Vincent to Be Asked to Resign for Baseball’s Sake : Baseball: Avoidance of unseemly legal battle is believed to be incentive for commissioner to accept owners’ mandate.

As he spends the holiday weekend at his vacation home on Cape Cod, Mass., family friends and baseball owners allied with Fay Vincent will try to talk the besieged baseball commissioner into accepting the inevitable and resigning.

It is not clear how many of the nine owners who voted against the resolution requesting his resignation Thursday in Chicago plan to call or visit Vincent this weekend, but a National League owner said Friday there is reason to believe Vincent will listen and step down.

Vincent told the Associated Press that he has “no interest in seeing a delegation” of owners, but he was accompanied to Cape Cod by Rich Levin, baseball’s public relations director, and other members of the publicity staff. That prompted speculation that he might relent and resign, rather than create a situation in which the owners would fire him, possibly precipitating a legal fight. The owners will meet again in St. Louis on Wednesday and Thursday.

No commissioner has been fired, but several owners have said they have legal support for doing it. Eighteen owners voted in favor of the resignation resolution.

“It would be foolhardy for Fay to think he can continue to run the game in the face of a two-thirds vote,” the National League owner said.

“He could have 10 Brendan Sullivans (Vincent’s attorney) and it wouldn’t make a difference.”

The owner said that friends and allied owners will apparently try to convince Vincent that it would be “proper and decent to put the game ahead of yourself.”

“Otherwise,” said the owner, “we’re headed for a collision.”

If Vincent steps down, the Major League Agreement, baseball’s constitution, calls for the Executive Council to operate the office and appoint a search committee to recommend a replacement.

Vincent has cited the Agreement, which also states that the power of the commissioner cannot be diminished during his term, and said he would never resign because of the harm it would do to the office.

But with the owners intent on rewriting the Agreement to restrict the commissioner’s ability to act arbitrarily in baseball’s “best interest” and to restructure the office along corporate lines, Vincent, the eighth commissioner, might be the last to serve under the current parameters.