Long before he became commissioner of baseball, Bud Selig was a car salesman.

Apparently, Selig was a darned good car salesman, good enough to earn enough dough to purchase the Seattle Pilots in bankruptcy court and move them to Milwaukee in 1970.

Now, I don’t want to paint car salesmen with a broad brush here, but I think it’s safe to say that one of the keys to successfully moving cars off the lot is you can’t spend a lot of sleepless nights wrestling with your conscience.

It seems that Bud’s been doing a lot of tossing and turning lately, though. In a recent interview with ESPN, the commissioner said the specter of steroids in baseball has been keeping him awake at night. He said he can’t stand the thought of somebody confronting him years from now on why he didn’t do something about steroids while he had the chance as the game’s chief steward.

Selig’s current term as commissioner runs out in 2006, and he’s on record saying that he doesn’t plan on seeking another. So it looks like the time is now for him to charge in on his white horse and save the players from themselves.

According to a report this week in the Houston Chronicle, Bud’s conscience-clearing crusade could begin with him invoking the “best interests of the game” clause in an attempt to bypass the Players Association and implement a testing program like the one baseball uses in the minor leagues. That would mean comprehensive testing for all major leaguers and “zero tolerance” for those who fail the test.

The reaction from most legal experts to Selig’s plan has been underwhelming. They say the chances of baseball getting away with unilaterally establishing a testing plan would be quite slim. Union officials see it as an invasion of privacy and don’t appear willing to even discuss more testing until the current collective bargaining agreement runs out two years from now.

Which brings us back to Bud, who you may recall had a little something to do with the current CBA, which the players and owners agreed to just in the nick of time to avert a strike in August, 2002.

Selig, who served as the game’s de facto commissioner before officially receiving the title from his owner cronies in 1998, didn’t seem too troubled by steroids during those negotiations. Revenue sharing and the luxury tax were his pet issues, and he got the players to make major concessions on them. When it came to steroids, he settled for a random testing program with a toothless penalty system.

We can’t blame Bud for not wanting to make a big stink over performance enhancing drugs two years ago. At the time, baseball was one-year removed from Barry Bonds’ record-setting season and seemed to be all the way back from the abyss brought on by its labor woes of the mid-90s. Negotiations for the current CBA came down to the last minute before the players would have walked out, and it hardly seemed worth it at the time to deal the game with another setback by haggling over steroids.

But it’s interesting to note that any time Selig has had a chance to address the issue of steroids in a meaningful way up to now, he’s avoided it.

Last year, baseball found that at least five percent of the players randomly tested as a survey in 2003 came back positive for steroids, yet there was no saber-rattling from the commissioners office, no threats to invoke mandatory testing for all players.

The tough talk didn’t start until Selig and union chief Donald Fehr received a public scolding from members of the Senate recently. And now that some of the game’s best-known players are having their names dragged through the mud in the federal government’s BALCO investigation, suddenly Selig wants to remove a stain that’s had at least 15 years to settle into the fabric of the game.

Boston player representative Johnny Damon suggested last week that the owners have wanted steroids in baseball all along. Given their silence on the issue over the years, and given the way baseball turned desperately to Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and the almighty home run to save it in the late ’90s, it’s easy to see his point. It’s also the pot calling the kettle black, of course, since Donald Fehr and Gene Orza recent public posturing indicates the union thinks the issue will just go away.

Bud Selig is wishing the same thing. Selig presided over baseball’s renaissance at the turn of the century, and has patted himself on the back at every opportunity for doing so.

It’s doubtful he had many sleepless nights after watching scoreboards light up and ballparks fill up while juiced-up players shattered records that stood for decades. It didn’t seem to bother him that what he was selling to the public was an artificially enhanced game of pinball. That’s because he knew all of those home runs, all of those records, all of those fannies in the seats would be his legacy.

It’s also hard to believe Bud would be reaching for the Sominex these days unless the federal government threatened to expose that legacy for what it really is, a bill of goods sold to the public for more than a decade.

Randy Whitehouse is a staff writer. He can be reached by e-mail at rwhitehouse@sunjournal.com

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