Over the last few weeks, our pal Bud Selig has been cuffed around pretty good into the public and virtual prints, either for being dim, crazy, evil or just plain weird.

	Perhaps Bud Selig is looking at contraction from the wrong end.

After all, you are known by the company you keep, and he spends way too much time with baseball owners. It's enough to give a normal person the creeps.

But let's be fair here. Selig may only be attacking baseball's perceived problems from the wrong end.

He sees contraction as a clear solution to, well, something, right? Yes.

He sees the problem as being teams that spend far beyond the level of their partners, correct? You go, Bud.

So he wants to take out teams that don't generate enough revenue, got it?

Well, no.

It seems clear to any linear thinker that Bud is being asked to attack the problem from the wrong end.

What needs to be done in the area of contraction is to lop from the top. The Yankees. The Dodgers. The Red Sox and Diamondbacks and Mets and Braves. They're plainly spending too much on their playing personnel and must be destroyed for the good of society.

We know this is what Bud would much rather do because of the way his own team, the Milwaukee Brewers, are run. And it is Bud's team despite his protestations that his daughter Wendy is in charge, because Bud still holds the largest numbers of shares in the team. The shares might be in a blind trust (which means that nobody is blind to this arrangement, and explains why Bud has so much trouble engendering trust), but they exist nonetheless.

The Brewers lay low in the salary lists, in part because the team doesn't generate a lot of revenue, and is also up to its neck in outstanding bank loans. We can only assume that this is the way Bud wants his franchise run; otherwise, it would be the Brewers rather than the Twins on the contraction list, new stadium or no new stadium.

Thus, if every team were operated like the Brewers -- trying to keep costs in line, not working the upper end of the free agent market, finishing in the lower half of whatever division they happen to be in -- there wouldn't be these frightful disparities between the haves and haven'ts.

And since, by Bud's calculations, there are fewer haves, it makes more sense to take them out than to pick a haven't here and a haven't there.

In other words, the Yankees, Dodgers, Red Sox, Mets, Braves and Diamondbacks.

Those are the top six teams that don't get it. They spend liberally, some to better effect than others, but their interest in the product on the field is clearly detrimental, plainly out of step with the "new" model ball team.

In addition, four of those six teams don't have new stadiums with which to create fabulous new streams of revenue in the Milwaukee model. Fenway Park is almost 90 years old, Yankee Stadium 78, Dodger Stadium 40 and Shea Stadium 38. This inexcusable architectural sloth can't be countenanced in the modern era, and these teams cannot continue to cruise on the backs of the hard-working and properly frugal teams who are saving baseball for all of us.

And finally, these are the teams least interested in progressive talent-leveling concepts like revenue sharing, salary caps and other initiative depressors. George Steinbrenner, for example, wouldn't blink a bit if he never had to bring the Royals, Tigers, Devil Rays, Blue Jays, Angels, Rangers, White Sox or Twins into town ever again, nor would he miss the road trips to Kansas City, Detroit, Tampa, Toronto, Anaheim, Arlington, Chicago or Minneapolis.

George, in short, is not a team player. He's not helping at all.

Neither, for that matter, is Rupert Murdoch, or whoever ends up owning the Red Sox. And let's not even start with Jerry Colangelo, who owns the Diamondbacks and whines about little things like being forcibly moved to the American League minutes after winning the World Series.

Such ingratitude must be dealt with on the administrative level.

But it won't be. Bud prefers to lead on the basis of a thousand paper cuts rather than one swift and well-aimed blow.

Or in this case, six. The ones who are out of step with The Plan. And if that won't do it, then the next targets would be the Orioles, Cubs, Rockies and Indians. Eventually everyone will be on the same page, revenue/expense-wise -- that is, if Bud is willing to take the one bold step and whack the split ends rather than the stalk.

We eagerly await developments.

Ray Ratto of the San Francisco Chronicle is a regular contributor to ESPN.com.