Poor Bud Selig shares agonizing tale of forcing himself to watch Barry Bonds hit homers

The former commissioner bore a heavy burden from cushy MLB owner's boxes around the country.

In a gut-wrenching excerpt from his new autobiography, For The Good of the Game, former longtime MLB commissioner Bud Selig shares a heartbreaking saga of personal woe from the summer of 2007. That year, Selig explains, he heroically put aside the comforts of his seven-figure salary and his suite at Miller Park in Milwaukee to bear the heavy burden of traveling the country watching baseball games.

Via Sports Illustrated, Selig shares the onerous sense of obligation he felt to endure the misery of witnessing Barry Bonds make baseball history by hitting triumphant homers. This is not for the faint of heart:

While I felt responsibility to be on hand for Bonds’s moment, I’ll admit I had a fantasy that I’d be spared when I went to Cooperstown to see Ripken and Gwynn be inducted into the Hall of Fame. Nobody would have blamed me for being there rather than on the road with Barry. But I received no reprieve, so I trudged on to Dodger Stadium and then Petco, the Padres’ beautiful home that had opened only three years earlier….

This awkward spectacle was the final exclamation point in an era of unprecedented power hitting throughout baseball. I’d seen it all, studied it, and would continue to study it for years.

I know some people will forever link me with Barry Bonds. Some will say baseball’s failure to limit the impact of steroids quicker is my failure. They may even call me the steroid commissioner.

The hardship seems unimaginable.

After telling the agonizing story of the year he had to “trudge” around the United States watching baseball, Selig, in a manner that does not seem even a little bit petty or defensive, laments the way he, and not “other longtime, well-respected executives like John Schuerholz and Andy MacPhail” is now associated with the era of heavy PED use in baseball. Read the full excerpt and know this man’s pain.