What did he know and when did he know it?

What did Bud Selig know about collusion and when did he know it?

What did Bud Selig know about steroids and when did he know it?

While Selig scoops up accolades with both hands as he leaves office after 22 years as commissioner, he faces questions that he won’t answer but that undermine the reputation he has gained as the man responsible for the game’s impressive growth.

Selig certainly deserves accolades because Major League Baseball is said to have reached, if not surpassed, an all-time high $9 billion in revenue. Owners are making money, players are seeing their salaries escalate upon escalation and fans are flocking to their local ball parks despite rising ticket prices.

But there has been a negative side to the progress, and Selig heads that parade as well.

Nearly three decades after the first of three years of the owners’ collusive activity against free agents (1985-87), Selig has never acknowledged that the owners colluded in violation of the labor agreement with the union. He has never said, “Yes, as the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers in those years, I was guilty of collusion.”

Or if he didn’t want to make it so personal, “Yes, we violated the free-agency rules.”

But not a word of any sort from Selig in 30 years, or 25 even after two arbitrators found the owners guilty, and the owners agreed to pay the players $280 million in a negotiated settlement. Despite his silence, Selig had to pay his share of the settlement.

I reached him at his office in Milwaukee last Wednesday and asked if he cared to talk about collusion before he left office Sunday.

“I don’t want to go back into that now,” he said. “That was 30 years ago. I have different views from everyone else. I was running a team and I know what I did.”

He paused for a second and added, “If you want to review collusion, call Peter Ueberroth. He was the commissioner.”

Fay Vincent, one of the few people who has worked in management and has acknowledged what the owners did, called former commissioner Ueberroth the quarterback of collusion.

A post-collusion commissioner, Vincent has long lamented that collusion poisoned relations between owners and players.

“It was catastrophic; it polluted everything,” he said last week, discussing ramifications of collusion. “I can’t imagine anything worse than having the union leadership find out management was violating their agreement.”

The effects of the players’ lack of trust in the owners quickly appeared in the negotiations that produced the 1990 lockout, when Vincent was commissioner, but most disastrously in the bargaining that led to the 234-day strike in 1994-95, when Vincent was no longer commissioner.

Nine months into Vincent’s tenure, he issued a memorandum to the clubs about steroids and other illegal performance-enhancing substances. Selig said he “vaguely” recalled the memorandum.

The seven-page memorandum clearly alerted owners to the existence of PEDs; nevertheless, for years, Selig said he was not aware of steroids in baseball. But as the Brewers’ owner, he received Vincent’s memorandum, which he should have seen as an alert and a warning.

“This memorandum sets forth Baseball’s drug policy and the principal components of our drug abuse program,” the June 7, 1991 memorandum said.

In 1990 Congress passed the Anabolic Steroid Control Act, which made the unauthorized distribution, possession and use of anabolic steroids a federal crime. The first President Bush signed the act into law Nov. 29, 1990.

Vincent reacted to that law, writing on page 2 of his memorandum, “This prohibition applies to all illegal drugs and controlled substances, including steroids or prescription drugs for which the individual in possession of the drug does not have a prescription.”

Appearing in the fourth line of page 2, the word “steroids” could not be missed. Any responsible person reading the memo could not miss it. Selig presumably was a responsible person; ergo, he must have read it and, if from no other source, learned that steroids were illegal.

Did he know that players were using steroids? Perhaps that question should be did he want to know if players used steroids?

In a 2008 interview with Newsday, the commissioner said, “I don’t want to hear the commissioner turned a blind eye to this or he didn’t care about it. That annoys the you-know-what out of me. You bet I’m sensitive to the criticism.”

However, sometime after an Associated Press reporter, Steve Wilstein, wrote about seeing a bottle of androstenedione, a steroids precursor, in Mark McGwire’s locker during McGwire’s season-long home run derby with Sammy Sosa, I asked Selig if he was going to look into it.

“I like Mark,” he replied. “I’m not going to do anything to hurt him.”

And he never did. Nor did he do much to discourage the use of steroids. Selig has always pointed out that MLB was powerless to do anything without agreement from the union, which was true, but he initially made little effort to secure the players’ agreement.

“We tried in ‘94 to talk to the union about it, but they didn’t want to talk about it,” Selig said.

Steroids, however, were not at the top of the owners’ list of negotiating priorities at that time. No. 1 was a payroll cap.

As Michael Cramer and James Swiatko Jr. wrote in the Marquette Sports Law Review in 2006:

“…MLB did not want a PED policy badly enough given other issues it faced, at least during the 1994-96 negotiations. While the signs of PED abuse were visible in 1994 as MLB prepared to square off with the MLBPA …baseball was preoccupied with economic issues at this time.”

Led by acting commissioner Selig, the owners plowed full speed ahead with their quest for a payroll cap (which they failed to get), leaving steroids to blossom into an unprecedented era of home runs.

“It needed follow up, it needed a lot, it needed intensity,” Selig said of baseball’s cure for steroids.

What about with amphetamines. It took Congressional criticism to induce Selig to secure the union’s agreement to ban amphetamines in 2006. It’s not as if greenies, as they are known, were foreign to Selig.

As owner of the Brewers, he was a frequent clubhouse visitor, constantly communicating with his players and free to enter any nook and cranny in the clubhouse, including the area where large jars of greenies were available to the players.

Selig, however, never did anything about greenies after he and his cohorts forced Vincent to resign as commissioner in September 1992 and he became de facto commissioner as chairman of MLB’s executive council. Selig did not seek the union’s agreement to ban amphetamines for 13 years after he took command of MLB.

