Baseball’s eighth commissioner .
When I was aspiring to be a writer, I began keeping magazine and newspaper articles of stories I found of interest. Over the years I accumulated a pile of stories which soon found their way into alphabetized file folders. I now have a box of accumulated stories and two of my favorite files are titled: Baseball and Good writing. With the recent passing of former baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, I looked at those two files. In the baseball file, I have seven stories, four of which were authored by Vincent. In the good writing file, I have nineteen different pieces, seven of which were written by Vincent. To say I admired his skill as a writer is an understatement.
My admiration for Vincent began long before his literary career. Vincent had taken a job as Deputy Commissioner of Major League Baseball in April of 1989, agreeing to the job of working with his longtime close friend A. Bartlett Giamatti, who was named the seventh commissioner of Baseball on April 1. The summer of 1989 was a tumultuous time for baseball. Pete Rose, one of the game’s biggest stars, was under investigation for gambling, specifically betting on his own team, the Cincinnati Reds. On August 24, Rose agreed to the terms laid out by Giamatti for a permanent, lifetime ban from the game. The whole thing was shocking. Imagine someone like Patrick Mahomes or LeBron James receiving a lifetime ban. That was the depth of this thing.
Then it got worse. On September 1, just a week after banning Rose, Giamatti suffered a fatal heart attack. Vincent was quickly approved as the eighth commissioner.
The honeymoon didn’t last long. Just weeks later, the 1989 World Series was disrupted by the Loma Prieta earthquake, which killed 63 and injured almost 3,800 people. I was at a business conference in Des Moines, standing in a hotel bar, chatting with other conference-goers, trying to watch the game, when everything began to shake. Players, fans, and family members rushed onto the field, fearful that Candlestick Park would collapse. I started to wonder if baseball was cursed.
Vincent did the right thing and delayed the Series by ten days. That in itself describes Fay Vincent—a man who did the right thing.
Being the Commissioner of Baseball brought many conflicts to the life of Fay Vincent. In recent years, one of the trendy buzzwords has been “stakeholders”. It’s often incorrectly applied, usually by people who have no stake in whatever is being discussed. Vincent though knew that baseball had many stakeholders. The owners and the players, certainly. The cities who were fortunate enough to have a team. The fans of those teams and of baseball. The residents and businesses located in the same neighborhood as the stadiums. The players agents, and even the employees of the teams, from the General Manager all the way down to the parking lot attendants and vendors are all stakeholders. Vincent knew this and believed his job was to be an impartial, independent commissioner of the game, beholden not to just the owners, but to all stakeholders.
Naturally, the owners hated this. After you’ve been around the game for a while, you realize that there are some owners who have no interest in fielding a winning team. To them, owning a baseball team is just a profitable piece of their conglomerate.
That reminds me of what O.W. Shaddock said in North Dallas Forty, “Every time I call it a game, you call it a business, when I call it a business, you call it a game”. Vincent knew it was both, but in his heart, baseball was always a game.
For Vincent, the hits kept coming. In February of 1990, the owners locked out the players. This lockout lasted for 32 days before an agreement, brokered by Vincent, ended the mess. The owners were later charged with and convicted of collusion. This is what Vincent said about collusion:
“The Union basically doesn’t trust the Ownership because collusion was a $280 million theft by Bud Selig and Jerry Reinsdorf of that money from the players. I mean, they rigged the signing of free agents. They got caught. They paid $280 million to the players. And I think that’s polluted labor relations in baseball ever since it happened. I think it’s the reason Don Fehr has no trust in Selig.”
On July 30, 1990, Vincent gave Yankee owner George Steinbrenner a permanent lifetime ban for paying a small-time gambler $40,000 to dig up dirt on his star player Dave Winfield.
By this time, the owners were furious. Vincent was decidedly not the lackey the owners demanded. In September of 1992, baseball owners gave Vincent a no-confidence vote by a tally of 18-to-9, primarily for his refusal to help them destroy the players’ union. Vincent was undone by what The Sporting News called the Great Lakes Gang, which included Bud Selig (Milwaukee), Jerry Reinsdorf (White Sox), Carl Pohlad (Minnesota), Stanton Cook (Cubs), Peter O’Malley (Dodgers) and William Bartholomay (Atlanta). On September 7, Vincent resigned and walked away from the game he loved.
At his departure, Vincent said, “To do the job without angering an owner is impossible. I can’t make all twenty-eight of my bosses happy. People have told me I’m the last commissioner. If so, it’s a sad thing. I hope they [the owners] learn this lesson before too much damage is done.”
Vincent lobbied for his Deputy Commissioner Stephen Greenburg, to be appointed the next Commissioner, but the owners wanted someone to do their bidding, and only their bidding, so they appointed one of their own, Bud Selig. I think most baseball fans know how the reign of Selig went. After Selig of course, came Rob Manfred. I believe it can be said that Fay Vincent was the last true independent Commissioner of Baseball. When I call it a game, you call it a business.
Francis Thomas Vincent Jr. was born in Waterbury, Connecticut on May 29, 1938. His father, Francis Sr., was a star football player at Yale and later an NFL referee. Fay was also an athlete, attending Williams College on a football scholarship. During a college prank, he was locked in his dorm room. To escape, he climbed onto the roof of the four-story building, lost his footing and tumbled to the ground, breaking his legs and crushing his spine. It was thought he may never walk again, but eventually, through grit and determination, he walked with the assistance of a cane. He earned a law degree from Yale and spent years ascending the corporate ladder, with diverse entities like the SEC, Coca Cola, and Columbia Pictures before taking the job with Major League Baseball.
After being forced out by the owners, Vincent dabbled in many things. He was an astute investor and later a very talented writer on many diverse topics. He was also the commissioner of the New England Collegiate Baseball League for six years. One of Vincent’s greatest (and often overlooked) accomplishments as Baseball Commissioner, came towards the end of his tenure.
In July of 1992, Vincent spoke to a group of Negro League ballplayers in Cooperstown. Joe Posnanski wrote about this recently. Vincent said, “We of baseball acknowledge our part in the shameful history of exclusion in this country. Baseball treated you badly, and on behalf of baseball, I extend my sincere apologies. We owe you very much. For you kept baseball alive in your black community and in doing so, you did baseball a magnificent service.”
With those words, Vincent became the first commissioner to apologize for decades of racial exclusion. Those words opened the door for many great things, more recognition for black ballplayers and the Negro Leagues. The acceptance of Negro League stars into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Eventually, this movement helped birth the establishment of the Negro League Hall of Fame and the inclusion of Negro League records as part of Major League Baseball.
Fay Vincent was a man who did the right thing. Vincent died Sunday at the age of 86, at a hospital in Vero Beach, Florida. Vincent is survived by his wife Christina and children and three children from his first marriage.
Re-reading all the columns written by Vincent, and with the Super Bowl rapidly approaching, I will share these two clips with you.
“My interest in sports, baseball of course, remains strong, though it is narrower than it used to be. I no longer watch hockey or boxing, but I never miss the World Series or the Masters. Despite a football lineage, I rarely watch the second half of the Super Bowl. The games are too long, and the halftime shows are a bizarre reminder of music I do not understand. Why is there so much jumping around?”
And finally, “Maybe I can assure the young that wisdom is the daughter of failure yet the mother of success.”
Fay Vincent lived a wonderful life packed with adventure that most of us can only dream about. He will be missed.