Talkin’ Baseball With Fay Vincent

GREENWICH, Conn. —  The former baseball commissioner lives on an idyllic cul-de-sac of tree-shaded homes, many imposing in size and stature.

He is an hour by train from the tumult of Manhattan, seemingly farther yet from the backdoor politics that ultimately forced him to resign as commissioner six years ago.

Fay Vincent hasn’t forgotten, but has forgiven.

He retains a grass-roots passion for baseball that he shared with his late, great friend, Bart Giamatti, whom he joined on Park Avenue as deputy commissioner.

And though basically retired at 60, he is still connected:

* As commissioner of the New England Collegiate Baseball League, a wood-bat summer league, he is involved in fund raising and strategy.

* He’s on the board of directors of Time Warner, which owns the Atlanta Braves, providing a rooting interest in Ted Turner’s team.

* He’s a keen observer of the Dodgers, having lured Chase Carey--now one of two Fox executives overseeing Dodger operation--out of Harvard Business School to become his assistant while president of Columbia Pictures and later, while commissioner, having encouraged Carey and Fox to become involved in the televising of baseball.

* And he may still have a voice as unofficial counselor-advisor to new Commissioner Bud Selig, who recently called and said he would like to sit down with Vincent soon to discuss the game’s direction.

It was a healing gesture by Selig, who as owner of the Milwaukee Brewers had been a leader in the coup that ultimately unseated Vincent and basically led to a four-year labor battle with the players’ union.

“What’s past is past,” Selig said, when asked about his call to Vincent. “There is no sense in going over it. The time has come to put all of that behind us.

“Fay and I were friends through Bart. I know how much he cares. I believe all of the former commissioners--Fay, Peter Ueberroth, Bowie Kuhn--can make substantial contributions.”

Vincent, relaxing in his sun room, said he is willing to help when and where needed. He called Selig’s move “a generous gesture” and said, “I think Bud is appreciative of the complimentary things I’ve had to say about him.”

Vincent referred to his belief that Selig is basically the right man at the right time, “the best politician baseball has had in years,” a master of “the art of the possible,” and a man capable of getting the things done that need to be done during the continuing recovery from the labor strife in which “baseball basically blew away five years.”

“In the best of all worlds, there should be an independent commissioner, but we’re not in a world where purity of logic is the critical issue,” Vincent said. “We’re in a world governed by experience and reality, and the reality requires considerable political skill, which is Bud’s strength. He can get the votes. He can get the owners to do the things that need to be done. He is far better at it than I am, than I was.”

The point, Vincent said, is that amid the recovery, there was no way the owners were going to accept an unknown.

“There’s an awful lot Bud can do and will do,” Vincent said. “He loves the game and, I think, genuinely wants to eliminate the acrimony. People have tended to underestimate him for years. He has considerable ability, and I’d be glad to help. Nobody can sit still and watch baseball decline, and he’s not going to do that.”

In the late summer of ‘92, it is doubtful Vincent would have offered such an endorsement.

The War of 1992

Selig and others, determined to change the economic system and go to war with the players’ union, if necessary, and fearful that Vincent would intercede under his “best interest of baseball” powers--as he had in ending the 1990 lockout--asked Vincent to relinquish that power as it related to labor issues. Vincent refused, citing major league rules, which say a commissioner’s power cannot be diminished during his term of office.

The owners, by an 18-9-1 vote, passed a resolution expressing lack of confidence in Vincent’s leadership and asking for his resignation.

Vincent said at the time that the owners didn’t seem to know what they wanted in a commissioner and considered legal action. But he ultimately decided, “What may have been right for me wasn’t right for baseball.”

He resigned Sept. 7, ending a tenure that had begun Sept. 13, 1989, after the death of Giamatti. It was a tenure marked by disputes with both players and owners, indemnification by the superstations, the division of expansion revenue, the reversal of his permanent ban of Steve Howe and a suit by the Chicago Cubs challenging his realignment of the National League, a suit dropped after his resignation.

Selig became acting commissioner Sept. 9, an act that played for almost six years before it went to Broadway.

“I was hurt, no question about it,” Vincent said in reflection. “I got badly treated and I don’t think I deserved that treatment. On the other hand, it’s history. Bud doesn’t have to apologize, I’m not looking for that. Life goes on. I’m at a point where I don’t want to fight with anybody over anything. The thing that counts is baseball, and I think I’ve been consistent about that.

“I mean, there were strong forces at work [in ‘92], and I was caught in the wrong place at the wrong time. Some owners saw it as Armaggedon, an opportunity to break the union. As much of a mistake as it was, as painful as the lessons were, it was a fight that had to take place, a war the owners were determined to wage.”

Peace at Hand in ’96

The bargaining agreement of November, 1996, brought peace, the commodity needed most, Vincent said, but left many of baseball’s major economic issues unresolved. Some owners may be determined to go back to the mat when it expires. Vincent said he is confident Selig understands the need to work with the union and remove the acrimony.

“You have to take the morality out,” Vincent said. “The owners are not bad; the players are not bad. It’s a business in which you’re trying to allocate the money, and the future of the game is as much in the hands of Don Fehr [the union’s executive director] as it is in the hands of Bud Selig. The public may not understand that, but I think Bud does. Not much can be done without those two guys working closely together.

“I tried, but some owners said they didn’t even want me to see [Fehr]. Dan Danforth [then president of the Pittsburgh Pirates] said he didn’t even want me to have breakfast with him. What was I going to get done without him?

