Commissioner Bud Selig

DETROIT - Baseball commissioner Bud Selig would love to use the sweeping powers of his office to rid the sport of performance- enhancing drugs if only his powers were as sweeping as some people would like to believe. Selig has asked the Major League Baseball Players Association to join him in adopting a much tougher steroid-testing program than the one that currently appears to be working just fine, because the fact that it seems to be working is only half the battle. "I believe this is an integ rity issue."

THEY ARE high school kids, playing on this Saturday morning amid the ping of aluminum bats and the sizzle of a backstop barbecue grill. Some fans sit next to the dugout in lawn chairs. Others sit behind home plate on a picnic table. There is no loudspeaker, no scorecards, no music other than the shrill cry of an upset dad. But make no mistake. When the Calabasas (Calif.) High Coyotes take the field, they want to look and act like major leaguers, even the most notorious of them. Check out their baseball pants.

SCOTTSDALE, Ariz. -- Orioles owner Peter Angelos met with baseball commissioner Bud Selig for the first time in nearly two months yesterday in the continuing attempt to agree on how to financially protect his team from competition from the Washington Nationals. As Major League Baseball begins the process of selling the Nationals, the two have tentatively scheduled another meeting for next week in Milwaukee. Angelos has been negotiating with MLB, primarily with chief operating officer Bob DuPuy, since September.

IT TOOK the threat of Congress and a steroid scandal that cast a shadow over the game's best players and most hallowed records. But, hey, whoever said baseball wouldn't eventually get it? With progress coming at this prehistoric rate, commissioner Bud Selig and union chief Donald Fehr will soon announce they're hard at work inventing the wheel. 'Round and 'round we go. In the Olympics, a first-time offense for violating the World Anti-Doping Agency's policy of banned substances earns an offender a two-year suspension.

ST. LOUIS -Commissioner Bud Selig and Major League Baseball chief operating officer Robert DuPuy both insisted yesterday that there is no stalemate in compensation negotiations with Orioles owner Peter Angelos over the relocation of the Montreal Expos to Washington. "There are just a lot of details to be worked out," Selig said, "but we'll work out all that stuff. We can only be in one place at one time." DuPuy said he exchanged phone calls with Orioles vice chairman Joe Foss yesterday, but DuPuy also said that the delay in completing a deal to indemnify the Orioles for potential losses related to the arrival of a second team in the region.

When baseball commissioner Bud Selig needs a difficult issue resolved, when he needs team owners to set aside competing interests, he often turns to his top aide, Bob DuPuy, a tough, button-downed lawyer from Milwaukee. It was DuPuy, as Major League Baseball's president and chief operating officer, who sat behind Selig during extra innings of the 2002 All-Star Game, offering advice before Selig made the difficult decision to declare the contest a tie. It was DuPuy who helped Selig and the owners hold together in agreement as they avoided a potentially disastrous work stoppage with the players union later that summer.

Major League Baseball's owners will convene in Philadelphia today for two days of meetings that will culminate with a coronation of sorts. And Orioles fans can relax. This won't involve an announcement about the Montreal Expos moving to Washington, Northern Virginia or anywhere else, for that matter. The Expos will be discussed, but their new home won't be decided. The coronation is for none other than Allan H. "Bud" Selig. Last year, in a meeting with the Associated Press Sports Editors, Selig said he planned to step aside when his current term expires on Dec. 31, 2006.

NEW YORK - Peter Angelos holds that a major league team in Washington would hurt his Orioles, and commissioner Bud Selig states his "first job and responsibility" is to protect Major League Baseball's 30 existing franchises - but that doesn't eliminate the District of Columbia as a possible new home for the Montreal Expos. Selig yesterday declined to be more specific about the Expos' relocation after the conclusion of a baseball owners meeting, saying he first wants to read the analysis of the seven contenders being prepared by the nine-person relocation committee.

A new autobiography of Pete Rose is scheduled to hit bookstores next week amid widespread expectations that Rose will use the book to admit publicly for the first time that he bet on baseball while managing the Cincinnati Reds. The book, My Prison Without Bars, has a huge first printing, 500,000 copies, and is being handled in top-secret fashion by Rodale Press, which has embargoed it until Jan. 8, when Rose will conduct a series of interviews about its contents. Rose was barred from baseball in August 1989 for illegally betting on sports events, although not specifically on baseball.

LOS ANGELES -- As the baseball players union considers possible strike dates in response to the absence of progress in the labor negotiations and the possibility that owners could unilaterally implement new work rules after the World Series, commissioner Bud Selig said Thursday that six to eight clubs could go out of business if the current economic system is not changed. "I would say six to eight can't exist another year, another year and a half. We're talking about the immediate future," Selig said during a luncheon meeting with editors and reporters of the Times.