Commissioner Bud Selig said Tuesday that he had already studied the integrity of baseball’s records, with help from Jerome Holtzman, the Chicago writer who was baseball’s official historian.
“I had enormous affection and respect for him,” Selig said of Holtzman. “I said to him one day — because he thought that was being overblown, about steroids and the way people were reacting — I said: ‘All right, Jerome, why don’t you do this for me? Why don’t you go back to the ’20s and ’30s and show me the things that were aberrational and caused differences in records?’
“He did. It took him six months, and he did it brilliantly; I still have it in my file. And his conclusion is every era has had its problems, whatever it is.”
Selig then spoke about the color barrier, not just before Jackie Robinson broke it in 1947, but for many years later, when some teams enforced it on their own. He said he was in Detroit the day Ozzie Virgil integrated the Tigers — 11 years after Robinson’s debut for the Brooklyn Dodgers.
Racism clearly affected baseball’s records. So did the rampant use of steroids. But all the records stand, as they should.
“That’s a slippery slope,” Selig said. “Once you get involved in that, there’s no fair way to do it. At this moment I have no feeling of doing anything differently than I’m doing.”
