Ingredients to make Bud wiser

How the owners of major league baseball teams could give the commissioner's job to the man who put a knife in the game's heart only four years ago is a puzzlement.

What couldn't be done by World War I, Prohibition, the Great Depression and World War II was done by Bud Selig & Buddies in 1994. They canceled the World Series. Fairly or unfairly Selig forever will be the symbol of dud darkness.

Nor does it make great good sense to hire a thinker who advocated dismantling the National and American leagues as we have known them through much of this century. "Radical realignment" may not have been Seligs concept; yet it weaseled its way into his heart So smitten was he with the idea of creating a new identity for baseball that even in defeat he predicted that at least five teams would change leagues for the '98 season. In the end, one team moved. His.

Which brings us to this: Selig's conflicts of interest in the commissioner's job will in multiples of 30. He can say his daughter runs the Brewers without so much as daddy's whisper into her ear. Could be absolutely true. Makes no difference. When you've owned a team for 28 ears, you can't get away with saying. "I'm a neutral party now" Snipers will use these circumstances to undermine Selig's authority.

Still, unless all accounts are wrong, baseball owners will ignore the Haws in Selig's resume and vote this week to bump him up from interim commissioner to full time. He began the part-time work September 2, 1992. He moved into the commissioner's chair after Fay Vincent was deposed for having committed the high crime of disagreeing with owners who wanted to declare holy war on the players,

No such disagreement was in Selig's bones. Now he has done the commissioner's work longer than four of his five immediate predecessors. It even could be argued that it's no puzzle at all as to how he would become commissioner. What a sportswriter sees as flaws in Selig's resume may be the very reasons he would now be promoted.

Look at history Commissioners have always kissed the owners' rings. They have never represented players, fares or the game. Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner, was hired to clean up the game He banished poor Joe Jackson. But did Landis say so much as a cross word to White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, whose dictatorial and miserly practices helped create the culture in which scandal grew? Not on your life.

Happy Chandler the second commissioner, sinned by nodding his head in the players' direction. He gave them a pension-fund share of All-Star receipts. Owners dumped him without so much as a thank you for having helped the game achieve racial integration in the late 1940s.

So it goes from Ford Frick through William Eckert and Bowie Kuhn from Peter Ueberroth through Bart Giamatti and Fay Vincent. They were the owners' hued hands, nothing less, nothing more.

What could be more perfect, then, than a commissioner who is a team owner? At least the owners are being honest about what the job is. Now if only they'd get smart enough to demand that Selig do a few reasonable things, such as ...

1. Forget radical realignment. Forget it now and forever. Better than any game anywhere, baseball profits from its embrace of history. To distort so completely the identity of the leagues would be to rip the rich fabric of memory and end the connection with the past that makes the game so distinctive.

2. Make permanent the experiment with interleague play No contradiction here with an opposition to realignment teams stay in their leagues except for a week or two each year. It should be a law that Ken Griffey Jr., Derek Jeter. Greg Maddux and Tony Gwynn play in every major league stadium in America.

3. Save baseball in the Bronx. Whisper in George Steinbrenner's ear. "Forget Manhattan. The Yankees are in the Bronx. Now and forever, amen."

4. Ask players to smile. They're making millions playing a kid's game we would all play for free if we could. All the fabulous stuff Mark McGwire has done this season includes a grand smile of amused disbelief after he poolcued a Bob Tewksbury "eephus" pitch. We all go to games to have fun, and our fun is maximized if we see the players having fun, too.

5. Go back to Me. The shoe people are marketing and promotion geniuses of the sort baseball has never had. Yet when Nike proposed a baseball deal three years ago, owners said no because they wanted freedom to make their own deals, Short term, maybe they were right long term, wrong. Here's why. Whether Michael Jordan made Nike or Nile made Jordan--talking about public images here--we know this: The relationship is magic Baseball needs magic

6. Bring the designated hitter to the N.L. Why should it be the only league in all creation that doesn't use the DH? There is good reason for its use, not the least of which is dud it keeps spectators from falling asleep whenever a pitcher comes to bat.

Oh, and one more thing: Whisper in Greg Maddux's ear. "Next time you see McGwire, try that `eephus' thing. And duck."