Have you ever had one of those weeks where so much happened that it felt like a month had passed? Or a year that was so eventful that it felt like a decade? Such was the case of the sports career of Fay Vincent, the former commissioner of the MLB who died this week in Vero Beach, Florida, at the age of 86. Although Vincent was only commissioner for 36 months, so many seismic events occurred during his tenure that it seemed as if he had been baseball’s commissioner for three decades, not three years.
Francis Thomas Vincent Jr. was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, on May 29, 1938. He graduated with honors from Williams College in 1960, earned a law degree from Yale in 1963, and thereafter made a quick ascent up the ranks of the corporate law world. It appeared as if Vincent’s life would continue along a steady, successful, inconspicuous path until 1988, when Vincent’s friend Bart Giamatti was elected MLB commissioner. Giamatti, who knew Vincent from their time together at Yale, prevailed upon his friend to serve under him as deputy commissioner. When Giamatti died unexpectedly a year later, baseball’s owners voted unanimously to make Vincent the eighth commissioner of the MLB.
A month into his commissionership, Vincent was thrust into one of the most serious crises in the sport’s history. Before Game 3 of the 1989 World Series between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland A’s, the Bay Area was rocked by a devastating earthquake that killed 67 people and caused considerable damage in the region (including to the Giants’ Candlestick Park). It was unclear whether the series could resume. But after meeting with city officials and receiving an assurance that the stadium was still playable, and after pausing long enough to ensure that most of the post-quake tumult had been quelled, Vincent gave the go-ahead for play to begin again, avoiding the fate of having the Fall Classic canceled for the first time since 1904.
Vincent was widely praised for his handling of the World Series crisis and for helping to usher in baseball’s first new franchises, the Colorado Rockies and the Florida (now Miami) Marlins, since 1977. Other problems arose, however, that would prove to be thornier. Vincent had difficulty getting the American and National Leagues to agree to a revenue-sharing agreement, and a labor dispute between the owners and the players led to a lockout during spring training that delayed the start of the 1990 season by a week. Vincent’s efforts to deal with the beginnings of the steroids scandal were blocked by the Players Association, and his attempts to create more geographically coherent division alignments (remember when the Chicago Cubs were in the NL East and the Atlanta Braves for some reason were in the NL West?!) were stonewalled as well, this time by the owners. With neither side particularly happy with him, and with the owners especially irked at how pro-player he seemed, the owners issued a vote of no confidence against him in 1992, prompting Vincent to resign from the commissionership two years before the end of his term.
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As commissioner, Vincent had a penchant for issuing lifetime bans. He handed one out to New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner for paying a gambler to dig up dirt on one of his players and gave out another to 1980 NL Rookie of the Year Steve Howe for recurrent drug policy offenses. Both of these bans were eventually overturned, but the most notorious lifetime ban that Vincent was instrumental in bringing about was upheld — the one that Bart Giamatti had dealt out to Pete Rose in 1989. It was then-Deputy Commissioner Vincent’s investigations into Rose’s gambling activities that had led Giamatti to ban baseball’s all-time hits leader for life. Giamatti died a mere eight days after issuing the ban, leaving Vincent to deal with the messy fallout.
Vincent’s lifetime bans, especially the one given to Rose, may have been excessive. But they stemmed from a protective desire to preserve the purity of a game that, for Vincent, possessed an almost religious quality. Like grandparents presiding over their grandchildren’s baptisms and brisses, Vincent understood that baseball is also a timeless tradition that is passed down from grandparents to grandchildren. (Like many children who were taken to their first baseball games by their grandparents, I’ll never forget when my grandfather took me to my first baseball game at Fenway Park.) As Vincent wrote, “From time to time, baseball fans must wonder and worry about the game we love. But let me remind us all that baseball will survive; our grandchildren will have baseball to love and to introduce to their grandchildren.” A game this special — a sport that, as Field of Dreams exemplified, can, at its best, transcend mere pastime and rise to the level of the sacred — should be treated with the dignity and even reverence that it deserves.
Daniel Ross Goodman is a Washington Examiner contributing writer and the author, most recently, of Soloveitchik’s Children: Irving Greenberg, David Hartman, Jonathan Sacks, and the Future of Jewish Theology in America.