NEW YORK (AP) -Union head Donald Fehr doesn’t plan to be at the ballpark if and when Barry Bonds sets the career home run record.
“I won’t follow him around, but I generally don’t go to games during the season, so that’s nothing new for me,” Fehr said Friday during a meeting with the Associated Press Sports Editors.
“My guess is it’s probably possible if not likely that somebody from our office will be there because Bobby Bonilla is in the office and he’ll probably go,” Fehr said. “And if he wants to go, we’ll certainly send him.”
Bonilla, Bonds’ former teammate on the Pittsburgh Pirates, has worked for the players’ association for several years. Baseball commissioner Bud Selig said Thursday he still hasn’t decided whether he will attend.
y players ever to play.”
Fehr defended baseball’s drug-testing program, which began in 2003, and said that years from now people will wonder why so much focus was put on performance-enhancing drugs. He speculated that a cable-television culture could be the reason.
“They’re going to say, with everything else that was going on America, between global warming and a war and 9-11 and the collapse of health care and everything else, why did we spend all this time on steroids and Anna Nicole Smith and whether Britney Spears did this or that or the other and all the rest of it? And yet it dominates the news, it just dominates it,” he said.
Fehr wouldn’t go into details on how many active players former Senate Majority Leader George Mitchell has asked to speak with in his steroids investigation. But when asked whether it was 5-to-10 or 120, he did say “it’s closer to the former than the latter, so far.” Mitchell’s staff and the union have been discussing possible interviews.
“I don’t know what it’s going to be in the end,” Fehr said. “Hopefully it won’t be very many more than we already have indications about.”
Fehr said that the dates of the second World Baseball Classic, to be played in March 2009, could be shifted by a few days for television, and that part of the tournament will take place again in Japan and probably Puerto Rico. He said that if the second edition is successful, the WBC could be expanded to include a qualifying tournament for its third go-around, which baseball officials have said likely will be in 2013.
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