Alan "Bud" Selig is rooting hard for a certain NL Central team.  Specifically, he is rooting for its best player.  It stands to reason that Selig likes Ryan Braun of the Milwaukee Brewers.  Blog over, right?  Wrong!  Bud Selig has to be rooting for Albert Pujols right now.

Why does Selig want Pujols to mash himself into the sixty home run range?  It's all about the best interest of the game.  Remember that clause?  Remember the Mitchell Report that grants the Commissioner full authority to deal with the steroid issue (see my Emperor Bud entry from that period)? 

Baseball's two sacred records both deal with the long ball.  Both are held by a player who appeared in the Mitchell Report, and has ongiong perjury proceedings related to the matter.  Assuming that Selig has all the knowledge to determine that Pujols is clean, Little Al has to be waiting on pins and needles for Big Al to hit number sixty-two.  At that point, Selig can reestablish the official single-season home run record.

The Bonds defenders will be quick to chime in that Barry did nothing wrong at the time he hit his seventy-three home runs.  As I have documented several times on this blogosphere, steroids have been banned from baseball since 1991.  Fay Vincent banned them.  Testing is another matter altogether. 

Nonetheless, some may say, "why wait to re-write the record?"  Well, to whom should it go?  If not Bonds, then the next man is McGwire.  There is a lot of circumstantial evidence surrounding Big Mac.  Giving the record back to him could set MLB up for an egg on the face moment, if the smoking gun is ever found.  And let's be real folks, that R word will also be tossed around like a beach ball.

So who is next in line?  Sosa!  Oh that no longer looks like a great idea.  So can baseball really roll the record back to Maris?  Probably not good PR to tell the fans, "the past thirty years didn't exist."  Then again, I have compared Selig to a sith lord on several occassions.

The fact of the matter is that Selig needs a "post" steroid era player to break the Maris mark in order to re-evaluate the record.  It's not that far fetched.  Ben Johnson never existed, and apparently, I never saw the Fab 5 play in back-to-back title games. 

Records are a bitter history lesson.  Once they are broken, the former holder is all but forgotten.  Babe Ruth is a glaring exception, and understandably, we aren't quite ready to let go of Hank Aaron.  But really, name everyone who has been labeled "fastest man in the world."  Name the guy who Lou Gehrig beat for his record.  Once all is right with the world, Alan Selig hopes that Albert Pujols is who we'll remember the most.