John Rocker did not embarrass baseball. He without a doubt embarrassed himself, but it takes a lot more than a few disparaging comments about New Yorkers to make baseball look bad. The sport’s bar for public humiliation has just been set too high.

We’re talking about a sport that a few years ago canceled one of the most time-honored chunks of Americana, the World Series, because its athletes and its owners could not decide who deserved the biggest slice of the money pie.

That’s why it seems strange that baseball is suddenly worried about its image enough to enact a 30-day suspension on Rocker for the horribly appalling things he said in an interview with Sport Illustrated in December.

Don’t think for one second that the reason for this suspension is anything other than public shine. All suspensions in sport are for this reason. Do you really think the powers that be in baseball care how racist or ignorant Rocker is or whether some Expos middle reliever spends his off days sucking on the business end of a crack pipe?

Of course they don’t.

But Major League Baseball commissioner Bud Selig wants to avoid protests from minorities and other groups who were included in Rocker’s arbitrary rant on everyone who has ever dared to not like him.

It’s one thing to have a racist star reliever holding down the bullpen of one of your sport’s most successful franchises. That can be ignored. But you can’t do anything to smooth over a good old-fashioned protest.

For a recent example, hearken back to the November protests against the World Trade Organization in Seattle. Along with most of the citizens of this country, I have no clue as to what the big fuss was. I do know, however, that the protests got violent and the Seattle Police Chief was forced to resign after the dust settled.

When you’re trying to sell a product such as baseball, you don’t want a bunch of do-gooders attempting to make you look bad. If MLB had not taken some disciplinary action against Rocker, spring training for the Braves would have been a distracting, picket-filled mess.

And distracting, picket-filled messes draw negative media attention, which eventually filters down to fans that didn’t really pay attention to the whole deal before but now think that maybe something should be done.

This is the way all these suspensions work, and there really is nothing wrong with that. Selig and company have the right to protect their sport, which is still fighting to win back its fans and its credibility.

However, that right does not apply in the case of Rocker.

Suspensions for throwing firecrackers at fans and for failing easily duped drug tests are one thing. This suspension was solely based on speech, which the last time I checked was still free.

Rocker has the right to hate New York and its inhabitants. He has the right to be a racist. He has the right to say he doesn’t want to sit on a subway with someone with green hair.

If the city of New York hated anyone as much as it hates Rocker, they would probably be inclined to hate it back too.

If Derek Jeter had done a similar interview in which he railed against Atlanta’s persevering panhandlers and rampant rednecks, would he have gotten as much flack as Rocker?

Possibly, but that would be just as wrong. Selig and MLB dropped the ball on this one. If they truly wanted to earn back the respect baseball still lacks, they would have taken a hard stance against disciplining Rocker.

They would have pointed out that America is filled with racists, and baseball, just like other sport, reflects the views of society.

They would have denounced Rocker’s opinions, making it clear that they are flatly opposed to his beliefs, but would have maintained that he is free to say what he wants because he lives in America, and baseball is still the American pastime.

They would have shown that the only thing that matters in baseball is the baseball, an aspect of the sport that, with the exception of the Sosa-McGwire soap opera, has been given little attention in the past few years.

But Selig instead chose to flex the mighty powers granted to him last month by the owners of baseball, which gives him more individual power to rule as he pleases than any commissioner since Judge Kenisaw Landis. This includes the right to negate trades, disperse franchise income and move teams on a whim.

Selig wants to make it look like baseball is now tough, that it will do whatever it takes to become a sport worth watching. But ol’ Bud needs to realize that being tough doesn’t always mean suspensions. Being tough can also involve not acting.

In this case, Selig chose the wrong kind of tough. Hopefully, for the sake of baseball, a sport which I still love, it is a mistake that will not be repeated.

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David Roepke is a junior in journalism and mass communications from Aurora. He is a news editor of the Daily.