When Octavio Dotel throws his first pitch of the 2012 season, he will establish a major league record. It won’t matter what the pitch is, whether it’s a ball or a strike or if it’s hit into the stands fair or foul.

Dotel, however, may want to get the ball back and put it in his pocket as a keepsake. That is, if the Hall of Fame doesn’t claim it first for display in Cooperstown. Dotel may go for that idea because how else will he be in the Hall of Fame?

When Dotel throws his first pitch, he will have officially played for the Detroit Tigers, and they will be the 13^th major league team in his career. Until that pitch, the 38-year-old relief pitcher remains tied with Matt Stairs, Ron Villone and Deacon McGuire, Elias Sports Bureau says, for having played for the most teams in a major league career.

Given his history and his durability, Dotel could catch Bobo Newsom for changing teams the most times in his career. Newsom did it 16 times, twice more than Terry Mulholland and Rudy Seanez, Elias research shows.

A four-decade pitcher from 1929 through 1953, Newsom played for nine different teams but had encore appearances with four of them, including the Washington Senators five times, the St. Louis Browns three times and the Philadelphia Athletics and Brooklyn Dodgers twice each.

How a player can have the misfortune of pitching for the Senators, the Browns and the Athletics, three of the worst teams of that era, I don’t know, but Newsom got to pitch for them a total of 10 times.

Dotel, meanwhile, has not had a return engagement with any of his 13 teams. He has stayed with three of them for more than a season – Astros, Athletics, White Sox – but for the most part he has moved on after a single season. He has been traded six times and been a free agent six times.

“There are guys who when they’re free agents will have one team interested,” Dotel’s agent, Dan Horwits, said. “But in his case every time he’s been a free agent it’s been numerous teams that are interested. It’s the same type of process every year.”

Last month Dotel signed with the Tigers for a guaranteed $3.5 million – a $3 million salary for this year and a $500,000 buyout of a $3.5 million salary for an option for 2013.

It was the third straight off-season in which Dotel signed a one-year contract with an option for a second year. In the first two instances, the teams that signed him traded him before they had to decide what to do about the option.

In 2010 Pittsburgh traded him to Los Angeles July 31 and on Sept. 18 of that season the Dodgers traded Dotel to Colorado. Last year Toronto signed him Jan. 3, then traded him to St. Louis July 27. He relieved in 12 of the Cardinals’ 18 post-season games, gaining two victories and incurring one loss. The Cardinals did not exercise his option for this year.

The timing of his trades the past two seasons has demonstrated Dotel’s usefulness to teams in playoff races, and teams’ pursuit of him as a free agent has shown that he remains an attractive pitcher.

“He still throws 93, 94,” Horwits said in a telephone interview. “He’s got a rubber arm. He’s had one Tommy John surgery; other than that he’s been healthy.”

Dotel had elbow surgery in 2005 but came back healthy enough to sign his only multi-year contract, a two-year, $11 million deal, with the Chicago White Sox for 2008 and ‘09, in which he relieved in 134 games. Yet his contracts since then have been the one-year guaranteed, one option year variety. The White Sox contract was also the only one of six contracts he has signed as a free agent that has provided more than one guaranteed year.

“I think he would prefer to be in the same place for a couple of years,” Horwits said. “I know he liked the Chicago situation and the way it worked.”

Teams like the way Dotel works. With 62 or more relief appearances each of the last four seasons, he has demonstrated that his age has not slowed him and that he can continue to play for several more one-year contracts.

That was something Stairs was not prepared to do. A few days after the Washington Nationals, his record-tying 12th team, unconditionally released him last August, the 43-year-old outfielder/pinch-hitter announced his retirement. A career-low .154 batting average in 56 games and 65 at-bats most likely had something to do with his decision.

Dotel, on the other hand, had a 3.28 earned run average and .182 opponents’ batting average in 29 relief appearances and 32 strikeouts in 24 2/3 innings for the Cardinals. If he pitches that way for the Tigers in the coming season, he may induce them to pick up his option for 2013 and turn his contract into a multi-year deal.

