COMMENTARY : This Commissioner Came With No Strings Attached : Baseball: Vincent’s independent stand on realignment angers the Dodgers’ O’Malley, who no longer is acting as the game’s puppeteer.

As cheerleader for the Chicago Cubs in their suit against Fay Vincent and ringleader of an attempt to organize support for it, Dodger President Peter O’Malley might be more concerned with his own best interests than with how the commissioner used his best-interest powers.

That is the view of several major league officials as the Cubs try to block their mandated move to the National League West. For O’Malley, it might be a struggle within a struggle as he questions the commissioner’s power and tries to rebuild his own.

He also seems to be implying that something might have to be done because this is a commissioner out of control, an especially unnerving thought to those owners who still believe a commissioner should be their puppet.

Vincent, under fire on a wide owner front, is nobody’s puppet.

Agree or disagree with his moves, he is an active commissioner who has responded to critical issues within the framework of the Major League Agreement, which delineates his authority.

As emergency successor to the late Bart Giamatti and a man who shares Giamatti’s love of the game, Vincent is beholden to no owner or group of owners, some of whom still yearn for the unknown soldier, Gen. Spike Eckert, or that invisible man, Bowie Kuhn.

Why would O’Malley react so strongly to Vincent’s ordering the realignment that makes geographical and economic sense, and which O’Malley favored, as did every National League club except the Cubs, whose negative vote was enough to kill it under league rules?

Why would O’Malley be the only owner outside Chicago to issue a printed statement questioning the commissioner’s authority and declaring that Vincent had set a dangerous precedent by undermining the National League constitution?

Why, according to two of the owners on the phone with him during a National League conference call Tuesday, would he be the most vocal owner, trying to drum up, at the very least, a league statement in support of the Cubs?

Why would he continue to hammer at it in calls to other owners last week?

Two reasons, according to several high-level club and major league officials:

--It’s personal.

Tutored by a father who was often called the real commissioner, O’Malley consistently pulled the strings for the doormat Kuhn, who in his recent book, “Hardball,” wrote of O’Malley’s support on behalf of his futile 1982 campaign for reelection:

“Nobody had kept up my spirits like Peter O’Malley. He had been dauntless, tireless and optimistic in even the darkest moments.”

No wonder Kuhn has been saying that Vincent needs O’Malley, confirming that the puppeteer’s strings have been severed by more individualistic, stronger-minded commissioners: Peter Ueberroth, Giamatti and Vincent.

“Peter has not been in the inner circle under any of the last three commissioners,” a major league official close to the highest level said. “He’s petrified by that loss of power and is coming after Fay because of it.

“He had Bowie’s ear for a long time. Bowie didn’t do too many things that Peter didn’t know about or ordain, but it isn’t the same now and hasn’t been for a while.”

O’Malley said he would not be lured into responding to unattributed quotes.

“There have been so many inaccuracies reported in the last week that it’s ridiculous,” he said.

Asked about his relationship with the last three commissioners, O’Malley said he had been “very close” to Giamatti, having chaired the search committee that recommended him to become National League president, and “was crushed when he passed away.”

He acknowledged that his relationship with Ueberroth was definitely different and not as close as it had been with either Kuhn or Giamatti. He described his relationship with Vincent in one word: professional.

Beyond that?

“I think the one word describes it,” O’Malley said.

--O’Malley is a traditionalist, a separatist, according to the officials, and as such he supports the old-school belief that the National League is the senior, sovereign, superior league, an entity unto itself.

“The National League is its own warring fiefdom,” the major league official said. “It’s almost like the North and South in the Civil War in that there’s a faction that believes it shouldn’t and doesn’t fall under the commissioner’s umbrella and has no interest in what the American League does unless it infringes on National League terrain and interests.

“When Ueberroth talked about restructuring in the early ‘80s to create more of a one-house concept that would operate out of the commissioner’s office, Peter and the National League separatists were strongly against it.

“He talks about the need for change in the system but belongs to the big-market group that resists just about every revolutionary concept from revenue sharing to overdue changes in how the National League’s home teams share gate receipts with visiting teams.”

