In case you didn't read it in one of our earlier posts, all 30 owners in Major League Baseball decided to extend Bud Selig's term as Commish until 2012 today.

Now, the optimist out there will say there's a reason for this. That the owners want to give Selig the chance to make sure that steroids aren't his sole legacy - let's give him some time to really solve the problem.

But the reality is that Selig didn't have his contract extended because the owners believe he can rid baseball of steroids and performance-enhancing drugs. They extended his contract because he makes them all exceedingly rich.

Selig just finished his 15th full season as Commissioner. As a business, the sport has never done better, setting records last season in gross revenue ($6.1 billion) and total attendance (79.5 million). Projections right now are for attendance to easily soar over the 80 million ticket mark in 2008.

And you might not know this, but baseball is incredibly close to producing as much yearly revenue as the NFL.

Even though you may consider baseball a sport, it is in reality a business. An entertainment business, to be more precise.

But what's driven these profits to new incredible heights?

Well, you already know the answer to that. It was primarily the Steroids Era. And Selig was the Chairman of the Board while it went on. As was made clear at the Congressional hearings earlier this week, Selig, along with Donald Fehr, basically choose to ignore a problem thanks to the bottom line. Selig for the owners' sake, Fehr for the players' sake.

In most other businesses, a person in Selig's position would quickly be fired after getting grilled on Capitol Hill and having no real answers to probing questions about how his company was run.

But that isn't baseball. Despite steroids, depite HGH, despite everything, Selig has presided over the most profitable era of Major League Baseball. People keep coming to games and spending money. And the owners like that.

Sure, Selig can give a noble, if feeble, effort to rid performance-enhancing drugs from the game of baseball behind closed doors (something the World Drug Administration called "demeaning to Senator Mitchell"). But he's only doing it to appease the authorities for a time.

Selig is essentially a puppet of the owners. Don't mess things up so much that you mess up our profits.

Because at its core, baseball is a business, whether we like it or not.