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This Web site has turned into an unexpected multi-year deal. This is the 400^th column to appear on the site, and three and a half years have elapsed since its birth.

Unfortunately, I don’t always find the time to respond to all of the e-mail from readers, but I try to answer as many as possible and I certainly appreciate your reading the columns.

Many years ago an 8-year-old girl wrote a letter to the New York Sun, a newspaper popular at the time but that subsequently died along with many other New York newspapers. She asked the editor of the Sun if Santa Claus really existed, explaining that she was writing because her father told her if you read something in the Sun you can believe it.

Yes, Virginia, the Sun responded in an editorial, there is a Santa Claus.

Once upon a time, if you read something in The New York Times, you could believe it, too. Sadly, no longer. Based on my recent experience with the Times and its version of historical accuracy, I could not be surprised if the Times told its readers that the South won the Civil War and the Holocaust never happened.

Six months ago, July 13, to be exact, the Times rewrote baseball history and has since steadfastly and stubbornly refused to restore the real history to its readers. A reasonable newspaper would do that with a correction or multiple corrections, but Times editors have basically said, “This is our story and we’re sticking to it.”

The rewrite of history appeared in a column about an HBO documentary on Curt Flood, the St. Louis Cardinals’ center fielder of the 1960s, who challenged baseball’s reserve clause in a lawsuit against Major League Baseball. The Cardinals had traded Flood to Philadelphia, and he refused to go, saying players should have the right to decide their playing locale.

The reserve clause, however, prevented that freedom, restricting a player to his team until the team traded, sold or released him. In a remarkably courageous or foolish move, depending on one’s point of view, Flood sued in Federal Court in 1970 in an attempt to have the reserve clause stricken from baseball’s rules governing players.

Flood, however, lost the case and also lost in the United States Supreme Court. His case changed nothing in baseball, certainly not the owners’ position on their control of their players. Yet in spite of the facts, the myth grew that the Flood case created free agency.

This was the myth that the Times perpetuated in a column by Richard Sandomir, its television sports columnist, and has refused to acknowledge. I have tried and tried and tried some more to get the Times to see the errors of its ways and run a correction, but no correction has appeared.

E-mail notes about the errors to the corrections editor in the sports department, the sports editor, an assistant managing editor, the Times’ chief corrections editor, the public editor and the columnist all failed to get the mistakes corrected. I made the most recent attempt directly to Sandomir, but he ignored two or three e-mail notes.

Sandomir made three mistakes in his column. Writing about two major grievances that players filed against clubs in the mid-1970s, he said “arbitrators” (plural) decided the cases, he said the Catfish Hunter grievance led to the creation of free agency and he said players “profited” from the Flood lawsuit, making the link to free agency.

In order, these would be the corrections:

One arbitrator, Peter Seitz, decided both the Hunter and the Messersmith-McNally grievances.

The Hunter case had absolutely nothing to do with free agency. It was a breach of contract grievance, and Seitz declared the pitcher a free agent because he found that Charlie Finley, owner of Hunter’s team, the Oakland Athletics, had breached Hunter’s contract. The decision affected no one but Hunter. No other player benefited or would benefit from that Seitz decision.

Although Flood deserves enormous credit for risking his career and challenging the reserve clause, he doesn’t get to share credit for the creation of free agency.

As noted, he lost his legal challenge. Not only, however, did the Supreme Court end Flood’s chance of killing the reserve clause, but the outcome also emboldened the owners’ view that they could continue controlling player movement. That’s not what Flood had in mind when he sued M.L.B.

“The case did nothing to change the owners’ thinking,” said Marvin Miller, the players’ labor leader at the time.”

Nor did the owners change their thinking three and a half years after the Supreme Court decision when just before Seitz ruled in the Messersmith-McNally grievance he suggested that a settlement would be better negotiated than have him rule.

Seitz made it pretty clear to Miller and John Gaherin, the owners’ chief negotiator, how he would rule, and Gaherin urged the owners to settle, but they rejected his recommendation.

