Fay Vincent, who became an unexpected baseball commissioner in 1989 following the death of A. Bartlett Giamatti and then was forced out three years later by owners intent on a labor confrontation with players, has died. He was 86.
Vincent had undergone radiation and chemotherapy for bladder cancer and developed complications that included bleeding, said his wife, Christina. He asked that treatment be stopped and died Saturday at a hospital in Vero Beach, Florida.
“Mr. Vincent served the game during a time of many challenges, and he remained proud of his association with our national pastime throughout his life,” current commissioner Rob Manfred said in a statement.
A lawyer who became a movie studio executive at the behest of a college friend, Vincent had been retired for three decades and lived in New Canaan, Connecticut, and Vero Beach.
During his three-year tenure as commissioner, Vincent had a string of what he called “three-cigar days,” angering owners by becoming the first management official to admit the collusion among teams against free agents following the 1985, ‘86 and ’87 seasons. He suspended the Yankees’ George Steinbrenner, divided expansion fees among both leagues, attempted to force National League realignment and negotiated a settlement that ended a 1990 spring training lockout.
“I had the conviction that being commissioner was a public trust. I tried to do what I thought was best for the game and the public who cared so much about it,” Vincent said in a 2023 interview with The Associated Press. “I had mixed results. Sometimes I’m pleased with what I did. The tragedy of baseball is the single biggest thing I left undone was to build a decent relationship between the owners and the players. I thought somebody would take over after me and get that done. If I died tomorrow, that would be the big regret, is that the players and the owners still have to make some commitment to each other to be partners and to build the game.”
Born May 29, 1938, Vincent was a securities lawyer when he was hired in 1978 as president and chief executive officer of Columbia Pictures Industries Inc. by Herbert Allen Jr., who had known him their time as undergraduates at Williams College.
Vincent remained a corporate executive for a decade, then had been with a law firm for only a few months when he was asked to become deputy commissioner by Giamatti, a friend since they met during a party at Princeton in the 1970s.
Giamatti, the former Yale president, was NL president from June 1986 until succeeding Peter Ueberroth as commissioner in April 1989. Giamatti tasked Vincent with supervising the gambling investigation of career hits leader Pete Rose, and Vincent hired lawyer John M. Dowd to lead a probe that led to Rose agreeing to a lifetime ban that August.
Giamatti died of a heart attack that Sept. 1, and Vincent was elected commissioner by owners 12 days later and given a 4 1/2-year term.
Vincent’s first World Series in charge was interrupted by the Loma Prieta earthquake, which struck a half-hour before Game 3 was to start at San Francisco’s Candlestick Park. Vincent was praised for a 10-day delay before the series resumed.
“It is becoming very clear to us in Major League Baseball that our concerns, our issue, is a rather modest one,” he said then.
His first full season as commissioner began after a 32-day spring training lockout. The deal he reached angered owners seeking greater management gains, a group led by Bud Selig of the Milwaukee Brewers and Jerry Reinsdorf of the Chicago White Sox.
In July 1990, Vincent signed an agreement with George Steinbrenner under which the New York Yankees principal owner resigned as managing general partner because of his dealings with a $40,000 payment to a gambler, Howard Spira, to find embarrassing information about outfielder Dave Winfield. Vincent later reinstated Steinbrenner as of 1993.
The following June, Vincent ruled the American League was to receive $42 million of the $190 million in expansion fees due for the National League adding Colorado and Miami in 1993. He also ordered both leagues to supply players equally for the expansion draft and that any future expansion money be divided equally among all clubs.
In July 1992 he ordered NL realignment for the following year, moving the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals to the West Division in 1993, and the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds to the East. The Cubs obtained an injunction in federal court, and the plan was dropped after Vincent’s departure.
By mid-August, Selig and Reinsdorf gained enough support to cause AL president Bobby Brown and NL head Bill White to call a special meeting aimed at ousting Vincent. Owners approved a resolution of no confidence in an 18-9 vote on Sept. 3. After a weekend of thought at his home on Cape Cod, Vincent quit four days later, on Labor Day.