“I mean, I got hurt, I wasn’t successful, I’m sorry I failed. I guess my biggest regret is that I couldn’t have left baseball on a higher note. But I think history will prove I was right. You can’t fight an open war with the players, you have to work cooperatively. I thought we had to take a long-term view, make an accommodation, but too many people at that time wanted to try an alternative strategy. The consequences were very severe.”

For baseball, and for Vincent, but both seem to have weathered the storm.

As a former commissioner and the head of Columbia Pictures and Coca-Cola--”three religious objects,” Vincent said--he has the resources to do what he wants when he wants. He recently married, is building a new family house on Long Island Sound, and is planning a trip to France.He is on the board of several major corporations, besides Time Warner’s, and his duties with the New England Collegiate Baseball League provide just enough “visibility and credibility” and the occasional opportunity to revisit small-town America in the summer.

He has also financed a celebrity appearance series at his alma mater, Williams College in Williamstown, Mass., and Carleton College in Northfield, Minn. The series includes a program on race in baseball, featuring appearances by new Hall of Famer Larry Doby, Negro leagues star Alfred “Slick” Surratt and columnist Claire Smith, providing students, Vincent said, “with the glimpse of an era and the history of an issue still critical in baseball.”

It was while speaking at the Hall of Fame in 1990, Vincent recalled, that he became the first person from organized baseball to publicly apologize to Negro Leagues players for the decades in which they had been prevented from playing organized ball.

New Ideas in ’98

Now, he said, there needs to be a new emphasis on the recruiting of minority umpires.

Vincent touched on other issues during a two-hour interview. Among his comments:

* The American and National League umpiring staffs need to be merged and the calling of the high strike made mandatory.

“No one has been more supportive of the umpires than I have, but who says the umpires can change the rule book?” Vincent said.

“It’s no defense to say, ‘Well, I don’t call the high strike, but I’m consistent in calling a very wide pitch a strike, and that will be the strike zone.’ We saw a very bad example of that in the playoffs with Eric Gregg, and that has to be dealt with.”

* The two leagues have outlived their usefulness and need to be merged and realigned under one set of rules and hierarchy.

“Bud is absolutely right when he talks about the need for a total realignment,” Vincent said. “I attempted to start the process with the Cubs, and he’s attempted to start it with the Brewers. People have to work through their self-interest and do what is best for the game.”

* Both the home run race and the New York Yankees’ dominance this season have been great for baseball.

“I think Mark McGwire or Ken Griffey will break the [home run] record,” he said. “I’m the one who took the asterisk off [the 61 homers Roger Maris hit in the 162-game season of 1961], so I’m kind of excited about it, not that there ever really was an asterisk. I just thought the perception was unfair to Maris and his wonderful season. What Maris did didn’t detract from Babe Ruth. Ruth is an icon.

“The Yankees seem to be in a class by themselves this year. I’d love to see a World Series in which Greg Maddux and Tommy Glavine [of the Braves] take them on, but sure as heck it won’t happen. Somebody will knock off one or the other in an early round.”

* The evidence that Pete Rose bet on baseball is overwhelming, and Selig is perfectly right in not considering his petition for reinstatement.

“Pete Rose was a great player, but you can’t have two sets of rules. You can’t reinstate him just because he was a great player,” Vincent said.

“If he was to admit it, apologize, acknowledge he bet on baseball and talk about it in contrite terms, it would change everything. But he won’t do that. His defense is no defense. . . .

“He’s just not dealing with reality, and the reality is that he bet on baseball. Look at the telephone records, Pete. Who made those calls? Look at the transcripts of the calls from the clubhouse to the bookies at 7:15 every night. Who made those calls, what were you talking to the bookies about, Pete? It was summertime. There was no football or basketball, Pete. Pete Rose has never explained any of his actions. There has never been an answer.”

* His description of former Dodger owner Peter O’Malley as a “nitwit” and “bigot” in a proposed book was the choice of his collaborator, and his decision to drop the project should speak for itself. He had the highest regard for the O’Malley operation over the years, accepted O’Malley’s subsequent apology for participating in the push that led to his resignation and was not surprised by O’Malley’s logical decision to sell, he said, given “the manner of discouragement Peter had expressed to me at times” regarding economics and leadership.

Vincent also said that he felt he was “ahead of the curve” and vindicated--considering that one of the charges owners made against him was he knew no one in television with whom he could negotiate a lucrative contract--when, shortly before his resignation, he invited Carey to drop by his office to talk about Fox and baseball.

Fox is now the biggest investor in baseball and owns cable rights to 22 of the 30 teams, as well as having spent $311 million for the Dodgers.Of that corporate takeover in baseball, Vincent said it was simply a sign of the soaring economics and added:

“Maybe in the sweep of time, it’s the big corporations that will provide the leadership and foundation. Who better to entrust the game’s future to than Disney or Fox or Time Warner, companies that are going to be there in 20 and 30 years, that are run by very smart people who understand marketing and strategy and know how to build franchises?

“It’s still this wonderful and shimmering game, and that’s what it always comes back to. I mean, wasn’t it [Charles] Ebbets at the turn of the century who said that it has to be a great game, considering everything the owners have done to try and kill it?”

That was at the turn of the last century. Fay Vincent could be excused for saying it at the imminent turn of this century.