Tag Archives: Bud Selig

A-Rod’s right about Coupmissioner Selig in Cooperstown

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Bud Selig

Maybe one of Selig’s few truly good deeds was the Show-wide retirement of number 42.

I hate to admit it, but Álex Rodríguez is right. There is a mountain of hypocrisy in former commissioner Bud Selig’s membership in the Hall of Fame. Especially when you marry it to A-Rod’s, Barry Bonds’s, Roger Clemens’s, and Mark McGwire’s lack of Hall memberships.

If the Baseball Writers Association of America is keeping Rodríguez, Bonds, Clemens, and McGwire (among others) out of Cooperstown for their actual or alleged use of actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances, there should have been no reason why that Today’s Game Committee elected their prime enabler.

Have you ever read Coupmissioner Selig’s Hall of Fame plaque? It’s a minor masterpiece of a mealymouthful. What was then the Today’s Game Committee that elected the Brewers owner-turned-coupmissioner should have been ashamed.

It only begins with omitting that his coupmmissionership began with the “acting” tag after he and enough of his fellow owners of the time strong-armed Commissioner Fay Vincent into resigning before they could fire him.

From 1990 through 1992, you had to be deaf, dumb, blind, and limbness not to know that Vincent’s execution papers began with his futile but full-bodied efforts at making owners and players partners instead of combatants. The Lords of Baseball were anything but thrilled at being seen as a little bit lower than lords.

The bad news was limited. Unfortunately for Vincent, the owners weren’t amused when a) he refused to surrender his authority when it came to labor matters; and, b) he actually played fair (the horror) about expansion spoils and division/league realignment. Then drug-addicted, self-destructive relief pitcher Steve Howe—whom Vincent magnanimously allowed an umpteenth chance—followed a magnificent comeback with the Yankees by stepping in it yet again.

After which Vincent himself stepped in it. Howe’s relapse prompted three Yankee personnel including manager Buck Showalter into facing an official hearing and character witnessing for the drug-battling righthander. Vincent tried strong-arming the Yankee trio into changing that character witnessing. It took press outrage to get Vincent to back off, but it gave those Lords so predisposed room to denounce as dictatorial a man who normally preferred discussion, debate, and reason.

“Formally named [commissioner] by unanimous vote of all 30 owners in 1998,” Coupmissioner Selig’s plaque continues. That’s like handing Kim Jong-un a loving cup for stable, unanimously-acclaimed leadership but forgetting to mention the thousands of bodies whose owners’s extermination made it so.

“Presided over an era of vast change to the game on the field while extending its breadth and depth off it.” So the dilution of championship, the advent of the wild card era with three-division leagues, the birth of regular-season interleague play were just think-nothing-of-it participation trophymongering hardly worth losing your sleep over, eh?

“Fostered an unprecedented stretch of labour peace . . . ” The achievement of which took the season-killing, World Series-ditching, near-ruinous 1994 players’ strike that should have been called an owners’ strike for the manner in which Coupmissioner Selig and his allies all but forced. The only thing the 1994 strike proved, other than how easy it was to manipulate the sporting press of the time into swallowing the owners’ side without investigating the recipe, was that no former owner should ever be allowed to hold the office Selig helped to besmirch.

So much for “acting” commissioner. It’s alleged that the owners spent six years searching for a permanent commissioner. Then, they decided to just remove “acting” from Coupmissioner Selig’s title.

“Under his leadership, umpiring was centralised and replay review was established” Umpiring became worse enough after its centralisation that replay review, which should have been established well before, became all but mandatory.

What the plaque also leaves off, of course, is that Coupmissioner Selig and enough of his fellow owners looked the other way long enough as actual or alleged performance-enhancing substances poured into the game. Looked the other way and never once sought to investigate the whys. Looked the other way until Capitol Hill decided to fashion player perp walks and threaten to spank the game’s bottom unless it moved. Fast.

Did some players take the actual/alleged PEDs up simply believing others doing it meant they needed to catch up, regardless of whether their chosen substances actually did enable that? Of course they did. Did other players take them up believing they’d help faster injury recovery? Of course they did. (Yes, you can look it up.)

Did Selig and his fellow owners make even a cursory effort to determine who did what and why before Capitol Hill roared? Did they make even a cursory effort to investigate when enough players did speak about the injury reasons they took up the stuff? No to both.

