COMMENTARY : Baseball Owners Are Putting Integrity Out of Commission

Now they have what they’ve long lusted for--the unimpeded authority to act in their own best interests, and to hell with the commissioner. Last week baseball team owners dumped Fay Vincent by a 18-9-1 vote and replaced him with one of their own as the guardian of baseball’s integrity.

The Gang of Eighteen gave the post to Bud Selig, Milwaukee Brewers owner and one of the prime plotters in baseball’s palace coup. But they’re not giving him the title of commissioner or acting commissioner or even interim commissioner. The word is anathema.

For Selig they invented the high-sounding title of chairman of baseball’s Executive Council, a bald euphemism for Grand Exalted Gofer awaiting their bidding.

Selig had been a co-leader in the conspiracy against Vincent along with White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf, who helped line up the votes to liquidate the office of commissioner. It was in a recent interview in the New York Times that Reinsdorf vouched for Selig’s activities, describing him as “a nice guy, who was talking to every club owner on the phone at least once a week.” For what purpose? Was Selig constructing a nationwide weather map?

They wanted Vincent out because of what they considered his peculiar views. The man they were paying $650,000 a year was a radical, who did not consider the club owners his only constituency. A heretic. Vincent had this notion that as the game’s commissioner he owed some duty to the players, the fans and even the umpires when there was a need for justice.

The owners also considered Vincent too intrusive. They didn’t like it when in the spring of 1990 the players were threatening strike over collective bargaining and he butted in and dissolved the crisis. They would have welcomed the strike as a means of halting the steep salary spiral of the players and were willing to sacrifice the 1990 season if necessary.

With the same kind of strike situation looming for next spring, and the owners now said to be inclined toward lockout, they didn’t want a commissioner who was soft on the players.

Vincent was also standing in their way as an opponent of the Chicago and Atlanta television superstations, who were paying certain clubs big money to beam their games into other communities. The Dodgers, for example, are being paid $75 million by the Chicago Tribune-owned superstation WGN to put their games on cable for the next five years. This would assure the Dodgers’ anti-Vincent vote.

What the club owners have done is to fire probably the best commissioner the game has known. Don’t mention the longtime icon, Kenesaw M. Landis. He chickened out back in 1936 in the Bob Feller case when he awarded the young pitching sensation to the Cleveland Indians despite their outrageous hanky-panky in signing the Iowa farm boy. All those wonderful years, the feller should have been pitching for the Boston Red Sox, who made the first legitimate offer for him. Landis’ successor, Happy Chandler, was baseball’s Good Time Charlie, who took too much credit for breaking the color line; Ford Frick did found the Hall of Fame, but otherwise was the consummate company man; Gen. William Eckert, a surprise choice, deserved the sobriquet of the Unknown Soldier and scarely knew the location of first base. They bought him out quickly. Bowie Kuhn was a good man, tough on everybody and left a fine mark on the game. Peter Ueberroth managed to sign a huge television contract but killed off the popular “Game of the Week”; Bart Giamatti was a fan and a poet, who leaned on his deputy Fay Vincent for advice in the big decisions, like banishing Pete Rose.

None of them took charge like Vincent, perhaps because as a multimillionaire himself he didn’t need their money or their job.