hey Bud, wake up!

Melky Cabrera was suspended for the last third of the year for cheating, testing positive for performance-enhancing drugs. The positive test came during the season, a season in which he exploded to lead the league in batting average and win the All Star MVP.

In his first six seasons in the majors Cabrera never hit higher than .280 and was really just a 4th outfielder for the Yankees and Braves. In his eighth season he jumped to .346! This also coincidentally coincided with his free agent year. PEDs clearly contributed to his success.

On Wednesday, commissioner Bud Selig says that it is unlikely that baseball will interfere with the baseball awards if Melky Cabrera ends the season as the leader in batting average. Cabrera began his suspension hitting .346, with Andrew McCutchen currently second at .339. Cabrera has 501 at bats, one fewer than the qualifying number. In the Official Baseball Rules, according to section 10.22(a), he would win the batting title if an extra hitless at-bat is added to his average and it remains higher than that of any other qualifying player.

Two and a half years ago, Bud Selig stated that “The so-called steroid era... is a thing of the past.” Today, the most recent NL MVP (Ryan Braun), All Star MVP and likely batting champion (Cabrera) flunked a test for PEDs during the season that they won it. This problem isn’t going away. And with an opportunity to punish a high-profiler offender, Bud just shrugs his shoulders and says “We’ll see how it all plays out. We generally don’t interfere in that process.”

So when my kids are old and looking through the baseball record books and see ‘Melky Cabrera: 2012 All Star MVP and NL Batting Champion,’ we will have this conversation:

“Melky’s a funny name. Dad, who was Melky?”
“He was a cheater. He broke the rules by using banned substances.”
“So how come they let him keep the awards?”
My only response will be, “Because the commissioner didn’t feel like interfering.”

As science is improving, player salaries are increasing, and substances are getting harder to catch, many low- and mid-level hitters are willing to take a chance on not being caught with the opportunity to crash the leaderboard and cash in on a big contract. Melky Cabrera took a chance on a $100 million contract and although he won’t get close to that next year, several teams will likely offer him over $10 million a year. That’s five times what he would have gotten pre-PEDs. And along the ride he picked up an All Star MVP and batting title.

Selig is a coward with his head in the sand. He waited until the last minute to do anything about steroids and performance enhancing drugs. As soon as he possibly could after that, he declared, “the steroid era is over.” And later on when players are still winning the hardware with the juice, he is content to just sit back and let it be, still whispering to himself that “things are changing, things are changing.”