Given this week's developments, the question no longer is whether there is sufficient reason for Bud Selig to resign as commissioner. It's whether there is any reason why he should continue.
The answer is no.
The commissioner's job is to capably lead his sport, rule in its best interests and represent it in the most favorable light. Selig has done neither recently, casting more shame on the game with each passing month. With each action, his credibility with the fans and -- more importantly -- the Players' Association sinks lower and lower.
The most important issue facing Selig the past two years has been negotiating a new labor contract with the union. Yet the man who canceled the World Series seven years ago is instead guiding the game into another labor war.
His ineffectiveness is revealed by his priorities. Two mere days passed after the World Series before Selig announced his repugnant "contraction" plan. Two entire months passed before he began talking seriously with the union about the basic agreement. And in between, he negotiated himself a three-year contract extension worth a minimum of several million dollars a year.
If Selig lasts through the extension, he'll have served as commissioner longer than FDR served as president. Yet, after his actions this past winter, how can he possibly sit across from the players' union and expect to be taken seriously, let alone be effective?
Those actions:
With the champagne still drying in the Diamondbacks' clubhouse from a gripping World Series that raised TV ratings to their highest level in a decade, Selig announced he planned to eliminate two teams. Not that he would name them. Instead, he merely hinted that the teams were Minnesota and Montreal, letting those two communities twist in the wind while crippling the teams for the winter.
Selig appeared before a Congressional committee and his answers were so evasive and unbelievable that he had to be reminded he was under oath.
This week, Selig acknowledged accepting a $3 million loan from the Twins' Carl Pohlad six years ago in clear violation of major-league ownership's own rules.
Selig and his lawyers tried to spin the loan as a mere housekeeping procedure of no consequence. But if the loan was so innocent, then why did the owners bother setting up the rule against such transactions in the first place? If it was so innocent, why did three past commissioners call it unprecedented? If it was so innocent, why did Pohlad and Selig deny the loan took place when initially questioned by Twin Cities reporters?
In a sense, the loan is a small matter -- as Jerry Reinsdorf so eloquently put it, the owners often don't enforce rules when it is inconvenient to do so. Of far greater importance is what the loan reveals: credible evidence that the proposal to eliminate the Twins had less to do with any alleged problems in the Minnesota market than with the too cozy relationship between two friends scratching each other's backs.
Most people already suspected as much. Now, there is a smoking gun.
Selig calls such speculation preposterous, but what he refuses to see is that the mere appearance of a conflict of interest makes it a conflict of interest. The same is true for the obvious (if small) benefit he and the Brewers would gain from eliminating the Twins.
These conflicts of interest provide the perfect example why it is such a bad idea to let an owner serve as commissioner. (And don't give me that, "Selig put the Brewers in a trust" nonsense. His daughter runs the team and Bud knows full well exactly how any of his actions as commissioner affect the Brewers in the short- and long-term.)
Selig won't believe this after the bashing he's taken in my columns, but I liked him before his nuclear winter. I didn't always agree with him, but I found him to be a genuine fan of the sport, whose roots extended far back in baseball. He is an accessible man who is fond of wandering into the press box during games or onto the field before batting practice. He seemed human compared to the remote suits who ran the other sports.
And he has done some good work as commissioner. Baseball's revenues have soared to $3.5 billion during his tenure. Attendance remains extraordinarily high. The game is growing on the international level. The expanded playoff system has been largely successful.
But his recent abuses overwhelm those successes. A commissioner who has spent his entire tenure complaining that baseball finances are so out of control that half the teams don't stand a chance to compete clearly is not doing a very good job.
In 1994, Selig claimed 19 teams were losing money. Now he claims 25 teams lost money in 2001. This is progress?
If Bud truly loves the game, he will see that he is hurting it right now, and that the best way he can serve the sport is to resign as commissioner. That best way he can help baseball is to return to running the Brewers in Milwaukee where he can push for his reforms as an owner rather than as a commissioner with a personal agenda.
Whatever Selig's goals for baseball, he is not helping achieve them. It's time to see whether someone else can.
Simply put, after this winter, the only remaining way for baseball's commissioner to act in the game's best interest is to leave his office.
Jim Caple is a senior writer for ESPN.com.
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