Baseball's "Last Commissioner" Has Left the Building

We’re painfully short on heroes these days. But the baseball world had one of them, and he wasn’t even a player.

Fay Vincent, who died this past week at 86, loved the game but wasn’t afraid to take on its owners (especially George Steinbrenner) and one of America’s most popular players, Pete Rose.

I’ve long admired Vincent for his integrity. I also enjoyed knowing he lived in my hometown of New Haven for a while when he was a kid.

When I learned a few days ago that he was gone, I pulled from the shelf my copy of his memoir “The Last Commissioner: A Baseball Valentine.” He recalled his family’s modest home on the first floor of a three-family house (several blocks from where I am writing this) and how he was able to follow the exploits of the New York Yankees.

From page one of his memoir: “You could get the Red Sox games on the radio. But the Yankee games you could get — if you actually had one — on TV. We had a DuMont TV, black-and-white, about the size of a breadbox; my father, a frugal New Englander, had won it at a raffle at a Polish Catholic church in New Haven. I rooted for DiMaggio’s Yankees, much to my father’s chagrin.”

His dad told him that rooting for the Yankees was “like rooting for General Motors.” Eventually Vincent became a Red Sox fan. That team also had its heroes — such as Ted Williams.

Although Vincent went on to live a fulfilling and rewarding life, a random event struck when he was in college, and for him things would never be the same. After Vincent enjoyed his freshman season playing football for Williams College, his roommate pulled a prank on him: he locked Vincent in his fourth-floor bedroom. Vincent decided to climb out his window and into an adjacent one — but he slipped on the icy ledge and fell. He broke two of his vertebrae. Doctors feared he would be paralyzed and bedridden for the rest of his life. However, after undergoing a year of rigorous physical therapy, he became mobile enough to return to school, although he would always need to use a cane and could never again play sports.

Vincent got a degree from Yale Law School and embarked on a successful legal career. He was about 40 when he met A. Bartlett Giamatti, who was president of Yale. They became good friends. When baseball owners offered Giamatti the commissioner’s job in the spring of 1989, he persuaded Vincent to join him as deputy commissioner.

Soon afterward Giamatti and Vincent had the Pete Rose scandal fall in their laps. Evidence surfaced that Rose, the Cincinnati Reds’ manager and former All-Star, had been betting on games. Vincent used his legal background to negotiate an agreement with Rose to leave the game; on Aug. 24, 1989 Giamatti announced that Rose would be banned from baseball for life.

A week later Giamatti died of a heart attack. The team owners named Vincent to replace him.

A little more than a month after that, as the San Francisco Giants were preparing to face the Oakland A’s in a World Series game, a severe earthquake struck the Bay area. San Francisco’s Candlestick Park rumbled and swayed. The game was cancelled and the Series postponed. Some people didn’t want the Series to be played at all (67 people had died in the quake) but Vincent made the right call: the Series would go on.

Vincent’s next challenge was dealing with Steinbrenner. The Yankees’ imperious owner had purportedly paid $40,000 to the gambler Howie Spira in return for damaging gossip about Dave Winfield, who hadn’t played up to Steinbrenner’s expectations. Vincent negotiated with Steinbrenner to get him removed from baseball; Vincent let him return two years later.

In his memoir, Vincent said of Steinbrenner: “The emperor must be told when he is naked — and when he is wrong.”

When Vincent tried to stop the owners’ lockout of players in 1990 amid a contract dispute, he angered those owners. They thought the commissioner should be on their side rather than independent and fair to both the players and owners. The owners turned in a vote of “no confidence” against him. Shortly afterward, in September 1992, he resigned. He was replaced by one of those owners, Bud Selig.

In the introduction to his memoir, Vincent wrote: “Baseball needs a commissioner who has only the welfare of the game in mind, who works to protect the interests of players, owners, and, most significantly, fans. In the near-decade since I left baseball, I don’t think we’ve had a real commissioner. Someday I hope that will change. For now, I’m the last.”

Much later in the book, after recounting all the legal disputes, Vincent told us: “The business is awful and ugly but the game itself is so magical and lyrical that it keeps bringing you back. I hear all the talk of gloom and doom and I always say, don’t talk about the game being killed, because these guys today, however venal and stupid, can’t kill it. You couldn’t kill it if you tried, because the fans will come back the minute you resolve your little spats.”

In 2023 Vincent told an Associated Press reporter: “I had the conviction that being commissioner was a public trust. I tried to do what I thought was best for the game and the public who cared so much about it.”

Vincent, like Giamatti, was above all a baseball fan. He ended his book by noting that every year when the World Series is over, a true fan of the game gets out a calendar for the following year “and marks up a square four months hence, a weekday in mid-February, with the letters ‘P. & C.’ to note the date that pitchers and catchers are due to report for spring training. Next year, next year, there’s always next year.”

That time has almost come. Fans of the Yankees and Red Sox know full well: next Wednesday, “P. & C.”