Selig frequently and loudly takes credit for creating the toughest PED program in professional sports. In reality, it was the players who made it happen. After fighting drug testing for years, the union was overwhelmed by a change in the position of its members, a large majority of whom had become tired of being labeled steroids cheats and wanted to be free of the stigma.

Selig also boasts of labor peace; indeed, when the current labor contract expires at the end of next year, the two sides will have gone two decades without a work stoppage or even a peace-threatening dispute. The two sides have negotiated three consecutive agreements without a strike or a lockout.

But what preceded this period of peace? Five strikes and three lockouts, of which Selig played a significant role in at least three of them, two as chairman of the owners’ Player Relations Committee and one as acting commissioner.

He might have belatedly learned the value of peace, but he spent many years fomenting the plagues of war. That part of his legacy he does not acknowledge. Instead he deals with it by saying, “I don’t want to go back into that now.”

Selig and his achievements are constantly touted by his in-house public relations firm – MLB.com. Selig can say he has nothing to do with what its reporters write and it posts on its web site, but he obviously has no interest in turning off the spigot of praise by saying “enough already.”

MLB.com even assigns one writer to write about the commissioner. The poor guy who has had the assignment for the last part of Selig’s career has been Mike Bauman, who before joining MLB.com was a highly respected Milwaukee writer.

Here’s one example from two months ago. With the headline “Peace in labor relations helps game thrive,” Bauman writes:

“It has been nearly two decades since labor and management couldn’t find enough common ground to keep the game going. In the two decades prior to that, baseball had seven work stoppages.

“Our game is so good; we are always better off when we keep the focus on the field,” Commissioner Bud Selig frequently says.

The articled adds, “What was once a competition between labor and management now often looks much more like a partnership. Selig deserves credit for that.”

And: “It took time, not to mention reason from both sides, for that atmosphere to be fostered. But baseball is better for it. Baseball is actually much more pleasant for it. When the legacy of Bud Selig’s tenure is discussed, labor peace has to be a central and very positive.”

The article mentions prior problems but doesn’t connect Selig to any of them. It’s as if he was an innocent bystander.

Bauman and other MLB.com writers have not been alone in praising Selig and ignoring his miscues. As he has coasted toward retirement, he has been saluted unceasingly by writers from all types of publications and web sites. Last season he made a farewell tour of major league parks, and each stop produced articles that glowed with his achievements.

I didn’t intend to write this piece, but all of those all-positive and nothing-negative assessments of Selig’s tenure as commissioner prompted me to take this more balanced approach.

Here’s one example. Bill Madden of the New York Daily News wrote a 3,200-word article that was filled with old Selig stories but nothing that questioned what Selig might have done wrong. I wasn’t the only reader who wondered about the absence of anything negative.

A reader named Jay Smith wrote in the comments section:

“Not a single word about the owners collusion in the 80’s when they tried to destroy the players union and were forced to pay the players $280 million. The owners then expanded and used the expansion fees (from Miami, Tampa Bay, Arizona & Colorado) to pay off the players, which only diluted the talent further and was a prime reason Selig added all these layers of playoffs and inter-league play. Selig became Commissioner when then-Commissioner Fay Vincent cut his own throat because he told the owners, ‘You stole $280 million from the players, and the players are unified to a man around that issue, because you got caught and many of you are still involved.’”

No, Jay Smith is not my alias.

Just last week Tyler Kepner of The New York Times wrote a column in which he featured stories about Selig from George Steinbrenner, late owner of the New York Yankees, and John Fetzer, late owner of the Detroit Tigers, whom Selig calls his baseball mentor.

Kepner quotes Vincent as saying “the fairest way to view Selig’s legacy was in pieces, and by understanding the history that preceded him into office.” But then Kepner fails to demonstrate any desire to explore that history.

Interestingly, the column mentions a recent challenge that Selig made to Bill Giles, the Philadelphia Phillies’ chairman, about being able to name old-time players. Had Kepner chosen to take Vincent’s suggestion to look into the history he could have written that Giles is one of the few management officials who has acknowledged that the owners engaged in collusion against free agents, which separates him from Selig. Kepner barely mentions collusion.

Walter Haas Jr., late owner of the Oakland Athletics, was another owner who admitted that the owners conspired against free agents. He didn’t say it publicly but told his friend Vincent.

“Years later,” the former commissioner related, “he called me and said, ‘You’re the only one who said it happened. Of course, it happened.’ He said ‘I’m embarrassed about it. I was involved in it. You should never feel bad about saying it happened, and on your watch it wouldn’t have happened.’”

Vincent added that Haas told him American League president Bobby Brown was the person “who called me” to make sure he was adhering to the Ueberroth-ordered plan.

What was behind collusion?

“It meant a sense of desperation and futility on the part of the owners feeling there was no way in a legal manner to change the economic circumstances,” Vincent said. “They really believed their economic viability was threatened. They felt the union had taken control of baseball, and there was no way to remedy that.”

Vincent said that he and Steve Greenberg, the deputy commissioner, argued that it would take time, “but we could work it out. We said it took a long time to get to this situation where the union was running rings around baseball. You’re not going to reverse it overnight.

“I understand the view, the frustration. They said we don’t have time to wait for it to change. They were frightened. They felt they were being squeezed by the bigger clubs.”

Concerned that if Vincent remained in the commissioner’s office, he would get in the way of the owners’ plan to go to war with the union, Selig and his closest cohort, Jerry Reinsdorf of the Chicago White Sox, led a move to oust Vincent. It was just another brilliantly bad move that is imbedded in the part of his legacy that Selig would prefer that no one talk about.