Seitz proceeded to rule that the renewal clause in the uniform player’s contract, paragraph 10a, applied to only one year for an unsigned player, that clubs could not invoke it in perpetuity. Seitz was an arbitrator who decided cases before him on the basis of the labor rules in place, not on unrelated court decisions or social tendencies or developments.

Flood had nothing to do with Seitz’s decision. Neither did his lawsuit. Those who link the cases do so to make Flood seem even more heroic than he was. If you’re looking for a hero in free agency, it was Seitz.

The New York Times, however, doesn’t acknowledge Seitz. The Sandomir column wasn’t the first time the Times credited Flood with the creation of free agency. In a 2006 review of a book about Flood, the reviewer, David Margolick, linked Flood to free agency.

“Catfish Hunter, Andy Messersmith, Dave McNally and Reggie Jackson quickly marched into the opening Flood had cleared, earning what then seemed like staggering sums,” Margolick wrote. “And the process only intensified. ‘Opening the Floodgates’ may be a bad pun, but in this case it’s true.”

But it was false. What opening had Flood cleared? Miller questioned that and other statements in Margolick’s review in a well documented letter, but the Times didn’t publish his letter any faster than it corrected Sandomir’s mistakes.

It took nearly two months before I received a reply to my first e-mail about Sandomir’s column. When I finally received a response, it was disappointing.

“While your points are taken about Catfish Hunter and Curt Flood, neither case existed in a vacuum,” Bob Goetz, the sports correction editor, wrote. “Each had significance in free agency’s development, and the article reflected that.”

Considering that the article’s reflections were wrong, how do they support the Times’ defense of its inaccurate reporting? But the newspaper’s position on the subject got worse. When my by now lengthy e-mail reached Greg Brock, the Times’ chief corrections editor (after sports editor Joe Sexton didn’t respond to my e-mail), he replied in part:

“If the Catfish Hunter case is one of these queries, you should go ahead and take that up with the public editor. I spent an enormous amount of time – too much – on that one. I talked to about 8 editors. We do not think that is correctable. That is the final decision and we’re not going to debate it and discuss it further. So there is no point in sending me back a lengthy rebuttal. Again, you can appeal to the public editor.”

So here we had about nine Times editors deciding – on what basis I have no idea – that the Hunter case created free agency. That case, remember, had Hunter charging that his employer breached his contract because he did not pay a premium on an annuity in the time stipulated in his contract.

Seitz ruled that Finley had breached Hunter’s contract, and therefore the contract was void and the pitcher was a free agent because of that breach.

Yet Sandomir wrote:

“Had Flood won, free agency would probably have arrived a few years before it was achieved in arbitrators’ rulings in favor of Catfish Hunter, and for Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally.”

Make that one arbitrator’s rulings – the Times has corrected far less significant errors – and delete Hunter’s name, and Sandomir’s statement would be correct.

“What Hunter did,” Marvin Miller said in a recent interview, “was give players an understanding of what I told them about their earnings.” But the union leader added, “It didn’t move the owners. They thought about firing Seitz.”

Either side had the right to fire an arbitrator, and Miller thought that’s what the owners would do with Seitz. “I knew Messersmith was a likely future case,” he said “I was concerned that the ruling in Hunter’s favor caused a storm.”

I ask one simple question of Sandomir and the nine Times editors who agreed with his version of free-agent history (for the record, I covered free agency for the Times from its inception to the day I left the paper, nearly 32 years):

If the Messersmith case had not come along but the Hunter decision stood, how would other players have been able to use it to become free agents themselves? Wouldn’t they have had to allege breach of contract, and what would the breach have been? On what other grounds based on the Hunter decision would players have been able to become free agents?

I would like to have asked those questions of Sandomir, but he did not reply to several e-mail messages. I would like to have asked those questions of Brock, who apparently became the Times’ instant resident expert on the Catfish case and free agency even though he never wrote a word on the subjects, but he had talked enough about Hunter, wasn’t going to talk any more about it and didn’t respond to my last e-mail.

I would also have liked to ask them about Mike Corkins. Who, they would have asked?

