By The Associated Press’ Ronald Blum
NEW YORK After A. Bartlett Giamatti passed away in 1989, Fay Vincent became an unexpected commissioner of baseball. Three years later, he was fired by owners who wanted to have a labor dispute with the players. He was eighty-six.
According to his wife Christina, Vincent suffered from bleeding issues after undergoing radiation and chemotherapy for bladder cancer. He passed away on Saturday at a hospital in Vero Beach, Florida, after requesting that his treatment be discontinued.
According to a statement from current commissioner Rob Manfred, Mr. Vincent served the game throughout a period of many difficulties and was proud of his affiliation with our national sport throughout his life.
Vincent, a retired lawyer who had resided in Vero Beach and New Canaan, Connecticut, for thirty years, had been a movie studio executive at the urging of a college friend.
After the 1985, 1986, and 1987 seasons, Vincent became the first management official to acknowledge team collusion against free agents, which infuriated owners. He also experienced a series of “three-cigar days” throughout his three years as commissioner. He tried to compel National League restructuring, punished Yankees player George Steinbrenner, split expansion money between the two leagues, and mediated an agreement that put an end to a 1990 spring training lockout.
I believed that the position of commissioner constituted a public trust. In a 2023 interview with The Associated Press, Vincent stated, “I tried to do what I thought was best for the game and the public who cared so much about it.” My results were not quite consistent. I’m proud of what I’ve done at times. Building a respectable connection between the owners and the players is the single biggest thing I left undone, which is baseball’s tragedy. I assumed someone would take over and finish that for me. The biggest regret, if I were to die tomorrow, would be that the owners and players still need to commit to one another in order to work together and develop the game.
Vincent was born on May 29, 1938, and was practicing securities law when Herbert Allen Jr., who had known him as a Williams College undergraduate, appointed him president and CEO of Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. in 1978.
After ten years as a business executive, Vincent had only been with a law firm for a few months when Giamatti, whom he had known since they first met at a party at Princeton in the 1970s, invited him to become deputy commissioner.
Before taking over as commissioner in April 1989 to replace Peter Ueberroth, Giamatti, a former Yale president, served as NL president from June 1986. Giamatti assigned Vincent to oversee the gambling inquiry into career hits leader Pete Rose. Vincent engaged attorney John M. Dowd to conduct the investigation, which resulted in Rose accepting a lifetime ban that August.
Twelve days after Giamatti passed away from a heart attack on September 1st, Vincent was chosen by the owners to serve as commissioner for a term of four and a half years.
A half-hour before Game 3 at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park was scheduled to begin, the Loma Prieta earthquake disrupted Vincent’s maiden World Series as manager. For delaying the start of the series by ten days, Vincent received acclaim.
Then, he stated, “It is starting to become very evident to us in Major League Baseball that our issues, our concerns, are rather modest ones.”
The 32-day spring training lockout preceded the start of his first full season as commissioner. The agreement he struck infuriated owners who wanted more management benefits, including the Chicago White Sox’s Jerry Reinsdorf and the Milwaukee Brewers’ Bud Selig.
Vincent and George Steinbrenner reached a compromise in July 1990 whereby Steinbrenner, the major owner of the New York Yankees, resigned as managing general partner due to Vincent’s involvement with a $40,000 payment to a gambler, Howard Spira, to obtain unflattering information about outfielder Dave Winfield. Later, in 1993, Vincent reinstated Steinbrenner.
When the National League added Colorado and Miami in 1993, Vincent decided the following June that the American League should get $42 million of the $190 million in expansion fees owed. In addition, he mandated that all teams receive an equal share of any future expansion funds and that both leagues provide players for the expansion draft.
He ordered the NL reorganization for 1993 in July 1992, which moved the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds to the East Division and the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals to the West Division. Following Vincent’s departure, the proposal was abandoned after the Cubs won an injunction in federal court.
By the middle of August, Selig and Reinsdorf had garnered enough support for NL head Bill White and AL president Bobby Brown to convene a special meeting with the goal of dismissing Vincent. On September 3, owners voted 18 to 9 in favor of a resolution of no confidence. Four days later, on Labor Day, Vincent gave up after spending the weekend reflecting at his Cape Cod home.
