It would be difficult to find a flaw in George Will’s academic life or his professional career. His life reads like a bold-faced entry in Who’s Who.

Academically, he earned bachelor’s degrees from Trinity College and Oxford University, master’s degrees from Oxford and Princeton and a PhD from Princeton. He has taught at Harvard.

Professionally, he has won a Pulitzer Prize, has been a celebrated conservative syndicated columnist for the Washington Post and Newsweek and has served as an analyst for ABC News and currently Fox News.

With those credentials and that background, how could Will come up with the astounding idea he expressed recently on the “winners and losers” segment of a Fox newscast? Keep in mind that Will’s bizarre utterance came only a couple of days after the conclusion of the seven-game World Series between San Francisco and Kansas City, and he might still have been caught up in the rapture of the exciting event. But that’s no legitimate excuse for a veteran professional journalist.

In his turn, Will declared his “winner” to be Bud Selig, the baseball commissioner. Had he stopped there, Will might not have been so outrageous. Selig, after all, would be retiring in three months and had concluded the active part of his 22-year tenure by presiding over that World Series. But Will didn’t stop there.

Besides declaring Selig his winner, he labeled him “one of the three most significant persons in the history of baseball, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.”

Creating such a list or class is dangerous in itself. Including Selig is downright foolhardy.

Will, of course, is entitled to concoct any list he chooses. He is also entitled to look as foolish as he wants. And by lumping Selig with Ruth and Robinson he sure looks foolish.

I wanted to talk to Will about his inclusion of Selig to the exclusion of others far more obviously deserving such a rank, but he did not respond to multiple e-mail requests. I don’t know Will, have really never talked to him, but I had one encounter with him that suggested to me he’s not the friendliest guy you would ever meet.

My lone encounter with him came on a press bus following a World Series game in 2009 in Philadelphia.  I had never met him, but I recognized him from having seen him on television. The bus was empty except for us, and I approached him and introduced myself.

I’m not the friendliest guy in the world, but I have never encountered anyone as cold and rude as he was at that moment. I don’t recall him even saying hello. I can’t even say he acknowledged my presence in the aisle of the bus.

Lest any reader get the idea that I am writing this critical column as a way of responding to his arrogant behavior, be assured that any criticism suggested here stems strictly from his unwarranted glorification of his friend the commissioner.

I say friend because by now Selig and Will must be the best of buddies. One man who knows them both described their relationship as “a very active two-way street.” I have a different image: Will sitting in Selig’s lap or vice-versa.

Over a period of 12 years, 1999-2011, more than half of Selig’s tenure as commissioner, Selig named Will to four blue-ribbon panels or special task forces. There might have been a fifth, a pink-ribbon panel on women and baseball, but I was unable to confirm that one.

Nevertheless, Selig seemed hard pressed to omit Will from his special panels. In fact, he was the only person who served on all of those panels, and only Len Coleman, the former National League president, was a member of two.

In 1999, Selig named Will to his blue ribbon panel on baseball economics, and the next year he was one of four so-called “independent members” of the 16-member panel who wrote a report that was widely circulated.

In 2003 Selig selected Will a second time, this time for the 15-man Commissioner’s Initiative: Major League Baseball in the 21st Century.

The commissioner obviously saw a versatility in Will that he didn’t see in any of the other members of the 21st Century panel because six years later he named Will to the 14-man Special Committee for On-Field Matters, the only repeater from the previous panel.

Will served on that committee with managers, owners and executives as well as Hall-of-Famer Frank Robinson.

Then came Will’s appointment in 2011 to the 11-person origins of baseball committee. Though he hasn’t been named to any committee in the past three years, Will apparently is not only versatile but also unique. He was the only journalist on those Selig panels.

Should it be any wonder then that Will names Selig as one of the three most significant figures in baseball history? It’s called payback, not as in revenge but as in you did for me, I do for you.

Where and how else was Will, a long-time baseball fan, going to get the chance to play with the likes of Joe Torre, Jim Leyland, Mike Scioscia and Frank Robinson?

As big a man as Will is in journalism, his committee service provided by Selig gave him opportunities he would not otherwise have had. It was easy for him to be blinded in Selig’s favor while ignoring men who have played far more significant roles than Selig.

I am not underestimating any of Selig’s accomplishment in his 22 years as commissioner, but I will point out some things I would like to have asked Will to explain.

No. 1, I think, would be collusion. As poor a job as Selig did in labor relations and negotiations when he was head of the owners’ Player Relations Committee – he was smack in the center of almost all of the work stoppages, strikes and lockouts – he was at the center of collusion in 1985-‘86-’87.

That three-year event, coming on the heels of a new labor agreement, poisoned relations between players and owners, undermined their ability to negotiate a new agreement in 1994 and avert the 234-day strike and led to Selig’s cancellation of the World Series.

Worse, to this day, Selig has never acknowledged that the owners colluded, has never admitted his role in it. He boasts of labor peace and says the past is the past and let’s not dwell on it. But just as Pete Rose lied for 15 years about his betting on baseball, Selig’s silence about collusion puts him right up there with Rose.

Rose has tried for years to gain reinstatement from the commissioner, but if Billy Martin were around, he would probably say the two of them deserve each other.

Choosing the three most significant figures in baseball history is a subjective exercise. I could choose my three, and you could choose yours and chances are they wouldn’t be the same three. But I know Selig wouldn’t be on my list and he probably wouldn’t be on yours.

Will’s other two, Ruth and Robinson, would certainly have to be considered. But instead of Selig, how about Marvin Miller, Branch Rickey, Walter O’Malley and Kenesaw Mountain Landis?

Landis was the first commissioner, who straightened out the game after the Black Sox scandal.  As much as my Brooklyn friends would curse me for bringing his name into this discussion, by moving the Dodgers to Los Angeles and inducing Horace Stoneham to move the Giants to San Francisco, O’Malley opened the entire country for baseball, which was more significant than wild cards.

Without Rickey, of course, there would have been no Robinson.

Miller? He’s an automatic in my view. Maybe Will’s politics blind him to the significant steps Miller forced baseball to take, but Miller is probably the man most responsible for the health of baseball today.

We can give Selig credit for his contributions to that good health, but there is still collusion. He can’t go back and reverse what he and his fellow owners did in the ‘80s, but just as he waited for Rose to tell the truth, it’s time for him to acknowledge his wrongdoing and tell the truth.

He would expect nothing less from Alex Rodriguez, and he should set a good example for him. Players are role models for children, and commissioners should be role models for players and everyone else in the game. The commissioner has only a couple of months to retire with a clear conscience.