Madden: To baseball, Bud Selig makes lots of dollars and even some sense

Finish your thought, Bill…your groaty dick pudding is almost ready.

Which brings me to the one issue I believe Selig really needs to rethink: contraction. If there is one overriding reason for owners continuing to dole out dumb contracts - particularly for pitchers - it is supply and demand. Under Selig’s watch, baseball over-expanded by at least two teams, primarily because of owner greed for those exorbitant expansion fees. There are too many teams in baseball, too many divisions and not enough good players to go around.

This is why the Red Sox felt compelled to commit, sight-unseen, $51 million in posting fees for Daisuke Matsuzaka. It is also why the Giants, out of desperation, made Barry Zito a $126 million pitcher, and why, this winter, the White Sox raised the salary bar for setup relievers with an industry-rattling three-year, $19 million contract for the mediocre Scott Linebrink. In the case of Linebrink, this is what you get when you combine “Creeping LaRussa-ism” with over-expansion.

There was a time, believe it or not, when teams got by with nine or 10 pitchers all season, when complete games were more the norm than a freak occurrence, and it seldom took more than three pitchers to get through a game. Now, with the advent of pitch counts and increasingly specialized relief, managers feel the need to carry 12-13 pitchers. Problem is, too many of them don’t belong in the major leagues.