This comes from the category of “do as I say, not as I do.” I am familiar with this concept because my children have often accused me of practicing it.

In The New York Times the other day, Commissioner Bud Selig was quoted as talking about the opposition to change in baseball.

“People don’t like to change, starting with me,” Tyler Kepner quoted Selig as saying. “I like to do the same thing. But what really stunned me in the ’90s was the resistance to change – ‘We’ve never done it that way!’ I always used to hear that. But the fact is, in the ’60s, ’70s and ’80s, baseball was stuck in neutral, unwilling to change, unwilling to do the things that it should do.”

Selig himself, however, was hip deep in 1992 in opposing change.

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At the start of the season I asked Omar Minaya if he wanted to see the Mets win or lose this year. The Mets, after all, had fired him as their general manager last October.

“Win, definitely win,” he replied emphatically. “Those are my guys.”

Indeed, 16 of the 25 players on the Mets’ roster this weekend were acquired by Minaya and his men during his six-year tenure. Two additional Minaya acquisitions, Ike Davis and Johan Santana, were on the disabled list.

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Sometimes you have to feel sorry for Bud Selig, just as you would for a child who watches other kids in the neighborhood playing with toys or games he wants but his parents won’t let him have.

For example, Selig, the baseball commissioner, always wanted a payroll cap and in his zeal to get it, he was a pivotal participant in the ouster of his predecessor, Fay Vincent, and in the owners’ bargaining strategy that killed the 1994 World Series.

But Selig failed to get the payroll cap the other professional team leagues had.

More currently, Selig wants a hard-slotting system that would reduce the bonuses for players selected in the annual amateur draft, but he faces another fight to get it. This is something the other sports have as well, and Selig says why not us?

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