Skip to content
Link copied to clipboard

Rich Hofmann | Bud: This home run record is for you

AS BARRY BONDS approaches history, baseball commissioner Bud Selig is in full dither. He says he has not yet made up his mind about whether to attend the games when Bonds ties and breaks the all-time home run record.

AS BARRY BONDS approaches history, baseball commissioner Bud Selig is in full dither. He says he has not yet made up his mind about whether to attend the games when Bonds ties and breaks the all-time home run record. He is playing Hamlet when he should be hiring a brass band. In fact, he should be hiring two brass bands.

The commissioner of baseball has to be there. He has to congratulate Bonds. He has to clap. He has to smile. If he can't bring himself to hire the bands, OK - maybe that ship has sailed, because of the dithering.

But Selig has to be there.

He has to be there, not for Bonds or for himself but for his sport.

"The time for disapproval is past," said Scott Tattar, senior vice president and director of public relations at LevLane, a Philadelphia agency. "It's over. You give the ballplayer his due. You shake his hand and then you walk away. You always take the high road, no matter how hard it is."

Tattar - also a Phillies season ticketholder - is one of nearly a dozen public-relations specialists contacted for this column. They all had their individual takes on the subject, and they all recognized Selig's dilemma, but all except one of them said that Selig had no choice but to be at the game and take part in the celebration of the record.

Even as Selig wavers - he has refused to say what he was going to do in several recent interviews, claiming that he hasn't yet made up his mind - these PR professionals were nearly unanimous. Many of them deal in crisis communications, like David E. Johnson, CEO of Strategic Vision in Atlanta. And Johnson said it was a simple bit of PR calculus.

"It's a bigger story if he doesn't show up," Johnson said. "The best thing to do is go and attend the event. There will be some commentary that he should not attend but by going, he keeps it a smaller story.

"He should go, he should sit there, he should smile, he should shake hands. Get it done and it's a 2-day story. Don't go, and it just goes on and on and on."

Selig would be exhibiting a colossal ego if he were to skip out now. The truth is that this is history for his sport and that nothing he says or does is going to change that. If Selig were to avoid this moment, he would be condemning a man when everybody knows that we are not talking about a man, but an entire steroid era. Bonds is its personification but, well, come on.

Baseball fans have made their judgment. They are voting with their feet and with their wallets and they are doing it in record numbers. Ask them if they care about cheating and they say they do. But they keep coming to the games and keep cheering on their favorites and, well, their actions suggest that they really don't care. Their actions suggest that there is something about the attraction of the sport that outweighs the negative feelings about cheating.

These are Selig's customers. This is Selig's sport, with all of its imperfections laid bare.

People see all of it, every bit of it, and they still come - and Selig needs to come, too. He need not apologize, even if all of his public hand-wringing about attending has brought his sincerity into question, even if his slowness about everything in this matter has robbed him of his effectiveness as a leader.

"There is a lesson in this for corporate executives," said Richard Levick, president and CEO of Levick Strategic Communications in Washington. Levick also deals in the art of crisis public relations.

"The thing they can learn from baseball and Selig is that in a time of crisis, you have to run to the problem and not run away from it," Levick said. "When you turn away from it, as baseball and Selig did, you find yourself in a position where you can't say anything."

For Henry Aaron not to show up to see his record broken is one thing - although, honestly, he could use a PR guy at this point, too. What he gains by staying away is beyond me.

Selig, though, does not have that choice. Whatever happened, whatever is happening, it is all on his watch. To repudiate this man and this moment would be to repudiate his own work as commissioner and to repudiate a sport that is thriving, negatives and all. How can Selig even be considering it?

"I don't understand it," Scott Tattar was saying. "Baseball is more vital than it has ever been. Baseball continues to be the sport that is handed down between fathers and sons and, now, mothers and daughters.

"This is bigger than one guy," he said.

*

Send e-mail to hofmanr@phillynews.com. For recent columns, go to http://go.philly.com/hofmann.