Woodling: Budig keeping busy

Gene Budig, we are told, ” … takes the reader from the bleachers to the dugout to the boardroom for fresh, inside views of the issues and questions which dominate baseball today.”

If those sound like the words you might find on the dust jacket of a book, you win the prize.

Budig, who spent 13 years as Kansas University’s chancellor, will go down in history as the last president of baseball’s American League and, as such, his new book “The Inside Pitch … and More. Baseball’s Business and the Public Trust” doesn’t really offer that many fresh insights into the six years he spent as AL boss until commissioner Bud Selig scrapped the position in 2000.

Although Budig does offer some personal opinions — he suggests Pete Rose should be reinstated and that the designated hitter rule be scrapped — most of the book is devoted to chapters inspired by visits by baseball personnel to the business class he taught at Princeton University after he left his Park Avenue baseball office.

Although he still lives in Princeton, N.J., Budig is no longer teaching at the Ivy League school. Instead he commutes to the Big Apple from time to time in his position as — and this is a mouthful — Scholar in Residence at The College Board.

Anyone who buys Budig’s book — it’s available from the West Virginia University Press — strictly for its baseball content will be surprised to find a chapter on the Sammy Sosa corked bat incident followed by one titled “The Challenge Facing College Athletics.”

Talk about a jump-shift with minimal foreshadowing.

Budig was chancellor at Illinois State and West Virginia before he came to KU, and he actually has more experience with college athletics than he does with baseball, so he obviously felt compelled to comment on the fiscal foes of the nation’s universities.

“Given the bleak economic realities of the day,” Budig writes, “it is easy to understand why a growing number of faculty members from across the country are enraged over the amount of money being spent on college athletics.”

By the way, Budig admits he was part of the problem. Back in the mid-1990s, he was a flag waver for the creation of the Big 12 Conference, “rationalizing it was the only way KU could remain athletically competitive and have the revenue to pay its bills.”

As it turned out, Big 12-generated revenue did enable Kansas to pay its bills, but the Jayhawks slid slowly into a noncompetitive state, except for men’s basketball. Now Kansas University is the poster school for contemporary college athletics.

In Robert Hemenway, KU has a chancellor who exemplifies both the best and worst of college athletics. As president of the prestigious NCAA Division One Board of Directors, Hemenway has been a strong supporter of accelerating academic standards for athletes. At the same time, however, Hemenway presides over an athletic department perceived as focused entirely on making money.

But can you blame Hemenway for speaking softly about academics and wielding a big athletic stick?

Budig writes that the college chancellors and presidents he has talked to are troubled by the direction intercollegiate athletics is traveling, but that “almost all of the presidents feel their options for sweeping change are few and limited.”

Who knows? Perhaps the day will come when athletic departments are making so much money that they’ll be able to help fund academics? Sure, that sounds like a pipedream, but who’s to say the NCAA won’t someday legislate a certain percentage of all TV revenue be designated for a school’s general fund?

Anyway, back to the book, I wish Budig would have mentioned some of the controversial aspects of his AL tenure — like the outcry that arose when Roberto Alomar spit on the umpire — but maybe those incidents will be examined when he publishes again.