How did Commissioner Bud Selig allow the Boston Red Sox and the Chicago Cubs to create the baseball farce of the year, and the year hadn’t even started? Let me count the ways.

* The commissioner allowed the Cubs’ pursuit of Theo Epstein, the Red Sox general manager, to overshadow Major League Baseball’s showcase event, a.k.a. the World Series.
* Selig allowed Epstein to abandon his unexpired contract and take the Cubs’ No. 1 baseball job with no agreement between the clubs on compensation for the Red Sox.
* He allowed the clubs to extend the deadline for completing an agreement on compensation for Epstein, then abandoned the deadline altogether.
* By telling reporters he expected to wind up with the compensation dispute on his desk, he virtually invited the teams not to reach agreement and leave the matter for him to decide.
* By allowing Epstein to go to the Cubs with the compensation issue unsettled, he put Epstein in position to negotiate his own compensation, a bizarre circumstance tantamount to having a player to be named later in a trade becoming the player who was traded for a player to be named. (It really happened once – Harry Chiti 1962.)

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When Octavio Dotel throws his first pitch of the 2012 season, he will establish a major league record. It won’t matter what the pitch is, whether it’s a ball or a strike or if it’s hit into the stands fair or foul.

Dotel, however, may want to get the ball back and put it in his pocket as a keepsake. That is, if the Hall of Fame doesn’t claim it first for display in Cooperstown. Dotel may go for that idea because how else will he be in the Hall of Fame?

When Dotel throws his first pitch, he will have officially played for the Detroit Tigers, and they will be the 13th major league team in his career. Until that pitch, the 38-year-old relief pitcher remains tied with Matt Stairs, Ron Villone and Deacon McGuire, Elias Sports Bureau says, for having played for the most teams in a major league career.

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Many years ago an 8-year-old girl wrote a letter to the New York Sun, a newspaper popular at the time but that subsequently died along with many other New York newspapers. She asked the editor of the Sun if Santa Claus really existed, explaining that she was writing because her father told her if you read something in the Sun you can believe it.

Yes, Virginia, the Sun responded in an editorial, there is a Santa Claus.

Once upon a time, if you read something in The New York Times, you could believe it, too. Sadly, no longer. Based on my recent experience with the Times and its version of historical accuracy, I could not be surprised if the Times told its readers that the South won the Civil War and the Holocaust never happened.

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