It’s More Than Job for Him

No one knows whether Kenesaw Mountain Landis, the first commissioner of the game, loved baseball.

Could he have named the starting lineup of the 1929 Philadelphia Athletics, complete with batting averages, strikeouts per inning and walks per game? Would he have known how Pie Traynor got his nickname? Did he collect player cards as a kid? Did he even keep score at the games? Did he think of a double play as 6-4-3? Was he even up on the infield-fly rule?

Did he even know who the third baseman was in the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance combination? (It was Harry Steinfeldt.)

Would he know who Frank Leja was?

We have a commissioner now who knows all of the above--and more. Chances are good that if Francis T. (Fay) Vincent were not the commissioner of all baseball, he would be haunting the baseball card and memorabilia shows. If he weren’t barring Pete Rose, he might be buying Charlie Hustle’s batting helmet.

Fay Vincent is like a kid locked in a candy store. He can’t believe his good luck. He thinks he has the third-best job in the United States and he’s not too sure about the other two.

Does it help or hurt to be a Fan, with a capital F?

“It’s essential,” he notes positively. “If you don’t love baseball, you shouldn’t be in it.”

Vincent is the eighth commissioner of baseball. The first--and the man against whom all others are usually compared--was Landis.

Did Landis love baseball? There’s no evidence Landis loved much of anything. It’s almost impossible to write Landis’ name without the adjective crusty in front of it.

Landis was a judge and he ran baseball as if it were a courtroom full of pickpockets. He conceived his job to be one of punishing.

And he handed out punishment and fines with will and enthusiasm, coming down on owners and players alike, breaking up the St. Louis Cardinals’ infamous minor league “chain-gang” operation with the same zeal and zest he broke up Standard Oil. Kenesaw was an off-with-their-heads commissioner.

When he was gone, baseball went to a backslapping politician. After six years of baseball, Happy Chandler was glad to go back to the comparative serenity of being governor of Kentucky again.

Ford Frick, the third commissioner, was a newspaperman. So he hardly saw the game through a haze of romantic legend. He was Babe Ruth’s ghost writer, and his chief legacy to the sport was placing an asterisk after Roger Maris’ name because he broke Ruth’s single-season home run record in a season eight games longer than Ruth’s. Fortunately, he was gone by the time Henry Aaron broke Ruth’s career record--so we were spared that blood bath.

William Eckert was the next commissioner, an air transport general they found in the far reaches of the Pentagon apparently playing with paper airplanes. New York sportswriter Dick Young dubbed him, “the Unknown Soldier,” and he was just as unknown three years later when he left the job, although he may have made the planes run on time.

Bowie Kuhn, a ramrod stiff, formal, inflexible man with a rigid set of values, ran the game as if it were a military school and, in a nation in which some 40 states had lotteries, banned from the game two of its greatest stars--Willie Mays and Mickey Mantle--for playing customer golf for a casino in Atlantic City. Bowie wasn’t a fan, he was a drill sergeant.

Peter Ueberroth wasn’t a fan, either. He was a marketing genius who took the most visible loss-leader operation in the history of the world--the Olympic Games--and promptly made several hundred million dollars off them, showing the world what it should have been doing all along.

Peter put baseball in the black, too. He couldn’t abide strikes, he thought the owners had the view of the world of the German general staff and, before he left, he had in place the most lucrative TV and marketing contracts--in the billions of dollars--the game had ever seen.

We never got to know Bart Giamatti. He was a fan--of the Boston Red Sox. He probably had no clear idea who Frank Leja was, either, but he goes down in history as the man who kicked Pete Rose out of baseball. That’s a little better than the man who shot Santa Claus. But not much.

Which brings the game to Fay Vincent. He hardly got the fax machine put in before troubles began coming in the windows. He had the Pete Rose mess, the game’s labor relations were in a shambles, arbitrators had found the owners collusive.

Then the World Series was virtually wiped out by an earthquake.

And then the owners locked the players out of spring training.

Fortunately, Vincent has been there before. A securities-and-exchange bureaucrat in Washington, he got called in to head up Columbia pictures after the David Begelman scandals--the studio head had misappropriated company funds. He presided over the company through its sale to Coca-Cola, then headed the division that bought in TV programs like “Jeopardy” and “Wheel of Fortune.” He was still there when the studio released “Ishtar.” He is no stranger to disasters.

Hardly anyone asks him who Frank Leja is--Leja had 23 at-bats as a Yankee in the mid-’50s and with the Angels in ’62. No one wants to know if Irv Noren played more games in left field than Norm Siebern in 1956 and what year Mantle won the Triple Crown. Instead, the conversation veers around to drug control, lockouts, arbitration, George Steinbrenner.

The nation’s No. 1 fan gets to talk everything but baseball. Hardly anyone cares who Frank Leja was, anymore. The good news, though, is that everyone will know who Fay Vincent is.