from Amazon
Wednesday, June 06, 2007
Selig reminds me of John Zeigler
This is disappointing to read from someone in charge:
“Discipline for wrongdoing is important, but it is also important to create an environment so players can feel free to honestly and completely cooperate with this important investigation.”
Unless he’s creating an environment of immunity from baseball prosecution (and keeping his statement confidential so that admitting to having committed an illegal act isn’t going to bring the real prosecutors after him), what the heck is Selig talking about? What environment? Talk or else we’ll suspend you for whatever we think we can get away with?
John Zeigler once suspended Borje Salming for an entire season for having admitted that he used cocaine several years prior:
Published: September 5, 1986
The National Hockey League has suspended Borje Salming, a Toronto Maple Leafs defenseman, for eight regular-season games and fined $500 because he used cocaine several years ago, the league announced yesterday.John Ziegler, National Hockey League president, said the penalty was the ‘’the very minimum.’’ Salming, who is 35 years old and a 13-year veteran of the team, was quoted in a Toronto newspaper in May as saying that he used cocaine ‘’five, six years ago, but not since and I feel good about saying no.’’ The league suspended him for the entire season, then commuted the suspension.
Here’s the list of NHL players. The basic rule is: don’t ask, don’t tell. Pro leagues care about its image first, and the players last. There’s nothing wrong with that, since the players care about themselves first. But, don’t be a hypocrite and say otherwise. Leagues and players will do anything to ensure that they maximize their revenues.
Except for someone like Dominik Hasek, who told the Redwings a few years ago to stop paying him, since he was injured. And Pavol Demitra who would have had a sizeable bonus kick in if he scored one more goal. As it turns out, he had an empty net, and instead of shooting, passed the puck to his teammate. That act of generosity cost him something like 500,000$ a year, for two years. The Blues *wanted* him to score since they had an insurance policy against the bonus. It would not have cost them an extra cent. Why did he do that? Because he passed the puck to a teammate who had a 300,000$ bonus on the line. The shot was deflected, and both players got nothing.
My head starts to hurt really badly when I think about people who get paid outrageous sums of money and are one notch above morons (Selig and various and sundry other CEO’s and people in charge) or people who are in charge of really important things and who are one notch above morons (but who don’t necessary get paid really large sums of money), like George W. Bush.
Tango is right on. One, if there is any chance of criminal prosecution or any other penalty (like a league suspension), no person should ever have to admit to anything! The 5th Amendment right not to incriminate oneself is not something that only criminals and other miscreants get to use, it is a moral right that everyone above the age of 12 (I mean who is not being questioned by their parents) can and should use in any context they choose!
If it is me and I am being asked to help MLB (or Congress or whoever) with their investigation, I am telling them to shove it, regardless of whether I did anything wrong or not, simply because I can. When I get stopped by the police and I have done nothing wrong (or I have), I tell them nothing beyond what I have to (which in my state is only my name) and I never let them look in my car or on my person, even though I have nothing to hide. There are complex (and good, IMO) reasons why I do this and encourage everyone to do the same, but my standard answer is because I can (say nothing).
It is not necessarily the same in private business (which MLB is of course - although the fact that they are granted an antri-trust exemption makes them quasi-governmental), but certainly if there is any chance that I can be prosecuted, I shut my mouth. And if I have done nothing wrong, I still shut my mouth.
If baseball wants to somehow give players immunity from prosecution (which they can’t of course, unless, for example, they provide each player with counsel and then have the player only talk to that counsel - in which case client-lawyer confidentiality applies), then they can ask for cooperation all they want. Absent that, they need to shut their filthy, lying mouths about “cooperation.”