You look at what is going on with major league baseball and steroids and you think: This never could happen if Bud Selig were alive. Then you remember that technically, Bud Selig is alive. It’s the office of the commissioner that is dead.

I used to believe that most of baseball’s problems could be eliminated if only the sport had a better commissioner than Bud Lite, someone strong and decisive and innovative like the NFL’s Paul Tagliabue or the NBA’s David Stern. I realize now that I was wrong: Baseball doesn’t need a better commissioner. It needs a commissioner, period.

It has become clear that Selig is not what has made baseball sick, merely the most visible symptom of what is a fatal, although easily curable, disease. Of all the ailments that plague baseball, none is more damaging to the future of the game than the fact that no one is in charge.

Union honchos Donald Fehr and Gene Orza carry water for the players. Selig is a toady for the interests of the owners. But who is the boss of baseball itself? Who is there to oversee that everything is running correctly, that neither side has usurped too much of the balance of power, and that everyone’s interests are being served?

No one. Never has this been more obvious than over the past couple of years, as the mushroom cloud of steroid abuse has expanded over the game like Barry Bonds’s cap size.

All of it has occurred on Selig’s watch, but I no longer blame him for allowing it to happen. After all, he was only doing his job, serving the interests of the 30 owners who pay his $2 million salary.

Eleven years ago, when baseball needed a jolt to win back its disenfranchised fan base, Bud and his 29 cronies told me there was no steroid problem in baseball. But in 2002, when baseball needed a hammer to force the players to heel during the last CBA negotiation, Bud and his cronies told me there was a very serious steroid problem.

Now, they claim the problem may not be all that bad after all. In fact, to hear them tell it, the only two juice monsters in the game are Jason Giambi, who admitted as much to a Bay Area grand jury in the Balco investigation, and Jose Canseco, who is desperately trying to sell a book.

Everything else is either a mistake – Barry Bonds and Gary Sheffield didn’t know that the cream they were rubbing on their newly-bulging muscles was actually a steroid – or a lie. Everyone knows you can’t believe a thing that comes out of Canseco’s mouth, and as for the FBI agent who claims he warned MLB security chief Kevin Hallinan about baseball’s burgeoning steroid scandal in 1994, well, he’s full of it, too.

“It didn’t not happen,” Hallinan claimed yesterday. “Not with this guy, not with anybody else.”

As a result, baseball and its “Commissioner” see no reason to investigate the claims made in Canseco’s book or by FBI agent Greg Stejskal as reported in yesterday’s Daily News. They’ve got the problem well under control – or so Bud and his buddies claim.

“The problem is, baseball has no cop on the beat,” said John Dowd, who served as baseball’s special investigator in the case of Pete Rose.

The Dowd Report, which chronicled Rose’s habitual gambling on baseball, was commissioned by a real commissioner, Bart Giamatti, and enforced by his successor, Fay Vincent, whose memoir is titled, neither inaccurately nor immodestly, “The Last Commissioner.”

“Unlike Bart or Fay, Bud has no disciplinary powers,” Dowd said from his Washington D.C. office. “Worse, he has no inclination to discipline. To not even listen to what Canseco has to say, to turn him down and crap all over him, it’s just appalling. If you truly love the game and have its best interests at heart, you’ve got to be all over this.”

In fact, Selig’s interests are solely those of his employers. They have no real interest in ridding baseball of the cartoonishly-muscled players who suckered millions of Americans back into ballparks in the late 1990s. It serves none of their purposes to discredit the accomplishments of Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa, although no one would be too upset if the surly Bonds went down under a hail of used syringes.

The owners’ wallets have grown as fat as McGwire’s biceps, and nobody wants it to stop. They merely want to give the appearance of getting tough on druggies while still hoping to reap their benefits. Like the players themselves, Bud and the boys want to enjoy the benefits of steroids but dare not suffer the side effects.

This could not happen if baseball had a true, independent commissioner devoted to the good of the game. Baseball, of course, won’t do that without a little persuasion – after all, the autonomy and authority wielded by Giamatti and Vincent only irritated the owners.

But there is a way to get the owners to change their views on the subject. “I think Congress ought to yank the antitrust exemption,” Dowd suggested.

Ever since 1920, when baseball friendly Chief Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes allowed baseball to operate under its own rules, the owners have enjoyed the closest thing to a legalized monopoly this country has to offer. For nearly nine decades, no one has messed with the anti-trust exemption.

Perhaps Congress has held this hammer in reserve, waiting for the right time and a suitable reason to drop it. Maybe now is that time, and steroid abuse is that reason. Maybe it’s time for baseball to appoint someone to police it, because it’s clear the game has no willingness to police itself.

Are you listening, Senator McCain?

Mr. Matthews is the host of the “Wally and the Keeg” sports talk show heard Monday-Friday from 10 a.m.-1 p.m. on 1050 ESPN radio.