COMMENTARY : Baseball Commissioner Appears to Be Another Endangered Species

Along with the northern spotted owl, the southeastern beach mouse, the sperm whale and the big-eared bat, there is now another endangered species. It is the Office of the Commissioner of Baseball, and already it may be too late, with no survivors of the breed sighted since the club owners liquidated Fay Vincent with one discharge of their blunderbuss by an 18-9 vote 4 1/2 months ago.

If the owners are intent on electing a new commissioner, if they are moving to replace Vincent, there are no signs of it. Not in the 72-year history of the office has baseball been without a commissioner for so long; a decent conclusion is that the club owners don’t want another commissioner, ever, God forbid.

They have always been uncomfortable with their commissioners anyway. Like rich men elsewhere, they do not suffer gladly employees who, by fiat, can affect their earnings. They’d had it up to here with Vincent.

Vincent was too intrusive. They didn’t like it when he barged into their collective bargaining dispute with the players two years ago, and there is another important bargaining session beginning. They frowned also when he expressed an interest as well in the umpires’ salary complaints. Out with Vincent. Anyway, he was too independently wealthy himself with his huge stack of stock in the Coca-Cola company, on whose board he sat for 10 years.

Vincent could have fought it, with two years left on his contract, but in his dignity he chose to resign. Anyway, he knew the club owners had been put off, too, by his intimacy with the players; they didn’t like his habit of tooling into the ballparks in his golf cart (he’s disabled) and schmoozing with the athletes. And he had an empathy with the umpires; his father was a National Football League official.

He embittered the 14 American League club owners when he decreed his split on the $190 million the Miami and Denver expansion clubs paid to get into the National League. The 14 AL clubs didn’t like the mere $3 million payoff each got from the pot while the 12 NL clubs got $12 million each. However, if Vincent had followed custom, the AL teams would have gotten nothing.

The owners’ attitude in the dismissal of Vincent recalls the story of the lout of a sleepy-eyed copyboy who was fired by the city editor. When a new applicant for the job appeared, saying “I hear Charlie has been fired and he left a vacancy,” he was told “Charlie has been fired but he didn’t leave any vacancy.” The owners have put a spin on it in the case of Vincent, the overachiever. By their lights, he left no vacancy.

Vincent also offended the pro-Steinbrenner clique among the club owners when he handed out life banishment to the Yankees owner for consorting with a sleazy con man in an effort to discredit Dave Winfield. There are owners who resent that kind of authority in the hands of a man who owns no team. It now appears that Steinbrenner will be a winner. He has succeeded in getting his banishment lifted despite having his fingerprints all over Yankees affairs in violation of his sentence.

It’s right out of Gilbert and Sullivan. The commissioner’s lot is not a happy one. As Dodgers owner Peter O’Malley put it years back when they were looking for a successor to Bowie Kuhn: “No matter who they hire, they will hate him in six months. Every time he hands down a decision, he’ll make somebody mad.”

This much can be predicted: If the owners do indeed decide on a new commissioner, his job will be so watered-down, diluted and enfeebled by the limitations put on his authority, the office will stand as a new definition of puppet, or three puppets, who see, hear and speak no evil, in terms of owner conduct.

The newest chapter in the messy commissioner story was enacted the other day with Steven Greenberg (Hank’s son) announcing he’d had enough and was quitting his post as deputy commissioner and chief operating officer. He’d had enough, he was saying, and he emphasized his admiration of Fay Vincent.

Greenberg said in effect that the owners double-crossed him. “You told me my responsibilities would remain as they had been. What wasn’t said was that I would no longer have the kind of input into the decision-making process that previously had been an integral part of my duties as deputy.”

Clearly being said was that the owners, with Fay Vincent out of the way, were ignoring his first mate and taking charge of everything themselves. They bypassed him during the TV negotiations and player bargaining that were Greenberg’s areas of expertise.

Greenberg’s situation is reminiscent of the story of the man who years ago sold Uline Arena in Washington to a conglomerate. He was my golf companion one day, and said: “They paid me a lot of money and made me a consultant. That was five years ago, and nobody has consulted me since.”

Steve Greenberg would have none of that. Besides, he had been managing partner of an important law firm in Los Angeles, and was a beneficiary of the Gimbel family stock portfolio and didn’t need their money, nor their ill-conceived mockery of the commissioner’s office, prime safeguard of the game’s integrity.