BASEBALL DAILY REPORT : AROUND THE MAJOR LEAGUES : New Stadium in Baltimore Gets a Name

The new baseball park being built for the Baltimore Orioles near downtown will be called Oriole Park at Camden Yards, Maryland Gov. William Donald Schaefer announced Thursday.

The name represents a compromise between the governor and Oriole owner Eli Jacobs. Schaefer had pushed to name the stadium Camden Yards, after the historic rail yard where the stadium is being built. Jacobs insisted the facility be called Oriole Park.

The agreement was reached over the weekend, Schaefer said. “He said to me and I said to him, ‘This is getting ridiculous. Let’s get this over with.’ ”

The park will be ready for play next April.

William Shea, who brought National League baseball back to New York in 1962 and got a ballpark named for him in gratitude, died early Thursday in his apartment in New York. He was 84.

A lawyer of wide influence, Shea and his law firm, Shea and Gould, were part of what some called the permanent government of New York.

He was asked by then Mayor Robert F. Wagner to head a committee to get a National League team for the city after the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants went west at the end of the 1957 season.

Shea tried, without luck, first to woo existing franchises away from other cities and then to get the National League to expand.

Success came with the ploy of organizing a competing third league, the Continental League, which Shea said he planned to field by 1961. Baseball capitulated and added two new teams each to the American and National Leagues. Shea folded the Continental League.

The expansion New York Mets began playing in 1962 in the Polo Grounds, the Giants’ abandoned home, while the city built Shea Stadium, which was ready in 1964.

The Florida Marlins hired Cuban native Angel Vazquez as director of Latin American operations in the wake of criticism about the lack of minorities working for the expansion team.

Vazquez is the fourth executive to join the Marlins from the Montreal Expos, where he had been director of Latin American operations since 1987.

“Angel is one of the most respected and talented baseball men in all of Latin America,” said General Manager Dave Dombrowski, who also came to the Marlins from Montreal.

Commissioner Fay Vincent encouraged debate about hiring practices as a healthy way to help cure one of baseball’s lingering ills.

“Baseball can stand some heat on this subject,” Vincent told the Miami Herald. “We have to take it because it is a legitimate concern, and it is not going to go away. We’ve got to deal with the perception that this is a white man’s game.”