Enough of the players who tried the substances were and still are pilloried, with or without real, hard evidence. The coupmmissioner who averted his gaze before Crapola Hill forced his and the owners’ hands into beginning and securing testing has a plaque in Cooperstown. A plaque that also looks the other way at his role in the owners’ flagrant salary-suppressing collusion of the mid-to-late 1980s that ended up costing them $280 million.

The should-be Hall of Famer who was caught red-handed indulging in Biogenesis-provided substances, and threatened to sue baseball’s heads off over it before accepting his precedent-setting suspension, has been a changed man since that suspension ended.

“Once I put myself in therapy, and the year suspension was two years into that, and it took me, and I’m still in therapy,” A-Rod told Stephen A. Smith. “It’s important to explain to the young people, not just to share, hey, here are my great stats and my home runs, but here’s how I screwed up.”

He even compared himself to Derek Jeter, the Hall of Fame shortstop who was once one of his best friends before an ill-considered remark sullied that friendship and his arrival to the Yankees compelled a reconciliation strained at first.

“Not only the ego but the lack of self-awareness and understanding my place in the clubhouse, understanding my place in the world,” A-Rod went on. “You know, the truth is, Derek is a phenomenal guy. I first met Derek when he was seventeen. I think I’m catching up to Derek at seventeen, now at fifty. Now we’re pretty much on the same level at seventeen. I mean, Derek’s never made a mistake in his life, and I’ve made every mistake in the book. And I love myself for that. I love myself for the good, the bad and the ugly.”

I’ve looked around. Rodríguez doesn’t have a book for sale.

Maybe it’s time to think about enshrining a man who really did try to save baseball from itself, the one who made only one or two mistakes trying. The man about whom Thomas Boswell once wrote that he, “perhaps more than any other commissioner, took his mandate seriously.”

He came to believe that he really should try to act independently in the “best interests of baseball.” Like [predecessor and best friend A. Bartlett] Giamatti, he viewed baseball as an institution that was both indestructibly strong and constantly vulnerable. Nobody could kill it. But plenty of people, from Pete Rose to narrow-minded, dollar-obsessed owners, could tarnish it.

Maybe we can’t purge Coupmissioner Selig from Cooperstown. But we ought to think hard about prodding to have Vincent enshrined. His plaque won’t look half as ill-placed.

First published at Sports Central.

Fay Vincent, RIP: Heart in the Right Place

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Fay Vincent, Rollie Fingers

Then-commissioner Fay Vincent (right) with Hall of Fame relief pitcher Rollie Fingers at the latter’s Cooperstown induction, 1992.

Fay Vincent’s finest hours involved navigating a World Series through an earthquake and navigating George Steinbrenner out of baseball, for a little while, anyway. His worst hour involved overcompensatory overreach and lit the powder keg that imploded his commissionership.

Which was a shame, because Vincent—who died Saturday at 86, after stopping treatment for bladder cancer—usually had his heart in the right place when it came to baseball.

For better and for worse, Vincent in the commissioner’s office he’d never really sought actually believed that baseball’s commissioner was supposed to act in “the best interest of the game.” He also believed the best interest of the game wasn’t restricted to making money for the owners.

What Steinbrenner got from Vincent, for using a street gambler named Howard Spira to help harvest dirt against Hall of Fame outfielder Dave Winfield, was suspended from baseball, though Vincent cannily allowed the Boss his vanity and let Steinbrenner say he’d merely resign. Biggest favour anyone could have done the Yankees then. With Steinbrenner on justifiable ice, it left Yankee visionaries such as Gene Michael unmolested enough to rebuild the Yankees (“reduced to rubble by the ten-thumbed touch of their owner,” George F. Will wrote on the threshold of the suspension) to greatness.

When the Loma Prieta earthquake hit the Bay Area right smack in the middle of the 1989 World Series (wags took note of the quake’s effect on ramshackle, refrigerating Candlestick Park and called the joint Wiggly Field), Vincent split the difference between the grief of the Bay Area and the necessities of his business. He put the Series on hold for a week. Returned in the rhetoric of healing, the Series finished and the Athletics (hey, yes! they used to be a Bay Area team!) got to finish what they started, a sweep of the Giants.