A San Diego Padres’ pitcher in the early 1970s, Corkins filed a grievance over travel expenses he claimed the Padres owed him after an injury prematurely ended his 1974 season. Seitz heard and decided that case, too.

As far as Peter Bavasi, a Padres’ executive, remembers, Corkins was playing on a minor league team in Hawaii when he was injured and wanted air fare to what he said was his home on the East Coast. Bavasi said his address of record was on the West Coast.

“I think we paid him the airfare from Hawaii to the West Coast address,” Bavasi said, “and that’s how the squabble began.”

Seitz handed down the Corkins decision Dec. 3, 1974, the Hunter decision 10 days later. Corkins sought free agency as a remedy, but Seitz awarded him only the amount of money he was owed for his trip home plus interest.

“They had refused to pay his air transportation home after an injury,” Miller recalled. “The contract was clear, and we followed the same procedure we did in Hunter. We sent the club a letter saying they were violating the contract. They didn’t correct it.”

Seitz, however, didn’t rule as he would in Hunter. “Seitz wiggled his way out of it and ruled for the Padres,” Miller said.

In the Times way of thinking, though, if Sandomir had known about Corkins, he might have included him with Hunter in those responsible for the creation of free agency. If breach of contract on an annuity payment can do it, why not breach of contract on a travel payment?

SCORE ONE FOR MCCOURT OVER SELIG

Call it the revenge of Frank McCourt. The owner of the Los Angeles Dodgers isn’t directly involved, but he is, in effect, responsible for the delay in the implementation of the two-year contract extension the owners are giving Commissioner Bud Selig.

The owners were supposed to vote Selig the extension at their meeting in Arizona last Thursday, but because the matter hadn’t been placed on the meeting agenda a 30-0 vote was needed. The vote, however, was 29-1 because John Moores, the Padres’ chairman, was angry and voted no.

Moores was angry because Selig had postponed a vote on transfer of control of the Padres from Moores to Jeff Moorad, the vice chairman and chief executive officer. Moores wanted the deal to be approved so he could get the rest of his money for the Padres from Moorad and his partners, who have been buying the team on a piecemeal basis.

Selig postponed the Padres vote, citing “economic concerns.” Though Selig didn’t say, those concerns stemmed from a newly ultra-cautious approach to club sales as a result of the problems with McCourt’s ownership of the Los Angeles Dodgers.

When McCourt bought the Dodgers eight years ago, it was widely speculated that he didn’t have enough money to sustain the ownership, and McCourt proceeded to pile up so much debt that he was forced to file for bankruptcy.

The owners don’t want to repeat that mistake and are carefully vetting new owners, including Moorad’s many partners, for whom Major League Baseball officials didn’t have enough financial information to act last Thursday.

Selig, meanwhile, will get his contract extension. To get around the unanimous vote, the owners at their Thursday meeting gave notice of an agenda item that covered the extension. That vote can pass with 21 votes and can be conducted over 10 days, meaning that the commissioner will have his extension Jan. 23. His current term runs through next season.

Selig’s current salary is $22 million a year. His salary is expected to rise to $25 million a year for each of the two new years. And to think that Selig isn’t even good enough to be a utility infielder.

MAYBE IT’S BUD’S SENSE OF HUMOR

Funniest line of the week: Commissioner Bud Selig said baseball is working “at a rather quick pace” to settle the fight over San Jose between the Giants and the Athletics. If this is fast, what is slow?

Selig appointed a committee three years ago March 30^th to study the matter and says, when asked, that it is still being studied. A new park could have been completed in that time.

The Athletics are dying in Oakland and want to move to San Jose. The Giants, however, claim San Jose is in their territory and is an important economic part of their territory, refusing to acknowledge that the Athletics willingly ceded Santa Clara County, which the teams had shared, to the Giants when they wanted to move there.

Selig has delayed making a decision, presumably hoping the teams would reach an agreement themselves. Nevertheless, Selig says the issue is “very much on the front burner.” The problem is the stove will run out of gas before Selig makes a decision.

