Bud Selig hasn’t reached the point where he will ask for volunteers, but he may get there.

The baseball commissioner is looking for someone to fill the vacancy in the position of executive vice president for baseball operations, but the prime candidates for the job have the same strike against them that stops Selig from naming one of them to the position: they are not prepared to show up for work every day at Major League Baseball headquarters at 245 Park Avenue in Manhattan.

I don’t know with 100 percent certainty that Joe Torre, Frank Robinson and Joe Garagiola Jr. are prime candidates, but I think there’s a pretty good likelihood of that being so. On the other hand, if Selig has a problem with each one, can they really be considered legitimate candidates?

Keep reading...

Imagine that on the eve of Game 7 of the World Series the manager of one of the teams, let’s say Ozzie Guillen of the Chicago White Sox, announces that his designated hitter, Adam Dunn, will hit three home runs, including a grand slam, to win the Series. Think that might put some pressure on Dunn?

But that’s exactly what Commissioner Bud Selig has done to Rob Manfred with his comments last week that offered an optimistic outlook to upcoming negotiations between the owners and the players for a new collective bargaining agreement.

Manfred is Major League Baseball’s chief labor executive, and he will be responsible for delivering a new agreement without the work stoppage Selig said he doesn’t expect to occur.

Keep reading...

The Hall of Fame debate goes on. It may soon catch the Energizer bunny because it keeps going and going and going. To put it another way, round and round and round it goes, where or when it’ll stop nobody knows.

That’s one of the charms of baseball. In many different ways, it generates differences of opinion and fuels debate. As long as the debate remains on a civil level it can be fun and even educational. Unfortunately the Internet has spawned incivility. It has become an enabler of malicious comments. People feel free to say things on the Internet, either in Web site comments or in e-mail messages that they would never say to someone’s face.

But in polite Internet company we can always learn from listening to the opinions of others.

Keep reading...