“Vincent displayed,” wrote Thomas Boswell in the Washington Post of that belief and his actions upon it, when Vincent was forced to resign, “one unexpected tendency that frightened the owners so much that, in recent weeks, they plotted against him . . . ”

When the owners, after years of collusion, shut the spring training camps in 1990, Vincent was a force against the hard-line labour strategy of some owners . . . When many assumed that George Steinbrenner would get off with a light punishment for rubbing shoulders with unsavoury types, Vincent treated the Boss with no more respect than if the owner had been a mere athlete who had gone astray and damaged the game’s reputation for integrity. When he was asked to divide the [1993] expansion spoils, he divided them so fairly that no one was happy. When he thought it was healthy for the game to put teams from the West in the NL’s West division and teams from the East in the East division—a shocking notion that had been discussed for decades—Vincent actually did it, even though one team* (out of twenty-eight) really didn’t like it and threatened to cause lots of legal trouble.

Vincent got into baseball only because his close friend A. Bartlett Giamatti asked. Pretty please, with sugar on it, even. So this man who made his fortune as an attorney, as a chief executive of Columbia Pictures, and as a Coca-Cola honcho after Coke bought Columbia, heeded his longtime friend. (“Coca-Cola surprised even Columbia’s management team of Herb Allen and Fay Vincent by paying $750 million for the studio, the equivalent of nearly twice its stock value at the time,” wrote historian Mark Pendergrast in For God, Country, & Coca-Cola.)

He stood by his man when Giamatti dropped the hammer on Pete Rose. He accepted baseball’s mantle when Giamatti suffered his fatal heart attack eight days after winding up the Rose investigation, and the owners practically begged him pretty please, too.

Alas, the owners would learn the hard way that they hadn’t exactly bought themselves a yes-manperson. If only Vincent hadn’t built them the guillotine into which they’d force him to put his head in 1992.

Vincent’s most wounding flaw was as John Helyar (in The Lords of the Realm) described it: “passively waiting for [some] issues to become a mess instead of getting ahead of the curve on them.” Then, when he did involve himself, enough owners could and did smear him as a stubborn tyrant. Then came the Steve Howe mess.

Once a formidable relief pitcher, Howe became the near-poster boy for baseball’s 1980s cocaine epidemic. And, a six-time loser while he was at it, in terms of baseball standing. Then, in 1991, Howe applied for reinstatement and Vincent gave it to him. Then the Yankees gave him a shot after he set up an independent tryout at their spring camp. The aforementioned Gene Michael said, just as magnanimously, “He’s been clean for two years. I asked a lot of people a lot of questions about him, his makeup, the type of person he is. I feel there’s been a lot worse things done in baseball than bringing Steve Howe back. If it was my son or your son, you’d want to give him another chance.”

At first, Howe more than justified Vincent’s and the Yankees’ magnanimity. He pitched his way onto the Yankee roster and posted the second best season of his career: a 1.68 ERA, a 2.34 fielding-independent pitching rate, and an 0.96 WHIP. A hyperextended elbow ended his season in August 1991, but when Howe opened 1992 with a 2.42 ERA and a 0.45 WHIP, he made Vincent, Michael, and the entire Yankee organisation resemble geniuses.

Except that there was this little matter of Howe being busted in Montana during the off-season on a charge of trying to possess cocaine. Howe had little choice but to plead guilty in June 1992. Almost unprompted, Vincent barred Howe for life.

The Major League Baseball Players Association filed a grievance based on Howe’s having passed every drug test he was called upon to take. Howe’s agent Dick Moss handled the union side of the grievance and brought in a few heavy Yankee hitters—Michael plus manager Buck Showalter and a team vice president named Jack Lawn—as character witnesses.

Oops.

Thinking that Vincent felt as though Howe had just made him resemble a fool after going out on a very long limb for him was one thing. But he struck back like a man whose knowledge of fly swatting involved a hand-held nuclear weapon. He tried to strong-arm Michael, Showalter, and Lawn into changing their testimony the following day. He ordered them flatly to be in his office no later than eleven that morning, never mind that Showalter was already in his Yankee Stadium office prepping for the day’s game against the Royals.

Vincent sent the same orders to Michael and Lawn at home. Michael picked up Lawn, then Showalter, and an attorney Michael called warned them: don’t go to Vincent without a lawyer present unless you’re taking suicide lessons. When they arrived, Vincent told them they’d each “effectively resigned form baseball” because they had dared to “disagree with our drug policy” by acting as Howe’s character witnesses.

Lawn, an ex-Marine who once worked for the federal Drug Enforcement Agency, told Vincent he was sworn to tell the truth and “only testified in accordance with my conscience and my principles.” The commissioner whose conduct rankled those owners who essentially told him, “We don’t need your steenkin’ conscience and principles,” told Lawn—who wrote it on an index card so he wouldn’t forget it—“You should have left your conscience and your principles outside the room.”

