Tag Archives: Office of the Commissioner

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.

Commissioner, anyone?

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Adapted from JK’s speech to the Las Vegas chapter of the Society for American Baseball Research delivered 10 June 2023.

Calling baseball commissioner Rob Manfred an inveterate tinkerer is calling Donald Trump and Joe Biden mountebanks. Calling Manfred a visionary denigrates the very definition of vision. But those who pine for the so-called good old days, while letting themselves think Manfred’s lust for rule remaking/remodeling points toward them, must first be made to answer, “Which good old days?”

Certainly not the days when the bases were large stones. Certainly not when pitchers were required to throw no way but underhanded and from a standing position strictly. Certainly not when the one-hop hit to the outfield was ruled an out if the fielder snagged the ball on that hop. Certainly not when none but white men were permitted to play the major league game. 

There are some things from the so-called Good Old Days that ought to be preserved or exhumed, of course. That’s without regard to the particular period of Good Old Days the get-off-my-lawn crowd prefers to revive. There are also things heretofore inconceivable to which today’s governors of our game, Manfred on down, should lend far more thought than they do. But it cannot be Manfred to shepherd it any longer.

Would you like to become baseball’s next commissioner? If your answer is yes, at minimum you’ll need a reasonable station from which to disembark your train. What follows is a fourteen-step platform:

1. The august office itself. Upon assuming office, the new commissioner shall convene a rules committee to explore broadening the means by which commissioners are chosen in the future. There’s no sound reason why the owners alone should choose the game’s public steward and top administrator, since it’s long been proven that under the owners alone the commissioner thinks the good of the game is little more than making money for it, and them.

The commissioner of the future should be elected by the following group of 79 people: Single representatives of the owners and the players, each; and, designated representatives from each of major league baseball’s nineteen umpiring crews.

2.Tick-tock clock. On paper, and in the imagination, the pitch clock seemed sound as a nut. In actuality, it wreaks more havoc than should be allowed. Havoc, and no few injuries ranging from the simple to the serious and back. Not to mention the imposition upon pitchers with unique or at least colourful pitching styles. Those concerned about the coming of the Clockwork Baseball Player should concern themselves about and stand athwart anything that would make that coming reality.

3. Game time. Are we supposed to applaud that, thus far, the pitch clock and its concurrent impositions upon the batter have shaved a whole . . . half an hour on average off the time of play? Are we supposed to applaud that the truest culprit of the elongated major league game—namely, the broadcast commercial blocks after each half inning and during each pitching change—remains unmolested?

The pitch clock’s elimination should be matched by all effort to make a new broadcasting agreement that includes no commercial blocks longer than one minute after half-innings and thirty seconds during pitching changes. (Yes, Virginia, it really does take less time now for a relief pitcher to get from the bullpen to the game mound than for the commercials to play.)

4. Manfred Man. The free cookie on second base to open each extra half inning shall be eliminated. Permanently. The only Manfred man that should ever be in the public mind shall be, once again, the hitmaking band of the 1964-66 British Invasion.

5. We’re on the air, anywhere. Eliminate all blackout rules for television. Allow any major league game to be broadcast in any region regardless of whether the ballpark is in the same broadcast region. Let a million television sets bloom because decades of evidence have proven that, of all the reasons for people to stay away from the ballpark, television like radio before it is the least of those reasons.

(As a relevant aside, I still remember seeing Dodger Stadium fans clutching tiny portable TV sets in the park. With the pictures turned down but the sound turned up. Why? Because they wouldn’t believe what they’d just seen from beginning to end unless they heard it from the late Vin Scully.)

6. Umpires can be impeached, too. The umpires have been laws unto themselves for long enough. It’s past time for them to be held as accountable for their malfeasance as players, managers, and team administrators. There’s no reason on earth for accuracy below 96 percent to be permissible. If you doubt that, ponder that a surgeon with a 96 percent accuracy rating wouldn’t face job security, he’d face malpractise suits.

Umpires with accuracy below 96 percent shall be placed on probation for the rest of the incumbent season or the first half of the following season. Failure to improve will result in suspensions. And, yes, the rule book strike zone shall be enforced strictly. The days of umpires deploying their own strike zones must end. That by itself should help assure accuracy of 96 percent or higher behind the plate.

7. No tank you veddy much. Team ownerships who fail repeatedly to invest properly in their major league product and their minor league support systems shall be put on notice. You have one year to decide: Will you invest properly in your teams, every year, regardless of the free spoils of revenue sharings you receive before each season begin; or, will you sell your team to a local/regional ownership willing to do what needs to be done to put an honestly competitive team on the field.

