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. As head of the executive council – in effect, the acting commissioner in the absence of an elected commissioner in the aftermath of Fay Vincent’s forced resignation – he could have acted to support a change Vincent initiated.

But instead Selig succumbed to taking the easy way out, opting to end a legal confrontation with the Chicago Cubs.

The Cubs had sued Vincent in July 1992 to block his decision to realign the National League’s two divisions geographically. Vincent had ordered the Cubs and the St. Louis Cardinals to move from the East division to the West Division and the Atlanta Braves and the Cincinnati Reds from West to East. The teams had been in their respective divisions since division play began in 1969.

The Cubs, however, took exception to the commissioner’s “best-interests-of-baseball” order and sued to get a temporary injunction to block it. They sued despite the provision in the Major League Agreement that barred teams from suing.

The Cubs’ resistance to change went beyond the kind of thing Selig was talking about. The Cubs didn’t want to switch divisions because they would have inherited many more games with West Coast teams – Los Angeles, San Diego, San Francisco – and they felt that would play havoc with their superstation cablecasts.

But Vincent wasn’t the only baseball official or executive who believed the four teams should swap places. Half of the National League owners signed a letter urging Vincent to make the switch and then voted for the switch at a National League meeting.

Two of the six, John McMullen of Houston and Ted Turner of Atlanta, were especially vehement in their support of the idea. At the owners’ meeting the vote was 6-6, but the Cubs rendered the matter moot by exercising the veto the league gives to teams that are being moved. They have the right to say no, thank you.

At this point, Selig was not involved in the dispute. His Milwaukee Brewers were in the American League. But he got involved a couple of months later after the owners induced Vincent to resign.

Meanwhile, the Cubs pursued their lawsuit, seeking a preliminary injunction in Federal district court in Chicago to block the commissioner’s realignment order. Talk about a home field advantage.

Asked Wednesday why the Cubs were able to sue him when they were barred by agreement from doing so, Vincent said, “The judge just ignored it. It was in Federal court, but for any judge in Chicago not to be sympathetic to the Cubs would be remarkable. Our lawyers made that argument, but the judge breezed right through it.”

The Cubs argued that they couldn’t be forced to change divisions because they had exercised their veto over a move under the rights granted them by the National League constitution.

“The Cubs’ argument,” Vincent recalled, “was that once the clubs decided on switching in a vote the commissioner did not have the right to change it.”

Judge Suzanne Conlon agreed with the Cubs, finding that Vincent had exceeded his authority, and granted the preliminary injunction.

The argument over the commissioner’s powers as outlined in the Major League Agreement versus the Cubs’ veto right under the National League constitution could have been interesting, but the Cubs vs. the commissioner didn’t get that far.

Seventeen days after Vincent resigned, the owners who replaced him as baseball’s ruling body, the executive council, rescinded his order to realign the National League, and the Cubs agreed to withdraw their lawsuit.

The leader of the executive council was Selig, who besides his position was a very influential owner. Other owners listened to him and heeded his advice. That’s why he has been commissioner for nearly two decades.

Had Selig seriously wanted to consider the kind of change that he now complains owners don’t like to make, he could have continued to contest the lawsuit and might have effected change. Selig did not return a telephone call seeking comment on why he chose to end the fight and the possibility of change.

That, however, is not Selig’s style. He doesn’t risk fights and confrontations. He has ruled by consensus and doesn’t call for votes unless he knows the outcome ahead of time.

He would most likely not have ordered the Cubs and Cardinals to switch divisions without having their agreement first. The only time I ever saw exasperation overcome him was the evening that the owners were meeting about dividing each league into three divisions.

George Bush, the future president, was managing partner of the Texas Rangers and was balking at going into the American League West because Dallas had a two-hour time difference with the division’s three other teams.

Taking a break from the meeting, Selig walked down the hall grimfaced and muttered, “I wish I had a machine gun.” He nevertheless eventually prevailed on Bush to agree to the division move.

Some years earlier, Bush was Vincent’s staunchest supporters when Selig led a large gang of owners against Vincent. Bush, who turned out to be a talented politician, complained to Vincent that he wasn’t enough of a politician, which Vincent readily acknowledges was true. The former commissioner has too much honesty and integrity to be a good politician.

Saying that his action with the Cubs might have been a mistake, he said, “I think it was the right thing to do, but I made the mistake of deciding to do the job.”