Bud Selig wants you to know that the stain on baseball ,known as the "steroid era", has nothing to do with him.

The gospel according to Bud is that he's as outraged as you are.  Said a foaming at the mouth commish:

"I don't want to hear the commissioner turned a blind eye to this or he didn't care about it. That annoys the you-know-what out of me. You bet I'm sensitive to the criticism. The reason I'm so frustrated is, if you look at our whole body of work, I think we've come farther than anyone ever dreamed possible."

According to Bud, the number of positive tests since the new, tougher drug testing standards went into effect in 2005 has gone down considerably.  

That's great Bud, but what about before that , say in 1998 when two guys, obviously hopped up on roids, played Home Run Derby?  Or in 2003, when Alex Rodriguez, one of the games top players, turned up on a list of 104 players caught with steroids.  Or all of the Roger Clemens stuff?  Or Barry Freakin' Bonds?

Bud says, yeah, well, we tried, but look at us now.

"I'm not sure I would have done anything differently," A lot of people say we should have done this or that, and I understand that. They ask me, 'How could you not know?' and I guess in the retrospect of history, that's not an unfair question. But we learned and we've done something about it. When I look back at where we were in '98 and where we are today, I'm proud of the progress we've made."

Which is the equivalent of saying "once we saw that the Titanic could be sunk by an iceberg, we got around to building a safer ship." 

In his comments, Bud is trying (poorly) to convey two things, one obvious and one transparent: The first is that at least baseball appears to have the steroid issue under control.  Finally.

The second thing is that the players union was complicit in dragging their feet for several years before baseball was forced by public opinion (and perhaps those useless, contemptuous Congressional hearings) to fix it.  In fact, if it were up to Bud, he would have enacted stronger testing measures in 2002, but feared a players union uprising.  This thinking right there tells you that Selig would rather the game go on damaged than to fix the problem.  If he had stood up to the union and made it public the players wanted no part of stronger testing, public opinion would have definitely swung in Bud's direction.  Rather than stand up and bark, Selig slunk down in his chair and continued to enable the problem.

Make no mistake, the owners and the commissioners office will paint Don Fehr and Gene Orza with the brush of blame when in fact, they, the owners, through their puppet in the commissioners office, allowed this situation to grow, fester and eventually explode.

One wonders if a stronger commissioner, like Bart Giamatti, would have buried his head in the sand like Bud did.  Probably not.  But for now, Bud Selig is further in denial than anyone in the game not named Alex Rodriguez.