Tanking is fan abuse, plain and simple. If you can afford to buy a major league baseball team, you can afford to put forth a product that gives honest effort to compete. Rebuilding on the fly has been done for eons, before and after the free agency era.

Concurrently, past commissioner Bowie Kuhn’s ridiculous prohibition on player sales shall be rescinded. Teams shall be allowed to sell their players on an open market for whatever price other teams are willing to pay—and the players to be sold shall receive at least 25-30 percent of the sale price. This will allow the supposedly not-so-rich teams to stay minimally competitive, too.

Call it the Averill-Landis Rule, after the ancient commissioner who thought Hall of Famer Earl Averill wasn’t nuts to demand to know how much of the sale price he might receive when the Cleveland Indians bought him from the Pacific Coast League.

While we’re at it, a tanking team must never be given permission to relocate, which leads to . . .

8. If you want to build it, we will come. Under no circumstances shall any team seeking to build a new ballpark go to the local and/or state government for help. For now we mean you, Oakland Athletics. It takes colossal gall to try strongarming your incumbent locale into building you a new ballpark and, when they call your bluff, try to strongarm Las Vegas into building one for you; or, at least, paying for half if not more of it.

The willful self-destruction of a team fan base should never be sanctioned. Neither should regional taxpayers be made to foot all or most of the bill for a new playpen. The Voice in Field of Dreams assuredly did not say, If you build it, they will pay for it.

9. Interleague, schminterleague. Eliminate it from the regular season. Entirely. Save it for when it truly matters—during the All-Star Game, and during the World Series.

10. Are the All-Stars out tonight? Absent one fan, one vote, one time requirements, eliminate the fan vote. Why? Because the All-Star Game must include rosters containing none but the absolute best players on the season thus far. If this means one or more teams lack All-Star representation, tough. This isn’t T-Ball.

While we’re at it, the next commissioner must rule that the All-Star Game also needs to cease being used as a gold watch, even for future Hall of Famers. They’ll get their tributes appropriately around the circuit without a final All-Star honorarium, not to mention those so qualified getting the big one in Cooperstown in due course.

11. Competition, not compensation. This nonsense must cease. The regular season’s meaning has been compromised long enough. And the saturation of postseason games has compromised more than enhanced the game. There’s no reason on earth why any team not parked in first place at season’s end should be playing for baseball’s championship.

Expansion should be pursued to create divisions with even numbers of teams. Then, two conferences of two divisions each shall be fashioned in each league. The wild cards shall be eliminated entirely.

Then, each league’s division champions will meet in a best-of-three division series. The winners in each league will then meet in a best-of-five League Championship Series. (You want the Good Old Days restored, there’s a splendid restoration.) The World Series shall remain its best-of-seven self with its primacy thus restored. (Postseason saturation will be scaled back considerably under such a system, too.)

Thus will baseball fans no longer be subject to the thrills, spills, and chills of watching teams fighting to the last breath to finish in . . . second or even third place.

12. We want a real ball! Something’s very wrong when the Japanese leagues can develop baseballs pitchers can grip easily and are eminently fair to both sides of the ball but the American major leagues—which own a major baseball manufacturer—can’t. All effort to develop a baseball that doesn’t require that new-fashioned medicated goo for pitchers but is consistent and fair to hitters as well shall be undertaken.

A new, consistent baseball shall be developed and brought into play within one year of the new commissioner taking office. It’s long past time for the thinking person’s sport and those who support and supply it to start thinking. Hard.

13. Pensions. The new commissioner shall convene an immediate panel from among all team ownerships and the Major League Baseball Players Association. This panel, at once, shall agree that it was wrong to eliminate pre-1980 short-career major league players from the realignment of 1980. That realignment granted pensions to all players who accrued 43 days of major league service time, and health benefits to all players accruing one day of major league time.

The calculations shall be done to ensure full and proper pensions, based on their actual major league time, to all 500+ surviving short-career players who played before the 1980 realignment. The 2011 Weiner-Selig stipend—one small payment per 43 days service time, which today equals $718 per 43 days—was laudable, but insufficient.

Those players backed their players union’s actions that led to or upheld free agency, too. They do not deserve to remain frozen out.

14. As your absolute first order of business in office. Before assuming office, the new commissioner’s first official pronouncement shall be to demand . . . a recount.