A MORRIS MEETING IN COOPERSTOWN

This would all be too much to expect to happen in July 2013, but we can fantasize, can’t we? There on the stage at the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., Jack Morris encounters Bud Selig. Morris is there to be inducted into the Hall, having been elected in his 14th and next-to-last year on the writers’ ballot. Selig is there in his evergreen role as baseball commissioner.

They meet and shake hands, and Selig says he is sorry that Morris was a victim of the owners’ conspiracy against free agents in the mid-1980s.

Nice fantasy, but returning to reality, it’s more likely that Morris would be there than Selig would say anything more than hello and congratulations.

Morris’ 66.7 percent of last week’s writers’ vote catapulted him into excellent position to be elected next year. No player who has received that high a percentage has ever failed to be elected subsequently.

“It’s encouraging, but there are no guarantees,” Morris said in a telephone interview. “You want to be optimistic, but you can’t be sure.”

On a December day in 1986, Morris and his agent, Richard Moss, were in a conference room of George Steinbrenner’s Tampa, Fla., hotel, the Bay Harbor Inn. I was among a small group of New York reporters in a room a floor above the one Morris was in. If he or the Yankees’ owner walked out onto the balcony we could see him.

Morris, who that year had won 21 games, was a free agent, and all us there – reporters, Morris, Moss – expected Steinbrenner to sign him to a contract that day. When we saw Morris leaving the hotel without a contract, we were stunned. But I also knew something fishy was going on.

The word collusion had been circulating through baseball, and it landed in capital letters that day on the Bay Harbor Inn balcony. There was no way Steinbrenner would have ever let Morris leave without a contract if he were not engaged in a concerted action with other owners.

Morris, however, survived collusion. He would be a 20-game winner a third time a few years later, and he would pitch for a second and third World Series championship team, pitching one of the greatest World Series games, if not the greatest, a 10-inning Game 7 victory for Minnesota over Atlanta in 1991.

How did he feel finally getting so close to entry into the Hall of Fame but not making it through the door?

“I’ve waited 13 years,” the 56-year-old Morris said, “and I’m sure I’ll make it through 14 and 15 if I have to.”

In recent weeks several people have asked me if I thought Bud Selig would really retire when his term as commissioner expires after the 2012 season. Always feeling certain that he would not retire, I replied that by the start of spring training Major League Baseball would announce a contract extension for Selig.

This qualifies as coming before spring training so the owners, meeting my expected timetable as they held their quarterly meetings in Arizona this week, asked Selig to stay on as commissioner for two more years through the 2014 season.

With a salary of at least $22 million a year and use of a private jet, how could he say no? He’d rather write a book and teach history at the University of Wisconsin at Madison? Not in this lifetime.

This column wasn’t going to be about Bud Selig so that’s all I will say about him. Well, one more thing.

After the owners forced Fay Vincent to resign in 1992, Selig became acting or interim commissioner because he was chairman of the executive council. Selig, however, denied that he was acting or interim. He also denied repeatedly that he was interested in being the commissioner.

He denied it so frequently and so vehemently that some people believed him. One of those people was Len Coleman, the National League president, who quietly let it be known that he would be interested in being the commissioner.

He would have made an outstanding commissioner, but by declaring his interest he killed his baseball future because he had dared to step on Selig’s toes. Of course, Selig wanted to be commissioner in the same way that he has spent the past year or two insisting that he was going to retire after the 2012 season.

He accepted the job in 1998, and now he will accept a new term instead of retiring. He is nothing if not consistent.

But I started out to write about the Hall of Fame election and want to get to that without further mention of Selig. I want to write about the terrific, unexpected increase in Jack Morris’ vote total, but there’s another aspect of the writers’ vote that cries out for attention.

In the election that put Barry Larkin in the Hall of Fame, 13 players on the 27-player ballot failed to receive enough votes to meet the 5 percent requirement to remain on the ballot for future elections. Six players received no votes at all: Jeromy Burnitz, Brian Jordan, Terry Mulholland, Phil Nevin, Ruben Sierra and Tony Womack.

Why were they on the ballot?

