But you can guess how high that idea would have flown from Selig's response to Mitchell Thursday, which was swift and Seligian: "I will deal with the active players identified by Sen. Mitchell as users of performance-enhancing substances," Selig said at his press conference, which followed Mitchell's. "I will take action when I believe it's appropriate."
Here was Selig's chance to lead. He had cover from a real-live statesman to actually do those smart leadership type things Selig never does. To work cooperatively with the players, whom he and the owners should be treating as partners, not adversaries. To think about the long term rather than the immediate.
But like some accounting clerk who's got the boys in sales dead to rights on paper-clip waste, Selig vowed to hand out punishments to those who deserve it, and he'll decide who deserves it. Never mind that what will really happen -- as Mitchell noted -- is years of mud-wrestling over disciplinary procedures.
Maybe that was the purpose of the Mitchell Report. Maybe Selig just missed the labor wars that had provided baseball fans with so many thrills from the late '60s to the early aughts.
Donald Fehr, executive director of the players association, was calm but chippy at his own later news conference. This probably came as a surprise to Selig, who had referred to himself as "reaching out" to Fehr. He was reaching out with a billy club.
If you want to know what Selig's all about, picture him at the 2002 All-Star Game. All-Star managers had an amiable, long-standing and never-complained-about policy of getting everyone into the game. Inevitably, that policy would lead to both teams running out of pitchers in a game that went into extra innings.
That happened in '02, the game was called a tie after 11 and we as a nation got our bloomers in a bunch for about six seconds. Mid-July. Nothing else to do.
Selig was completely at a loss. He stood in the first row of the stands and threw his hands up, utterly baffled.
"Not in your wildest dreams would you have foreseen this game ending in a tie," he said afterward.
Actually, it took only the most meager of imaginations to picture a game ending in a tie because of a lack of pitchers, given that the managers routinely tried to empty their bullpen by the ninth inning. That amount of foresight was beyond Bud Selig. That's Bud Selig.
Selig also couldn't see how hiring Mitchell, a salaried member of the Boston Red Sox board of directors, to write this report might have created the appearance of a conflict of interest. As Howard Bryant of ESPN.com reported in an exhaustive piece two days before the Mitchell Report was released, this was a massive miscalculation.
"He is a man of integrity and we believed he was the best choice for the job," Selig said. Mitchell went off the Sox payroll -- temporarily -- while conducting the investigation. But, Bryant writes, people around baseball weren't eager to cooperate because of the conflict. Trainers and strength coaches figured Mitchell would absolve management and dump the blame on them. Some clubs figured he'd try to deflect blame from the Red Sox.
"It doesn't make a difference what they say," Bryant quotes an American League source saying about Mitchell. "He's one of them."
The players, of course, would have stonewalled regardless of who'd been running the investigation because it was a unilateral management action the players hadn't agreed to in collective bargaining.
And maybe Mitchell wasn't the best man for the job. Bryant quotes several people around baseball who found Mitchell's investigators to be clueless about baseball and clubhouse culture, and who say the investigators asked dumb questions and pushed them to make guesses about who was on steroids.
So what do we have? Mitchell's report is a pile of mostly uncorroborated hearsay. Frankly, a fair amount of it is believable, and sure enough we've had a trickle of confirmations of the "I did it once four years ago and it was a terrible mistake" variety from Andy Pettitte and others.
But most of it wouldn't get past a good newspaper editor, never mind a judge. It adds up to what even Mitchell admits is a massively incomplete picture of baseball's drug culture, but at least it succeeded in angering the players, the clubs and the support staffs and ensuring that even fewer people will cooperate with the next effort to get at the truth in this or any other serious matter.
Now, thanks to this latest bungling, this forgoing of cooperation in favor of renewed 20th century-style worker-management grappling, baseball desperately needs enlightened, visionary leadership.
Alas, look who it has as a leader.
Here come a bunch of 15-day suspensions. They'll solve everything, you bet.
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About the writer
King Kaufman is a senior writer for Salon. You can e-mail him at king at salon dot com or visit his Facebook page.
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