Mavericks Owner Mark Cuban yesterday called MLB Commissioner Bud Selig a “horrible” commissioner and said, “The only growth was at the end of the '90s, and we know what happened there." Appearing on "The Dan Patrick Show," Cuban said, "The things that he did behind the scenes, giving and taking away draft picks, discretionary money where somebody that didn’t expect to make the playoffs and made the playoffs said that he promised them X number of dollars if they did X, and when they made the playoffs didn’t get the money -- that discretion is just ridiculous. That’s why I’ve compared him to ‘The Godfather’ because every offer he made was one you couldn’t refuse." Cuban over the years has expressed interest in buying the Pirates, Cubs, and Rangers when they were on the market, but he claims he was told secondhand that Selig “thought I was going to be the next George Steinbrenner and just overpay for everything and push up the price of players." Cuban went on to discuss what attracted him to baseball, saying, “In basketball you know who 90% of the stars are going to be. It's really tough to develop someone from, ‘We never heard of him,' into an MVP. In baseball, that happens all the time. You can discover players that weren't necessarily meant to be stars. You can develop stars. You can train them. You can make teams better." He said another draw was the "analytic side of it, which going back when I started looking at teams was big, but not nearly as big as it has become." Cuban: "I saw that as an opportunity I thought would be fun. But obviously I’ve burned every bridge and dynamited it just to make sure there were no signs of life left." He added, "In most cases, I wouldn't say anything, but in this case everybody has always told me Bud reads everything that is written about him. ... It's just a little tit for tat, and I get a little bit of enjoyment knowing he pays attention to everything” (“The Dan Patrick Show,” 8/25).