Why were Javier Lopez and Eric Young on the ballot? They each received one vote. Why? Did each have a friend among the writers who wanted to express his feelings for him? Did the writers honestly believe Lopez and Young belong in the Hall of Fame? If so, how did those writers last long enough covering baseball – 10 years – to qualify as voters?

The writers get enough criticism for voting for legitimate candidates or not voting for players fans think belong in the Hall of Fame without incurring criticism for voting for players with career records like Lopez and Young.

In last year’s election 16 players failed to get the 30 votes they needed to continue as candidates. Like this year, six players received no votes: Carlos Baerga, Lenny Harris, Bobby Higginson, Charles Johnson, Raul Mondesi, Kirk Rueter. Bret Boone and Benito Santiago each appeared on one ballot. Again, why?

This is the way the system works. A screening committee of six members of the Baseball Writers Association receives a list of players eligible for the first time and nominates those they think should be placed on the ballot. Any player who is named by two or more of the six writers goes on the ballot, joining players who had been on the ballot in previous years.

Considering that players need 75 percent of the votes to be elected to the Hall, I would think that newly eligible players should need at least 50 percent of the screening committee votes to get on the ballot.

In this year’s voting, 12 of the 13 first-time players failed to make the cut, Bernie Williams was the only first-timer who survived, and he did with 9.6 percent, or 55 votes.

“I haven’t heard any complaints about it,” Jack O’Connell, BBWAA secretary-treasurer, said of the system. He noted that one writer complained this year that Edgardo Alfonzo did not get a second vote to get on the ballot, but he added that the system is intended to be as fair as possible in giving players a chance to be voted on.

I asked O’Connell if players might be embarrassed by being on the ballot but getting only one vote or no votes. On the contrary, he said, players are flattered simply by having their names on the ballot.

“Chet Lemon’s wife called me,” O’Connell related, “and wanted to make a plaque of the ballot and give it to him. Jerry Reuss saw me and asked me to send him a ballot.”

At this stage of his ballot history, Morris wants more than a piece of memorabilia. The pitcher has gone through 13 elections, and this year came closer than ever, falling 48 votes short with 66.7 percent of the vote.

Such a high percentage has always meant subsequent election, but Morris has only two years left on the writers’ ballot, and each year could present built-in problems for the pitcher.

In two years, two certain first-timers will be on the ballot, Greg Maddux and Tom Glavine. It’s unlikely that writers would vote for those two pitchers and Morris, though they could consider that it would be Morris’ last year on the ballot.

What about next year? Morris’ chances in 2013 could depend on the writers’ reaction to first-timers Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Sammy Sosa and Mike Piazza.

The past several years the voters have overwhelmingly rejected Mark McGwire and Rafael Palmeiro for their use of performance-enhancing substances. Some voters, however, might have rejected them without the steroids link, believing their careers did not merit Hall of Fame election.

That belief would most likely not exist for Bonds and Clemens and probably not Sosa and Piazza. But Bonds and Clemens have been clearly implicated in their use of illegal substances, and Sosa and Piazza have been suspected of their use.

Sosa and Piazza have never been convicted by testing or their own admission, but they may find it impossible to overcome the circumstantial evidence that has grown around them.

If, on the other hand, writers vote for some or any of them, they may not want to add Morris to their ballot. Since Hall of Fame voting began in 1936, more than three players have been elected in only three years and three have been elected seven times, only four times in the last 40 years and once in the last 21 years.

When I voted for the first time, I submitted a full ballot, all 10 lines filled with names. By the time I voted a year later, I had reconsidered what I had done. In voting for 10 players, I was saying in essence I wanted to see 10 players inducted into the Hall at the same time.

How foolish, I realized. Having 10 players enter the Hall at the same time would detract from the honor for each player. In addition, the induction ceremony would take forever and require a break for dinner. On subsequent ballots I placed an X next to three or four names at the most, sometimes only one or two.

I have not voted for McGwire or Palmeiro and don’t expect to vote for Bonds, Clemens, Sosa or Piazza next December. I will vote for Morris.