O’Malley dismissed the separatist and traditionalist labels and said his statement in defense of the league’s constitution and his concern for how the commissioner undermined it speaks for itself.

“A large number of clubs in the American League also feel the commissioner exceeded his authority,” O’Malley said. “I chose to speak out. Others haven’t. That’s fine.

“On matters of integrity and discipline, the commissioner has a clear authority to use his best-interest power, but there are definite limits, and I feel he exceeded them. There’s nothing more to it.”

Others are skeptical.

They believe that O’Malley is intent on re-establishing his influence in the National League, where expansion and ownership changes in the last 20 years have uprooted the old-boys’ network.

O’Malley insists that there was no vote taken during the league’s conference call on Tuesday, but two owners on the call say there was a definite straw poll and that the Dodgers and Cubs were voted down, 10-2, on the supporting statement.

At this point, what strings O’Malley pulls are attached primarily to Bill White, his search committee’s choice to succeed Chub Feeney as league president in 1986.

At a time when many owners are displeased with him because of recent remarks alleging racism he has confronted, White, who is stepping down at the end of the season, has become an O’Malley extension.

The league president was at Dodger Stadium on Monday when Vincent announced his decision. White’s statement was much like O’Malley’s. He criticized the commissioner for exceeding his authority and undermining the league constitution.

Also, during the recent attempt to have Vincent give up his best-interest power in the area of labor negotiations, which Vincent rejected, White, as a member of the owners’ Player Relations Committee, voted in favor of the attempt, a position supported by O’Malley.

No commissioner can satisfy all of his constituents all of the time, and Vincent has undoubtedly alienated enough owners so that he will have a difficult time getting majority support if he chooses to seek reelection when his contract expires in March of 1994.

Vincent isn’t sure he will run again. Much of the optimism he brought to the job has been eroded by the infighting.

The two owners who led the Player Relations Committee fight to oust Vincent from the labor area, Bud Selig of the Milwaukee Brewers and Jerry Reinsdorf of the Chicago White Sox, are known to be still at it. They are beseeching colleagues to look for ways to guarantee that Vincent won’t intervene in the next collective bargaining talks.

An American League owner said Saturday that the “vast majority of owners” now oppose Vincent, their feelings inflamed by a series of recent developments, including:

His refusal to yield his right to intervene in labor talks; his overriding of the National League constitution; his perceived bullying of three New York Yankee officials for their testimony in the appeal of Steve Howe, and his arbitrary revoking of the Rules and Procedures of Baseball because, he said in a letter to the owners, it had been interpreted incorrectly in a series of court cases and he would now establish protocol on a case-by-case basis.

The rehiring of a commissioner must be considered by the owners not more than 15 months or less than six months before the end of his term, but it would not be a surprise if the owners moved sooner, though Vincent has said he would not resign.

Vincent also said he knows the “back-alley talk and whispering” continue. He knows, too, that his best-interest powers can’t be abridged when it comes to labor disputes because the Major League Agreement states that no changes in a commissioner’s authority can be made until the end of a term.

He knows there is need for a change in the economic system and need for autonomy on the part of the Player Relations Committee. He has assured the owners that he won’t intervene in those next talks, but remains disquieted by the way he was approached in the first place, portraying those June events in the manner of a coup.

“I was approached as the enemy and asked to sign a press release I had never seen before,” he said. “I still feel it was badly handled and not very bright.”

Now he must face a court challenge based on hypocrisy.

Where has the Cubs’ concern about prime-time starts been in all the years they have played day games?

Have they ever shown compassion for the Dodgers and other West Coast teams whose broadcasts and telecasts from that Western Division city of Atlanta are over before it is prime time on the West Coast?

How can their fans be irreparably harmed by the loss of traditional rivalries, as their suit contends, when the most traditional rival, the St. Louis Cardinals, would continue in the West?

Tradition?

Tradition has nothing to do with any of this. If it did, Walter O’Malley and his son, Peter, would never have left Brooklyn to establish their kingdom in Los Angeles.