by Jerry Feitelberg and Amaury Pi Gonzalez

OAKLAND–The election for a new MLB Commissioner is coming up on August 14th and any sense of a non political transisition might not be in the cards. Sources in baseball say that Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig is endorsing his right hand man for most of his 22 years as Commissioner Rob Manfred who is MLB’s Chief Operating Officer. Manfred for the most part supported all of the decisions coming from Selig and the handling by baseball in the BALCO/steroids scandal that took almost ten years to discover, investigate and enforce new drug rules that was just the beginning of a long line of doping policies formed.

If former San Francisco Giant Barry Bonds was the face of the BALCO scandal than currently suspended New York Yankee Alex Rodriguez is the face of the Biogenesis case. A-Rod is out for the season after his second infraction for use of banned substances and he was found out by Federal agents to be receiving such enhancements from Florida distributor Biogensis who also supplied current Met’s pitcher Bartolo Colon and the Blues Jays slugger Melky Cabrera.

Federal agents just recently arrested Biogensis Founder Anthony Bosch on Tuesday for distribuition, Bosch in testomonies before sang like a bird and helped name some minor league and MLB players in the distribution ring. A-Rod who fought this season’s suspension even threatening to sue baseball relented and drop his lawsuit against MLB and accepted the year long suspension for this season was named by Bosch in the sting. Colon and Cabrera are not off the hook yet if in the ongoing investigation by the feds find that they’ve received any more banned substances since their last suspensions.

How this will ties into the choice of baseball’s next Commissioner? That will be decided next week and may might make a huge difference. Manfred critics claim he was Selig’s right hand man and Selig acted slowly in getting a drug policy instituted and it litterally took an act of Congress to get Selig to testify and promise the Congressional listening body to get some teeth to baseball’s new drug policy and form it’s own doping invstigative department headed by Senator George Mitchell.

Biogenesis couldn’t have happened at a worse time for Selig and Manfred with the election coming up and with the Bosch arrest as baseball is about to take a vote for the next Commissioner and Manfred has been named as the lead choice to be next Commissioner. 12 unnamed players will be named soon in the federal investigation of receiving banned substances from the Coral Gables lab and this would be the second major distribution case that will be in baseball’s lap since BALCO.

Baseball owners Jerry Reinsdorf of the White Sox and Artie Moreno of the Los Angeles Angels have been named to be campaigning for Boston Red Sox Chairman Tom Werner who is outside of the Selig circle and Moreno and Renisdorf want to block any chance for Manfred to get elected as next Commissioner it will take eight Werner votes to make that happen. Selig’s handling of baseball’s drug policy was too little too late, it should have been nipped in the bud during the McGwire-Sosa home run derby era in 1998 but baseball was having a resissance recovering from the bad publicity of the 1994 canceled baseball strike shorten season.

With Bosch being photograghed and making the front page tabloids of some of the New York papers being led away by Federal officers Tuesday it sure doesn’t bode well for the Commissioner’s election this August 14th. Moreno and Reinsdorf maybe onto something here with their attempts to get the other owners to make a huge change in the top administration levels of baseball and set a new tone with a baseball political outsider who was not in the MLB office when all this was going down in trying to elect Werner.

Amaury Pi Gonzalez is the Spanish radio voice of Oakland A’s baseball and Jerry Feitelberg covers A’s baseball for http://www.sportsradioservice.com