Budding Leader

Does baseball need a commissioner?

Does an airliner need a pilot? Does a symphony need a conductor? Does a prison need a warden? A lion act a tamer?

Baseball without a commissioner is--well, picture 30 passengers on a 747, each with a different destination and a different timetable insisting his needs be met first. And no one at the controls.

The office came into being in the first place because the owners couldn’t control the players. Now, they can’t control one another.

The game picked Judge Landis back in the ‘20s because the players, who didn’t have a union, found another way to make more money: They fixed games.

Landis fixed them. Even though he was a celebrated jurist, he ignored the law and the verdict of the jury that acquitted the eight “Black Sox” players accused of throwing the World Series. Judge Landis threw all eight out of the game anyway. The judge had his own jury nullification.

I bring this up because a friend of mine, Jerome Holtzman, probably the premier baseball writer of his time, has written a book about the office, “The Commissioners--Baseball’s Midlife Crisis.”

It’s timely, because today Bud Selig is expected to become the ninth full-time commissioner in the game’s history.

Holtzman examines the office of the commissioner from the days when baseball didn’t have one to the present time when it doesn’t either.

Landis ruled baseball the way the pharaohs ruled Egypt. He threw guys out of the game almost for double-parking, 19 players in four years. He also boxed the owners’ ears, once breaking up the Cardinals’ so-called “chain gang” of minor league farm clubs and setting free dozens of indentured players.

When he died, the owners vowed never again to select such a dictatorial, curmudgeonly autocrat. They strove to find one who was as owner-friendly as their butler ever since.

Baseball’s second commissioner was A.B. “Happy” Chandler, who had been governor and U.S. senator from Kentucky.

A warm and gregarious man, Chandler did one meritorious thing: He could have vetoed Jackie Robinson’s severing of the color line. Holtzman quotes Chandler telling Branch Rickey, “I am the only man on earth who can approve the transfer of his contract from Montreal to Brooklyn.” Then, he did it.

The owners refused to renew his contract.

He was succeeded by Ford Frick, a former newspaperman who was probably as close to the owners’ ideal as they were likely to find. The perception was, every time Ford Frick said something, you could see Walter O’Malley’s lips move.

Still, Frick lasted 14 years. He was a supporter of the Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, N.Y. He also put an asterisk after Roger Maris’ name when Maris broke Babe Ruth’s home run record but needed 10 extra games and 50 extra at-bats to do it.

“History has not been kind to Frick,” Holtzman acknowledges. Frick presided over the first franchise switches in the modern history of the game, the Boston Braves moving to Milwaukee, the St. Louis Browns to Baltimore, the Philadelphia Athletics to Kansas City, Washingtons all over the place, and the Dodgers and Giants to California. Frick raised no objection.

He was succeeded by a military man so unfamiliar to the game and the public that the writer Larry Fox was moved to exclaim, “My God, they’ve picked the Unknown Soldier!”

Former Air Force Gen. Spike Eckert was as unsuited for the job as a nun, and the owners, in some embarrassment, fired him in midterm.

The owners picked a league lawyer, Bowie Kuhn, next. The trouble was, by the time he came along, baseball already had a commissioner: Marvin Miller. The head of the players’ union, Miller was really in charge of the grand old game by then.

Miller vs. Kuhn was Koufax vs. Willie Miranda, Sampras vs. Agassi. A mismatch.

Kuhn presided over the most devastating swipes at the underpinning of the game in history--the demolition of the reserve clause, the admission of arbitration. He let the fox in the henhouse. He made some pawing efforts to preserve the traditions of the game, but Miller kept slipping a called third strike past him.

Free agency came into being. The multimillion-dollar ballplayer emerged. Kuhn was helpless. He could not restrain owners from throwing money off the back of trains.

Peter Ueberroth thought he could. Ueberroth could have been the best commissioner the game had. But he despised the owners.

He began by recommending they stop dumping truckloads of money on .240 hitters. He urged them not to enter the free-agency bidding. He pointed out that 26 clubs were on the hook for $40 million to players who were retired or otherwise no longer playing.

To Ueberroth’s surprise and chagrin, the union seized on his advice as evidence of “collusion,” a violation of the Basic Agreement. The arbitrator agreed with them. Baseball was fined $280 million, the “largest single penalty in the history of sports.”

Bart Giamatti succeeded Ueberroth. Giamatti is remembered chiefly for banning Pete Rose from the game for life. Rose bet on baseball. Rose also bet on horses, cards and the color of the next car coming down the street. But he didn’t fix games.

Fay Vincent was the last full-time commissioner the game had. The owners not only dismissed him, they abolished the office.

Oh, they finally picked an owner for the job. But “owner-commissioner” is an oxymoron of the first water. So is “acting commissioner.”

As this is written, Bud Selig is on the point of accepting the full-time commissionership. He managed to get his Milwaukee club out of the American League on his (interim) watch. But he also managed to get a World Series canceled.

Before Judge Landis would have let that happen, he would have kicked 30 owners out of the game for life. Which might have saved the game at that.