In Retrospect, He Was Exactly What Baseball Required

They said he was a stuffed shirt, an anachronism, a Victorian character in the wrong century, part Scrooge and part Micawber, but an elitist all the way. But in his tenure in baseball, salaries escalated into the stratosphere, going from an average in the low five digits to the high six digits.

They said he had the political outlook of William of Orange, the economic enlightenment of Calvin Coolidge. But in his term, baseball cast off the last shackles of slavery in this society, the reserve clause, and players accepted the freedom of movement of Hungarian Gypsies or plains Indians.

They said he was a product of the owners’ ventriloquism, that when he talked you could see Walter O’Malley’s lips move, but somehow he incurred the enmity of enough owners that he had a constant fight on his hands just to stay in office and finally was no longer able to do it.

They said he was what Harold Ickes once called Wendell Willkie, “the barefoot boy from Wall Street.” That he was enlisted to turn baseball back a century and into an absolute monarchy again. Instead, he saw it turn into the nearest thing to a workers’ paradise in the whole fabric of sport.

There were five commissioners of baseball before Bowie Kuhn. By common consent, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis was the best of them. He had carte blanche, coming to the game on the heels of its most embarrassing scandal, the Black Sox fix of 1919, and he ruled the game the way Genghis Khan ruled Asia.

By and large, he left the game in the same unenlightened, backward-looking condition that he found it. Jim Crow was still the governing philosophy of its landscape. Even in Dixie, you got the back of the bus. In baseball, you didn’t even get on the bus. Landis tacitly enforced this plantation mentality.

As an antitrust jurist with a reputation for busting up a Standard Oil cartel from the bench, Judge Landis must have known he was presiding over one of the biggest combinations in restraint of trade this side of the Roman Empire, but he preserved the fiction of fairness and impartiality with a crusty veneer of moral superiority. He was bigger than baseball, which in itself was bigger than the law.

The owners never made the mistake of installing a Pope in that chair again. One of the things they did was provide that a commissioner’s reelection required a three-quarters majority. They needed a warden but they wanted a servant. They didn’t want another Judge Landis, they wanted a Judge Crater.

When A. E. (Happy) Chandler proved to misunderstand his role completely, they fired him and hired Ford Frick, whose duties consisted mainly--if not to say entirely--of calling off World Series games if it was raining.

When Frick retired--and they found out about it--they hired an Air Force general whose qualification for the job was that he had never seen a major league ballgame.

The owners put the 75%-of-the-vote rule in for the same reason mule skinners carry whips. But, smarting under the derision the selections of Frick and Gen. William Eckert brought them, they picked a baseball man for a change, a man who not only knew the infield fly rule but how many hits Ty Cobb got, lifetime, off left-handed pitching and who caught for the 1951 St. Louis Browns.

Bowie Kent Kuhn was a nice guy who loved baseball, but he came into focus as baseball’s hatchet man, an Ivy League socialite, a Hoover Republican, a Park Avenue lawyer. And he came into power, if that was the word for it, at the same time as Marvin Miller, who became such a powerful adversary as counsel for the players’ union, that, for many years, the press snickered that Miller was the game’s real commissioner and Kuhn was his whipping boy.

Miller had the power to destroy baseball, via strike, and Kuhn scarcely had any to save it. But, as Kuhn points out in his new book, “Hardball, the Education of a Baseball Commissioner,” baseball was on fire when he first got into it. It was the sick man of sport, running a distant second to football in the popularity polls, dismissed by networks and public alike as too slow, too contemplative, too old-fashioned and too archaic for today’s sensation-seeking, violence-preferring audiences.

Kuhn may have been the best commissioner the game had, given the circumstances of his reign, if it could be called that.

Kuhn himself brought to the office a reverential awe for the traditions of the game. He was his own worst enemy. He was more of a gut fighter than anyone imagined.

He put George Steinbrenner, no less, out of the game for illegal election contributions, put Ted Turner out for tampering with another team’s player--the San Francisco Giants’ Gary Mathews--and he took on such powerful enemies as Gussie Busch, the beer billionaire and owner of the St. Louis Cardinals, and Nelson Doubleday, the publishing scion and owner of the New York Mets. Kuhn was like the general who fails to protect his rear.

Still, in Bowie’s time at the top, the grand old game moved from an average salary of $20,000 to $450,000 per player. Attendance--in all of organized ball--moved from less than 20 million to more than 80 million. The game survived devastating strikes, scandals, player and owner troubles.

And Bowie’s office was always open, his phone was listed. Where you could get in to see Judge Landis only if you fixed a game first, you could get Bowie at any time, day or night, to take your call. He had a mentor who warned, “Never get in an argument with people who buy ink by the barrel,” but Bowie’s reputation in the press was never any better than his predecessors. He was either a nonperson or a villain. He either got no mention at all, or unfavorable mention.

Hence, not only the book but a tour Bowie Kuhn is currently taking of the camps down here at spring training. Bowie is ostensibly trying to sell the book, but Bowie is really trying to sell Bowie. He is even counteracting the widespread belief that he was a vicar without humor by chuckling that his longtime foe, Steinbrenner, dismisses his book as, “Sea Stories by the Captain of the Titanic.”

He does not want to go down in baseball history as the front office equivalent of Fred Merkle or the guy who dropped the third strike against the Yankees in the ’41 World Series or let the grounder go through his legs in the last one. Bowie thinks he was one of the best friends baseball ever had. He thinks someone should say thanks for helping save the baby from drowning instead of “He had a hat when he went in.”