Vincent stated, “The owners don’t want to hear me speak that idea, and the commissioner has to look out for the fans.”
FILE – On March 19, 1990, in New York, Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent announced that the 32-day lockout had been settled after players and owners reached an agreement on a four-year contract. Bud Selig, president of the Milwaukee Brewers, is on the right. (Frankie Ziths, File/AP Photo)AP
In his new role as chairman of the executive council, Selig effectively became acting commissioner. He was elected commissioner in 1998, led owners through a 7 1/2-month strike in 1994–1995, and served until his retirement in 2015.
For the first half of 1993, Vincent, a lifelong Anglophile, rented the Mill House in the Berkshire village of Sutton Courtenay in order to unwind. During his vacation, Vincent often hosted guests at the residence of former British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith.
Francis Thomas Vincent Jr. was born in Waterbury, Connecticut, on May 29, 1938. Francis, his father, became a collegiate football official after excelling in baseball and football at Yale in the 1930s. The former Alice Lynch, his mother, was a homemaker.
Prior to breaking his back during his freshman year, Vincent played both center and tackle for Williams. He fell four storeys from an icy ledge outside his bedroom when his roommates shut him out as a practical joke. He used a cane to walk because his left leg was largely paralyzed. Because of the injuries, Vincent, a Roman Catholic, abandoned his dreams of becoming a Jesuit. Nevertheless, he graduated Phi Beta Kappa and completed school on schedule.
In 2023, Vincent stated, “I’ve been fortunate in many ways, primarily that I survived that horrible accident and being paralyzed for so long.” I can’t regret anything.
After graduating from Yale Law School, he worked for five years as an associate at Whitman & Ransom in New York, beginning in 1963.
He relocated to Caplin & Drysdale Chartered in Washington in 1968, where he worked for nearly ten years as a securities lawyer before rising to the position of partner. He left the company in March 1978 to take a position as an associate director in the Corporate Finance Division of the Securities and Exchange Commission. He was only there for a short time.
The CEO of Columbia Pictures Industries, Alan J. Hirschfield, was fired that summer by Allen, who was two years behind Vincent at Williams. After the movie studio’s president, David Begelman, was found to have falsified checks, the business had been in disarray for over a year.
On July 13, Vincent took Hirschfield’s place. He managed the business so successfully that Allen & Co. sold it to Coca-Cola Co. in 1982 for $692 million. Vincent became executive vice president of Coca-Cola’s new Entertainment Business Sector and was elevated from president to chairman.
He allowed his production heads, David Puttnam, Guy McIlwaine, and Frank Price, to make the artistic choices and only visited Hollywood roughly six times a year. Columbia released Tootsie, Gandhi, The Big Chill, and Ghostbusters when Vincent was in charge of the business.
He was still committed to baseball, though.
Allen claimed that he discussed baseball every day. I accompanied him to the Mets’ opening day a few of times.
When Coca-Cola acquired Tri-Star Pictures on September 1, 1987, Vincent was transferred to manage equity investments in Coca-Cola Bottling’s properties, and Tri-Star’s Victor A. Kaufman took his place. In 1988, Vincent resigned and became a partner in Caplin & Drysdale’s New York office. Giamatti invited him to join baseball before he moved in.
“I’ve always loved baseball,” Vincent remarked at the time. Since I can remember, I have been an avid baseball fan.
One of his most enduring contributions as commissioner was chairing an eight-member statistics accuracy committee that eliminated 50 no-hitters and the asterisk that had been next to Roger Maris’s season home run leading record. A no-hitter, according to the group, is a game that lasts nine innings or longer and ends without any hits.
His oral history project, which resulted in three books—The Only Game in Town (2006), We Would Have Played for Nothing (2009), and It’s What’s Inside the Lines That Counts (2010)—involved recording conversations with Hall of Fame members and Negro League athletes. He gave Yale $2 million in 2024 to establish a job as Yale baseball coach in his father’s honor.
In 1965, Vincent wed Valerie McMahon, with whom he had twin sons, William and Edward, and a daughter, Anne. After their 1994 divorce, he wed Christina Watkins in 1998.
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