Congress was hard on first commissioner

Baseball commissioner Bud Selig might face a brushback pitch or two when he testifies next week before a congressional committee investigating steroid use among players. But it will be nothing compared with the treatment that Congress gave the sport's first commissioner.

In 1920, in the wake of the "Black Sox" scandal, baseball owners turned to a federal judge in Chicago, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, to reign over the sport. Landis retained his judgeship, leading to an impeachment effort in the House by Rep. Benjamin Welty, D-Ohio.

"What is to prevent (baseball owners) from going into the Supreme Court now and hiring every member on the bench?" Welty asked at a House Judiciary Committee hearing on Feb. 21, 1921, according to a transcript. "I think it affects the very soul of this government."

Selig is scheduled to appear Tuesday before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee. Lawmakers want to know how baseball will respond to the Mitchell Report's findings about the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs.

A similar hearing involving pitcher Roger Clemens and others is set for Feb. 13. Clemens will follow a long list of players who have also come before Congress, from Ty Cobb, Mickey Mantle and Jackie Robinson in the 1950s to Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Rafael Palmeiro in 2005.

Landis took the impeachment effort in stride. On the day Welty filed his charges, Landis said, "I'm not worrying about this thing. I'm no more interested in this than I am in the appointment of a new bellhop in that hotel across the street."

Welty alleged that Landis was neglecting his official duties for another job. The attorney general, A. Mitchell Palmer, had ruled that Landis violated no law by holding both positions.

The owners paid Landis $50,000 a year, but reduced it by $7,500, his salary as a judge. They were looking for an iron-fisted ruler to clean up the sport following the scandal in which eight Chicago White Sox players were indicted for throwing the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. The players, including the famed "Shoeless" Joe Jackson, were acquitted in court. Landis still banned them for life.

A couple of weeks after the hearing on Landis, a majority report from the committee concluded that his acceptance of the baseball job was "a serious impropriety." The report, however, left it up to the next Congress to investigate the impeachment charges.

The House took one more shot with an amendment in December 1921 that would have prevented him from holding both jobs. The proposal was defeated.

The American Bar Association did censure Landis, saying his decision to hold both jobs "meets with our unqualified condemnation as conduct unworthy of the office of judge."

Landis stepped down from the bench in March 1922, after 17 years as a judge, explaining, "There isn't enough time to do everything. I've worked hard. I've been getting up at 5 o'clock in the morning. I've had to go without lunch for two weeks." He became the longest-serving baseball commissioner, holding the job until his death in 1944.

David Pietrusza, author of a book about Landis, said the commissioner may have resigned as judge because of pressure from Congress as well as the workload of the two jobs.

Ronald Rotunda, a law professor at George Mason University, said the Landis case led the ABA to adopt its first judicial code of ethics in 1924, which said judges should not do anything that would interfere with their judicial duties. Although judges can do outside work like writing and giving speeches, holding a separate job such as baseball commissioner is not allowed, he said.

Congress has taken an interest in other commissioners, too.

In 1986, Commissioner Peter Ueberroth suspended stars such as Keith Hernandez and Dave Parker for using cocaine. The suspensions allowed the players to stay in the game if they donated to drug-prevention programs, performed community service and, in some cases, submitted to random drug testing.

Some lawmakers did not think Ueberroth was tough enough. Rep. Mike Oxley, R-Ohio, held up Landis as a model — 65 years after another Ohio congressman had tried to impeach the first commissioner.

Oxley called Landis "probably one of the greatest commissioners in baseball." A lot of people, Oxley told Ueberroth, were "looking for something perhaps of a firmer nature from the commissioner's office if we are indeed at war with drugs."

Ueberroth, who now heads the U.S. Olympic Committee, responded that Landis was operating in a far different time. A lifetime ban of the players for drug use, he said, "would be overturned in seven minutes and it would have looked like a joke. ... The truth is, they didn't deserve banning."