Melky Cabrera is on pace to win the National League batting title, even though he hasn't stepped foot into the batter's box since he was suspended on Aug. 15, and won't step foot into the batter's box for the rest of the year.
Cabrera, who currently has a .346 average, will win the title barring a big surge from Andrew McCutchen, who's seven points behind Melky, thanks to the MLB rule that allows his average to be extrapolated over the minimum number of required at bats.
"We'll see how it all plays out," commissioner Bud Selig said Wednesday on the YES Network. "We generally don't interfere in that process. We'll take a look at it at the end of the year."
The move for Selig should be to declare Melky ineligible for the batting title because of his suspension for performance-enhancing drugs.
You cheat, you get caught, you don't get to win awards for being better than anyone else while you are cheating. This isn't a complex subject, right? It is for Selig, though, because he oversaw rampant performance-enhancing drug usage by baseball players that led to an insane number of records being broken.
Selig was also asked about changing records that were broken during the recent steroids era (oh, hey, this also applies to the Giants ... awkward) and said that MLB doesn't like to mess with those records because "it would never stop."
"You can't change records because once you get into that it would never stop," Selig said. "It would create more problems than it would solve."
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One of the biggest problems is that it's impossible to delineate performance from whatever substances were used versus "clean" performance. You could never figure out how many home runs Barry Bonds had while clean, because there's no real answer.
And we don't know how long Melky was taking the performance enhancer, so it's impossible to figure out how much of his average was effected.
But the bigger issue is that stepping in and taking Cabrera's title away would mean that baseball took an active stance against steroids and how it effects record-breaking. Which would mean that Selig might have to go back and unearth all the nastiness of the steroid era.
Don't bank on him opening up that can of worms any time soon.
