Baseball loses with tie
Selig says 'horribly painful' lesson learned
Milwaukee ? Baseball commissioner Bud Selig vowed Wednesday to make changes to the All-Star game to avoid ties, but he said expanding the rosters isn’t the answer.
Selig said the sport needs to return to its past, when managers didn’t feel pressured into using every player.
Baseball fans show their displeasure after Tuesday's All-Star game was called in the 11th inning with the score tied at 7-all. Baseball commissioner Bud Selig on Wednesday promised changes would be made to prevent ties in the future.
“There is a different bit of thinking today,” Selig said. “I’m not going to be critical of the managers. They felt they were doing the right thing and they got everybody in.
“But I think it’s time (for change). We do have 30 players. We’ve expanded the roster. So, hopefully that should be enough.”
Selig said he had a sleepless night after calling off Tuesday’s game with the scored tied 7-7 after the 11th inning. Fans, who paid up to $175 for a ticket, were outraged.
Selig called it a “horribly painful and heartbreaking lesson.”
“We will learn from this,” he vowed. “This will never happen again.”
He said there was “a series of ways we can solve it, but that’s for another day. I’ve talked to both managers and it’s an easy problem to solve once you know you have a problem. But I didn’t have that luxury.”
Selig believed he had no choice but to declare a tie when managers Bob Brenly and Joe Torre told him they had run out of players.
Brenly informed Selig that pitcher Vicente Padilla had trouble loosening up. Selig said that if Padilla had been healthy, he would have ordered the game to continue.
Although Selig called the solutions easy, he said they wouldn’t be discussed until after the season. But he suggested managers return to using starters deeper into the game and discarding the pitcher-per-inning trend.
Selig said he thought All-Star games have been managed differently since baseball took a public relations beating in 1993, when Mike Mussina, then with the Orioles, didn’t get into the game All-Star game in Baltimore.
Selig said he had no other option Tuesday night but to call the game.
“Look, we can have the debate about how you should use players in the All-Star game, but we were past that,” Selig said. “I didn’t have that option to sit and sort of pontificate about what they should have done. That’s for another day.”
Selig, already dealing with the possibility of a strike and reports of steroid abuse in baseball, said he understands fans’ disappointment, but that no one was more disappointed than him.
Many fans at Miller Park booed Selig’s decision and some of them threw bottles and giveaway seat cushions onto the field.
“Joe Torre called just to find out how I was doing,” he said. “I spent a very lonely and sad evening. It was a great, great five days, but for a couple of minutes.”
Selig said he would announce his decision differently if he could do it over. Perhaps having a player announce the news to the crowd would have been the way to go, such as when Joe Girardi told a crowd at Wrigley Field that a game was canceled when Darryl Kile died, Selig said.
“That’s the one thing I think we should have done better,” he said, “I’m not sure anyone would want to come out and deliver that message.”
Selig said he had a heavy heart when he left Miller Park.
“Nobody wanted to play more than I did, but I have to balance the concerns and hopes of the fans against the welfare of the players and the game,” Selig said. “And every so often you get caught in a really difficult and sensitive situation. This is why they have a commissioner, because somebody has to make those decisions.”
And Selig said he doesn’t second-guess himself. Allowing a pitcher back into the game was out of the question.
“Joe and Bob were very nervous about that,” he said. “Pitchers have showered, dressed, a lot of them gone.”
What about allowing a position player to pitch?
“If you want to engage in another travesty, that would be it,” Selig said. “Yes, of course teams do it during the season when they’re hopelessly behind and they don’t want to waste anybody in their bullpen. But that was a very unattractive option and one that, at least in baseball, there’s no support for.”
And Selig dismissed as gimmicky the notion of ending a tie with a home run derby much like soccer breaks a tie with a shootout.
“I can’t find any support for that,” Selig said. “That’s not the way to solve the problem.”
Selig also said he briefly considered naming co-MVPs before deciding not to name any.
“But this is a big honor, the game was a tie,” he said. “And it was just difficult to award under these circumstances, especially because this was the first year we had named it in honor of Ted Williams.”