“The commissioner has to look out for the fans, and the owners don’t want to hear me speak that idea,” Vincent said.
Selig was installed as chairman of the executive council, a new position that made him in effect acting commissioner. He led owners through a 7 1/2-month strike in 1994-95, was voted commissioner in 1998 and remained on the job until retiring in 2015.
A longtime Anglophile, Vincent wanted to decompress and rented the Mill House in the Berkshire village of Sutton Courtenay for the first six months of 1993. Living in the home of former British Prime Minister Herbert Asquith, Vincent frequently entertained visitors during his sabbatical.
Francis Thomas Vincent Jr. was born May 29, 1938, at Waterbury, Connecticut. His father, Francis, was a football and baseball star at Yale in the 1930s and became a college football official. His mother, the former Alice Lynch, was a housewife.
Vincent was a tackle and center at Williams until he broke his back during his freshman year, falling four floors from an icy ledge outside his dormitory after his roommates locked him out as a prank. His left leg was partially paralyzed and he walked with a cane. Vincent, a Roman Catholic, gave up thoughts of Jesuit training because of the injury. Still, he managed to finish school on time and graduate Phi Beta Kappa.
“I’ve been lucky in a lot of ways — mostly I survived that terrible accident and being paralyzed for so long,” Vincent said in 2023. “I can’t have any regrets.”
He went to Yale Law School, started as an associate at Whitman & Ransom in New York in 1963 and stayed there for five years.
In 1968, he moved to Caplin & Drysdale Chartered in Washington and practiced securities law there for almost 10 years, becoming a partner. In March 1978 he quit the firm to become associate director of the Securities and Exchange Commission’s Division of Corporate Finance. His stay there was rather brief.
Allen, who was two years behind Vincent at Williams, decided that summer to fire Alan J. Hirschfield, Columbia Pictures Industries’ CEO. For more than a year, the company had been in turmoil after David Begelman, president of the movie studio, was discovered to have forged checks.
Vincent replaced Hirschfield on July 13 and ran the company so well that Allen & Co. sold it to Coca-Cola Co. in 1982 for $692 million. Vincent was promoted from president to chairman and was named executive vice president of Coca-Cola’s new Entertainment Business Sector.
He went to Hollywood only about six times a year and let his production heads —Frank Price, Guy McIlwaine and David Puttnam — make the artistic decisions. While Vincent ran the company, Columbia released “Ghostbusters,” “The Big Chill,” “Gandhi” and “Tootsie.”
Still, he remained devoted to baseball.
“He talked about baseball every day,” Allen said. “A couple of times I went with him to Mets’ opening day.”
On Sept. 1, 1987, Coca-Cola bought Tri-Star Pictures and Tri-Star’s Victor A. Kaufman replaced Vincent, who was reassigned to oversee equity investments in Coca-Cola Bottling’s properties. Vincent quit in 1988 and went to Caplin & Drysdale’s New York office as a partner. Before he settled in, Giamatti asked him to join baseball.
“I’d always been a baseball fan,” Vincent said then. “I’ve followed baseball as long as I can remember.”
In one of his lasting acts as commissioner, he chaired an eight-member committee for statistical accuracy, which removed the asterisk that had been next to Roger Maris’ entry as the season home run leader and deleted 50 no-hitters. The group defined a no-hitter as games of nine innings or more that ended with no hits.
He recorded interviews with Hall of Fame members and Negro Leagues players for an oral history project that led to 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). In 2024, he made a $2 million gift to Yale to endow the Yale baseball coach’s position in the name of his father.
Vincent married the former Valerie McMahon in 1965 and they had a daughter Anne and twin sons William, and Edward. They divorced in 1994 and he married Christina Watkins in 1998.
The Associated Press contributed to this report.