In his second month as the commissioner of baseball, Fay Vincent, working by candlelight, open-collared shirt and a proper low-volume sense of empathy and perspective, steered the 1989 World Series through the enormous tragedy of the Bay Area earthquake.
In his first season on the job, he oversaw a lockout, banned New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner and defended the ban of Pete Rose, a decision made by Bart Giamatti, his predecessor, the previous year with Vincent’s counsel.
As the first anniversary of his appointment as commissioner approached, Steve Jacobson, a fellow Newsday colleague at the time, and I visited Vincent in his office for a question-and-answer session. Turmoil greeted him in waves, we remarked.
“But,” he said, “I think there are big waves coming. See, I don’t believe there’s clear water in this job.”
Never did he speak truer words, unless when he also told us, “I don’t think anybody should be here who doesn’t have a great affection for the game itself, who doesn’t enjoy going to the game and sitting through rain delays. If you don’t like baseball, you shouldn’t be working for baseball.”
Vincent passed away Sunday at the age of 86. He will be remembered for an outsized influence on baseball for someone employed in it only 3 ½ years. His time in the commissioner’s chair was brief but was long enough to create a delineation in the game. His independent streak caused owners to reexamine what the job should be.
As Vincent predicted, those big waves kept coming. He never did find clear water. In his second and third years, Vincent banned pitcher Steve Howe for life, brought back Steinbrenner, ordered that American League owners share in the fees of National League expansion, spoke out in favor of eliminating the DH, proposed a realignment plan that prompted a lawsuit from the Chicago Cubs about being shipped to the NL West, failed to stop a gathering storm of owners jonesing for a salary cap, and was asked to resign by 18 of the 28 owners.
There was no fourth year.
Vincent had written a letter to owners promising “I will not resign – ever.” But four days after the owners voted against him, realizing he was working for people who did not want him, he resigned.
Vincent was the right man at the wrong time. His love of the game was indisputable. He loved to tell the story of watching a spring training game with Giamatti and, like one giddy kid to another, his friend whispering to him, “Remember, this is work.”
He was never so happy as when he was at a ballpark, especially around the batting cage for pregame batting practice. Typically taken there by golf cart (he was captain of the Williams College freshman football team when he suffered a crushed spine and leg paralysis from a four-story fall), Vincent luxuriated in the sounds, storytelling and camaraderie of being in the baseball fraternity at ground level. And Vincent would go to the ballpark often with no official business. He was there for the love of it.
“It’s much better than I ever dreamed, in the sense that it’s the most wonderful way to spend time that I ever could have imagined,” he told me of the job. “If you have to get up in the morning and go to work, this is the job that you want … It’s as close to perfection in terms of a way to spend time as I can imagine.”
His greatest strengths were his love for the game and a financial independence that made him beholden to nobody. He was only half kidding when he liked to say he was the first commissioner that came in with more money than some owners. Vincent made millions as the head of Columbia Pictures, his job before he joined Giamatti as deputy commissioner.
“I came to Columbia broke and left financially independent into the third generation,” he said. “Having that advantage means I don’t have an agenda, if you will.”
He started in baseball with Giamatti on April 1, 1989. They were two romantics from Yale. (Vincent graduated from Yale Law; his father was a football and baseball standout at Yale.)
“I think we can accomplish something,” Vincent said back then. “It depends how committed people are to the majesty and purity of the game.”
Majesty and purity? They were concepts of another time, not this one, as those waves of turmoil grew bigger and more frequent. Expansion … realignment … the looming labor war that would wipe out the 1994 World Series … the growing influence of television (back then, Vincent was worried about “superstations,” such as ones that backed the Cubs and Atlanta Braves, creating an imbalance of power) … drugs (including the percolating PED scandal) … the game was getting whipsawed farther from its glossed history as the quaint national pastime. The owners needed a true CEO.
Vincent’s biggest problems were the labor hawks among the owners and his lack of political acumen to build consensus. Majesty and purity were admirable, but not enough for making policy. Even if you thought, for instance, it made sense to move the Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals from East to West and the Braves and Cincinnati Reds from West to East, you would need consensus to pull it off.
“You’re not going to leave this job popular, unless you try very hard to do nothing,” he said after his exit.
Baseball simply had grown too big and its owners less likely to acquiesce simply for “the good of the game” for a voice like Vincent to hold power. Adding to the degree of difficulty, Vincent was an outsider, brought into baseball by a friend and rushed into the commissioner’s chair five months later because of his friend’s sudden passing. He lacked deep institutional knowledge with the owners he tried to herd. Some of them took his “good of the game” pronouncements as grandstanding.
History can be fluid. The deaths of Richard Nixon and Jimmy Carter, for instance, prompted reexaminations of their truncated presidencies that seemed more balanced, or at least nuanced. The commissionership of Vincent is different in its obviousness. It seems as fixed in amber today as did 33 years ago when it ended.
Upon his death, I returned to the day he resigned to find how I framed his place in baseball history. I found that I wrote how “no commissioner as historically defined could satisfy his employers” in the climate of such growing complications.
“That may be his epitaph,” I wrote. “A man who so revered baseball tradition that he wished to repeal the designated hitter wound up effecting enormous change on the game. He may not have been the greatest commissioner nor the most prolific, but he was the last.”
Nine years later, Vincent wrote a memoir. He titled it The Last Commissioner.
In the book, he referred to his successor, Bud Selig, the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, as “a walking conflict of interest, hiding behind his formal title.” Mostly, though, the book was what you would expect from Vincent: an homage to the game and its players.
Ever the romantic, Vincent subtitled his book, A Baseball Valentine. As in his short term as commissioner, it was a labor of love. He donated the proceeds of the book to surviving alumni of the Negro Leagues.
This article was originally published on www.si.com as Fay Vincent’s Intentions As MLB Commissioner Were Good, If Not Appreciated.