Business to Baseball: Vincent Thrives

MILWAUKEE —  Once upon a time, before Messersmith and McNally got their freedom, before Curt Flood phoned his lawyer and before this era of million-dollar player deals and billion-dollar television deals, baseball had a different sort of commissioner.

Who was Gen. William Eckert anyway? He may have been the wrong man for the job. In fact baseball lore has it that he definitely was the wrong man, that owners actually thought they were voting for someone with a similar-sounding name when Eckert was elected in 1965.

Who was Bowie Kuhn? He was kind and decent and loved the sport. He also had zero influence with its owners, and even today general managers remember him saying some of the same things that Peter Ueberroth would say a decade later.

The difference was that when Kuhn spoke, owners smiled, cleared their throats and threw another couple million dollars at some sore-armed reliever. The job changed, perhaps forever, in 1984 when Ueberroth became commissioner.

He was a self-made millionaire, had built a successful travel agency and had already had a huge impact on sports by getting corporate sponsors involved with the 1984 Los Angeles Olympics -- one of the first money-making Olympic Games.

Ueberroth had clout. He settled a nasty umpire’s strike in 1984 and barely asked an owner for advice. He chided owners on their spending habits and influenced them to stop bidding for free agents. A sport that had been virtually controlled by the players union wrestled back some control, and a job that had been mostly symbolic became significant.

That’s what A. Bartlett Giamatti inherited last April when he succeeded Ueberroth, and it’s what Fay Vincent inherited this week when he took over for Giamatti, baseball’s eighth commissioner.

In the wake of Ueberroth’s departure, it’s still a job with unclear parameters.

Giamatti held great promise to many baseball people, who wanted someone who was both a businessman and a passionate fan. But his term was so short -- five months ending with his death on Sept. 1 -- that he left few footprints.

How much he could have done and what he would have done is anyone’s guess. The job that Vincent took over this week can still be largely defined by the new man on the job. Who is this man?

On his first day on the job, Francis T. “Fay” Vincent Jr. showed many sides, a biting wit, a profound sadness over Giamatti’s death and acumen for discussing subjects ranging from literature and films to cigars and, naturally, baseball.

He showed that, like Ueberroth, he is comfortable in talking about business and high finance, and that, like Giamatti, he loves the game.

“It’s hard, even at this point in my life, to identify why baseball is so permanently affixed to the American soul,” he said. “I think I’m wise enough to know that if you don’t understand all there is to know, you’re careful about tampering with it.”

He talked openly about his friendship with Giamatti, his disability and a happy, active childhood in Connecticut. He talked about Yale, where he graduated from law school in 1963.

He talked about meeting William Bush and how that led to a longtime friendship with William’s brother, George, a future president of the United States. At Yale he would meet Eli S. Jacobs, who would buy the Baltimore Orioles after amassing a fortune worth a reported $600 million.

He talked about meeting Giamatti, and about his father, Francis T. Vincent, who umpired amateur baseball games until he was 76 and was a former official in both the National Football League and the old All-American Conference in the ‘40s and ‘50s.

Despite protesting that he was a “private man in a public job,” he talked about himself, and like Giamatti, he was charming, gentle and articulate.

“The most surprised guy in the United States is the one who coached me in American Legion baseball,” he said, smiling. “He said I couldn’t hit, run or throw, and look where it got me.”

Again and again, he was pressed on what it means to be baseball commissioner. Again and again, he shrugged off the question, saying it meant many things, not all of them understandable.

“It’s a good job in the abstract,” he said. “There’s a chance to affect something very special in American culture, and anytime someone like me has a chance to have that kind of position, one ought to take it.”

He was born in Waterbury, Conn., on May 29, 1938. His father had been a football and baseball star at Yale in the 1930s and, later, a football official. His mother was a housewife.

His early years don’t appear to have been too difficult. He attended The Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn., and graduated cum laude from Williams College in 1960. He was a tackle and center at Williams until a youthful prank almost killed him.

That happened in the winter of 1955-56, when he was locked in a dorm room for fun. He tried to escape by crawling out the window and into an adjacent room, but he slipped on an icy ledge and fell four floors, suffering two crushed vertebrae that a surgeon rebuilt with a bone from his hip. He was left partially paralyzed and, “I had to learn to walk all over again,” he said. “Neither of my legs is worth a damn today.”

His walk is a slow, awkward gait, made even worse by arthritis a few years ago. He clearly spends a lot of his days in pain, but his friends say he almost never complains and never uses the disability as an excuse.

“I was blessed because I was young and in very good shape,” he said. “If I’d been older, I don’t think I would have had nearly the recovery.”

He tells the story without much emotion, joking how the Jesuits used the injury to turn him down for the priesthood. He remembers watching the Yankees in that summer of 1956 while confined to a bed in a body cast.

“That was the summer Gil McDougald hit Herb Score,” he said, “and I can see that line drive hit Herb Score as clearly as I can see you sitting there. That’s why I know a little bit about what baseball means to this country. I waited all day for a game to start, and if it was rained out, I’d be very sad.”

The injury took about a year out of his life, but he still finished four years of college in three and then went to Yale.

He received his law degree in 1963 and married the former Valerie McMahon in 1965. They had a daughter in 1967 and twin sons two years later.

Vincent worked at law firms in Washington and New York before joining the enforcement department of the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1978. He stayed there only six months before the president of Columbia Pictures phoned.

Herbert Allen Jr., who was two years behind Vincent at Williams, was on the line and wanted Vincent to be the chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures Industries, to take over a company that had been in turmoil since David Begelman, president of the movie studio, was discovered to have forged checks.

Although Vincent knew nothing about Hollywood or the movie business, Allen was convinced he knew a lot about running things.

“Nobody knows him,” Allen told his lawyer that day. “Nobody can lay a glove on him. We need a healer in this situation. We need a Judge Landis,” the first commissioner of baseball.

Vincent remembers those early days at Columbia uneasily. “I don’t think anyone could ever feel as uncomfortable as I did in my first days there,” he said. “I was in law enforcement on Friday and running a world-wide entertainment business on Monday. I didn’t know anything.”

He may not have known the movie business, but he knew who to ask, and under Vincent’s leadership, Columbia produced a string of giant hits, including “Kramer vs. Kramer,” “Ghandi,” and “Tootsie.”

Vincent was given no small measure of credit for the successes that led to Coca-Cola’s buying Columbia for $692 million in 1982. He was promoted from president to chairman and named executive vice president of Coca-Cola’s new Entertainment Business Sector.

He resigned from Coca-Cola in 1988 after he was transferred out of entertainment and placed in charge of international joint ventures. A few months later Giamatti phoned to ask him help negotiate his contract to be commissioner. Shortly after that, he was asked to become Giamatti’s deputy.

“I met Bart at a party at (author) Peter Benchley’s house in 1978,” he said. “After that we would see each other regularly, and it was a friendship that developed late in life. I’m sure it’s very unusual to develop a close friendship at that age. We talked about that. I hope it happens again to me; I doubt that it will.

“Our relationship is hard to describe. It’s what someone once said of hitting a curveball -- ‘When you’re thinking about it, you can’t do it.’ We’d talked about working together before he came to baseball. We said that whoever was in position to hire the other ought to do it first.”

Giamatti got the first crack at that, and five months later Vincent has been left to finish what Giamatti began. He is at least prepared, and while still suffering the loss of a good friend, he seems genuinely excited to get started working at something he loves.

“In the entertainment business, you are trying to develop new products, new films, new television programs,” he said. “You are constantly changing and adjusting to the public pace. In baseball it’s precisely the reverse. The essence is not to change what has been working and what has been so productive and so wonderful.”