COMMENTARY : The Baseball Pooh-bahs Are Still as Ugly as Ever

By an 18-9 margin, with one abstention, the Major League Baseball owners have voted that Commissioner Fay Vincent immediately resign. It’s against baseball’s rules to fire the commissioner or diminish his powers during his term--Vincent’s runs through March 31, 1994--but you didn’t think these cutthroats would let a little thing like their own rules stop them, did you?

Surprised? Don’t be. Let’s get one thing straight about most of the owners: Basically, they’re pigs. They’re among the most arrogant, obnoxious capitalists on earth. They’re petty, unprincipled and power-crazed. Money is their god. None of them has ever listened to anything but the sound of his or her own voice.

And those are some of their better qualities. When they’re not violating the law by colluding to hold down players’ salaries, or violating the civic trust by moving their franchises, they’re violating the Basic Agreement.

Which is why these 28 fine people met at a hotel near O’Hare Airport in Chicago Thursday to discuss Vincent’s job performance. If the American voter were as impossible to please as these guys are, President Bush would have been impeached two years ago.

Pardon our foolishness, but from the outside, it looks as if Vincent has done a pretty good job since replacing his late friend and former Yale president, Bart Giamatti, three years ago.

He certainly was right to end the 1990 owners’ lockout by ordering the opening of spring training. He was right to suspend George Steinbrenner and Steve Howe. And he was right to realign the National League, a move NL owners supported by a 10-2 vote. Under Vincent’s leadership, baseball is generating the richest licensing and marketing revenues in sports.

So what’s the problem? The problem is that what baseball’s owners really want is a do-nothing, know-nothing commissioner--someone like John Ziegler, whose availability, in the wake of his forced resignation from the National Hockey League, must have had baseball owners drooling.

Wouldn’t baseball’s pooh-bahs just love to get hold of Ziegler and make him their king of nothing? You betcha. Ziggy Stardust knew better than to let an actual thought enter the empty space between his ears. And even if he hadn’t, he’d have known better than to try and implement it.

Fay Vincent, too heavy in both mind and body to be a puppet on anyone’s string, is standing firm. When several owners tried to arrange an August meeting in an attempt to force him to resign, he declined to meet with them. Instead, he faxed a five-page letter to every club in which he wrote: “I will not resign--ever.”

It wasn’t all harsh talk. In his letter, Vincent, acting the part of the ultra-diplomat, noted that the owners are “strong, independent, successful, bright people. . . . who understandably want to do things their own way.”

In anticipation of the vote Thursday, Vincent’s way was to hire Brendan V. Sullivan Jr., the lawyer who represented Oliver North in the Iran-Contra hearings. Indications are Vincent will sue to keep his job.

Why is the commish in such dire straits? Among other things, he ticked off some of the owners by trying to limit the exposure of games cablecast on superstations, explaining that such saturation is not in the “best interests of baseball.” The owners, whose best interests are their pocketbooks first and baseball a distant second, want no such interference.

The Cubs, who are owned by the Tribune Company, which owns Chicago superstation WGN-TV and is balking at realignment, are Vincent enemy No. 1.

Geographical and travel logic dictates that the Cubs be placed in the NL West and Atlanta’s Braves in the NL East. But the Cubs, fearing that more West Coast road games would result in later Chicago starting times and therefore, lower advertising rates, have filed a lawsuit to prevent the switch.

There also is the matter of baseball’s $1.45 billion contract with CBS and ESPN, which expires this season. Baseball has been something less than a ratings smash, and because of that, and the prospect of a smaller contract this time, the owners may invoke their right to reopen the terms of their Basic Agreement with the players union. To most owners, the commissioner is an obstacle they put in place, like an orange Day-Glo traffic cone, then run over or move whenever they want.

They’re quite a crew, these owners. The lawsuit over realignment opens Sept. 30 in Chicago District Court, delaying Vincent’s ruling and the making of the 1993 schedule.

The 1993 schedule also is being delayed because some owners are opposing the sale and move of Bob Lurie’s San Francisco Giants to a Florida group from Tampa-St. Petersburg. You know what the best part is? The Giants’ move is being opposed by Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley, whose late father, Walter, became the most hated man in Brooklyn when he moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles in 1958. But there’s another word for the owners’ treatment of Vincent--ugly. Ugly, but understandable. People who have spent their adult lives chopping off heads in the corporate world, getting anything and everything they want, aren’t about to listen to reason, even if it’s reason being dispensed by the guy they hired. The owners want an empty suit, a figurehead--remember William “Spike” Eckert?--and you can be sure that as soon as they’ve rid themselves of Vincent, they’ll get one. Plenty of people willing to be a bobblehead for a million dollars a year.