on the Day of Atonement, whose rules and meaning are explained in Leviticus:

Aaron shall lay both his hands upon the head of the live goat, and confess over him all the iniquities of the people of Israel, and all their transgressions, all their sins; and he shall put them upon the head of the goat, and send him away into the wilderness.

The scholar Rene Girard theorized that the ritual of the scapegoat helped stabilize early societies. In his Encyclopedia of Religion, Mircea Eliade describes Girard's ideas in this way:

The peaceful coexistence of human beings cannot be taken for granted; when the desires of humans fasten upon the same object, rivalries arise and with them a tendency toward violence that endangers the existing order and its norms. This tendency can be neutralized, however, if the reciprocal aggressions are focused on a marginal object, a scapegoat. The scapegoat is thereby rendered sacred: it is seen as accursed but also as bringing salvation.

Some Christians have argued that Christ made himself the ultimate scapegoat, and by doing so obtained for the world ultimate salvation. In his story, Three Versions of Judas, Jorge Luis Borges refers to a group of heretical Gnostics who believed that God chose to embody himself in the reviled Judas, rather than the revered Jesus, in order to more perfectly achieve his own abasement.

What does all this have to do with our friend Bud? Well, baseball just might have to run itself into the ground — and miss a good many games and possibly another postseason — before it get its act together. If the strike drags on into next year, everyone will look for someone to blame, someone who can absorb all the animus the fans feel toward the players and owners, so that they can go back to loving their teams and heroes the way they always have. Commissioner Selig will be forced to resign in shame and ignominy.

Everything could turn out as the theory predicts: The game will be saved and the reviled scapegoat will retire into the wilderness (or, in this case, Milwaukee). So far Selig, intentionally or just by native instinct, has followed the script. There's only one problem. As Borges points out in the context of the Gnostics, the plan to save your followers by making yourself their scapegoat only works if it remains a secret. What will he do now that we've revealed it to the world? Probably settle with the players this week, and continue to be hated anyway.

E-mail David Propson at david at flakmag dot com.