Excellent column by Yahoo! Sports' Dan Wetzel today putting the blame for the steroid era where it belongs.

The media loves to pick on ARod because he's such a tool, but really he's just one of 104 players who took steroids in an era where it was for the most part condoned. You can argue all day about the morality of his choice, but without ARod, Clemens, Bonds, Tejada, Palmeiro, Sosa, McGwire and 100 others were still juicing. ARod is almost irrelevant when it comes to the systemic corruption that caused baseball to turn a blind eye. But Selig was the central figure.

Nonetheless, according to Selig, it was ARod who "shamed the game."

The other interesting backstory is that the 1994 strike which resulted in the cancellation of the World Series happened on Selig's watch. As a result, baseball was hurting in the succeeding seasons, and the steroid-driven McGwire-Sosa home run race in 1998 helped dig it out of that hole. In other words, not only did Selig turn a blind eye toward steroids for the sake of boosting baseball's popularity during tough times, he was partially responsible for the tough times that put the sport in that desperate position. And once baseball allowed that kind of power "inflation" to happen without raising any concerns, it was inevitable that steroid use would become rampant.

It's a little bit like what happened in the housing market. Turn a blind eye to terrible lending standards, and you create a short-term boost when people take out irresponsible loans. You can blame individual borrowers, but once those conditions were created, it was a virtual certainty that it would happen. Selig, like one of those Wall Street CEOs, made $17 million in 2007. But when the true extent of the steroid use comes out, what's baseball's bottom line going to look like then? Selling out the long-term interest of your organization for short-term profit and recognition isn't limited to businesses without an antitrust exemption apparently.

Personally, I don't care as much about who took steroids and who didn't, or whether taking steroids is a minor mistake or a criminal act - I just like to see the hypocrisy exposed from the top down. It's not ARod who should have been doing the apologizing and sucking up this week - it's Selig. Nice to see Wetzel calling him out.