An attorney privy to the Yankee trio’s session with Vincent said, “This guy has cooked his own goose.”

Showalter didn’t get back to the Stadium until four minutes before the first pitch. It hit the New York media as hard as the home runs that began a 6-0 Royals lead and helped end things with a 7-6 Yankee comeback win. Three guesses which part of the day mattered more postgame.

If Vincent wanted to mop the floor with The Boss, that was fine by the scribes. But if he wanted to mop the streets with Showalter, Michael, and Lawn, they were going to raise a little hell. They forced Vincent to back off his disciplinary threats. He was also forced, more or less, to order notices posted in baseball clubhouses saying no one should fear retaliation for testifying candidly during grievances.

Those among the owners already itching to dump Vincent got new impetus by his “manhandling of the Yankee Three,” Helyar wrote. “More no-confidence [in Vincent] memos came across [then-Brewers owner Bud Selig’s] fax machine. The conference callers turned to two big questions. One: How much support did they need to fire Vincent? Two: Could they legally fire him?” In order: 1) A two-thirds majority. 2) Yes, long as they paid the man the rest of his contract terms.

After vowing to fight to the end but gauging his falling support, Vincent saved the owners the trouble of executing him when he resigned in September 1992.**

“He vowed,” Boswell wrote, “to fight his backstabbing, leak-planting, disinformation-spreading enemies all the way to the Supreme Court. But, in the end, Jerry ‘I’m Michael Jordan’s Boss’ Reinsdorf of the White Sox, Bud ‘Me? Plot against Fay?’ Selig . . . and Peter ‘I’m Just as Powerful as Dad’ O’Malley of the Dodgers got their way . . . Vincent resigned rather than than drag baseball through the indignity and distraction of a long legal brawl . . . His final act ‘in the best interests of the game’ was, he wrote, ‘resignation, not litigation’.”

Long before the Howe mess, enough owners believed Vincent was too much of a players’ commissioner. Vincent himself said often enough that his largest regret after leaving office was being unable to build what he called “a decent relationship” between the owners and the players.

“I thought somebody would take over after me and get that done,” he told a reporter in 2023. “If I died tomorrow, that would be the big regret, is that the players and the owners still have to make some commitment to each other to be partners and to build the game.”

Selig, of course, became the head of the owners’ executive council, which made him in effect baseball’s acting commissioner. After the owners under his watch forced the 1994 players’ strike, they elected to make him the new commissioner, where he stayed until 2015.

“To do the job without angering an owner is impossible,” Vincent once said. “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 [the owners] learn this lesson before too much damage is done.”

Vincent didn’t exactly go gently into the proverbial good gray night, either. His memoir, The Last Commissioner, was a bold if futile wake-up invitation to the game he loved. His later interviews with assorted Hall of Famers and surviving Negro Leagues players led to three books worth of oral history (The Only Game in Town, We Would Have Played for Nothing, and It’s What’s Inside the Lines that Counts).

He tried to leave baseball better than when he found it. If he couldn’t do that, it wasn’t because he failed to speak or act but because enough who mattered failed to listen when he was at his best and overreacted the one time he overreacted himself.

Vincent deserved better than to be pushed out the door under the lash of one bad mistake. May the Elysian Fields angels grant his family comfort and himself a warm homecoming.

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* For the record, that team was the Cubs.

** Steve Howe was reinstated, again, after all. Arbitrator George Nicolau ruled that baseball failed to test Howe “in the manner it promised based on Howe’s documented case of attention deficit and hyperactivity disorder,” as Forbes’s Marc Edelman wrote in 2014. Howe had a none-too-great 1993 but got himself named the Yankee closer for 1994, having a splendid season, the near-equal of his striking 1991-92 work.

His 1995 was anything but, alas. Moved back to a setup role in 1996, he would be released that June after 25 appearances and an obscene 6.35 ERA. He tried one more season in the independent Northern League, with the Sioux Falls Canaries, but called it a career after that 1997 season, after the Giants backed away from signing him following an airport incident in which he was found with a handgun in his luggage.

Almost ten years after his pitching career ended, working his own Arizona framing contracting business, Howe was leaving California for home when his pickup truck rolled over in Coachella, ejected him, and landed on him, killing him at 48. Toxicology reports said there was methamphetamine in his system.

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Note: This essay was published first by Sports Central. A very few small portions were published previously.