A Few Words About Fay Vincent

Survey

I’d love it if you would take the JoeBlogs five-question survey about your favorite sport and favorite team. It shouldn’t take more than a minute.

Savannah This Weekend

I’ll be in Savannah this Saturday, February 8, at the incredible Savannah Book Festival. Specifically, I’ll be at the Jepson’s Neises Auditorium from 3:40-4:35 p.m. And if you can get there, come early — my dear friend Tommy Tomlinson will be talking about his amazing book “Dogland” right before me.

Oh, and you’ll want to stop at Leopold’s Ice Cream — always a must-stop in Savannah anyway — because they will feature a special “Football on a Chocolate Nut Sundae” flavor in honor of WHY WE LOVE FOOTBALL!

Going Back to Rockville — February 23rd!

I’ll be back in the Bender JCC of Greater Washington in Rockville, Maryland on February 23rd to talk some football (and baseball and whatever else comes up) at their Franks and Football event. It should be a blast.

In July 1992 — more than 30 years ago — Baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent spoke to a group of living Negro Leaguers in Cooperstown. This was more than 30 years ago, and even then, so few of the great Negro Leagues players were still alive.

This is what he said:

“We of baseball acknowledge our part in the shameful history of exclusion in this country. Baseball treated you badly, and on behalf of baseball, I extend my sincere apologies. … We owe you very much. For you kept baseball alive in your Black community and in doing so, you did baseball a magnificent service.”

Vincent did not realize until he saw it in The New York Times the next day that he had unknowingly become the first Baseball Commissioner to apologize for the segregation of the sport and acknowledge the extraordinary contribution those players made to baseball.

Fay Vincent died on Sunday at 86, and the few stories out there about him focus (naturally) on his short and turbulent tenure as Commissioner. He was catapulted into the job when his great friend Bart Giamatti died of a heart attack. Vincent fought with Pete Rose. He fought with George Steinbrenner. He presided over a World Series interrupted by an earthquake. He anticipated some of the steroid issues that would taint the game later but was unable to do anything to prevent it. He tried to move the Chicago Cubs to the National League West. He was forced out by owners who wanted him to fight harder to destroy the players’ union.

But if you want to talk about the most lasting and important thing Fay Vincent did — I think it was that statement to the Negro Leaguers in 1992.

“I grew up in a segregated world,” He wrote in his book “The Last Commissioner: A Baseball Valentine.” “My block of Orange Street in the New Haven of my boyhood was all white. My church was all white. When Jackie Robinson made his major league debut in April 1947, it made little impression on me. He played for the other league, and as a boy of nine, I didn’t care what the National Leaguers did.”

When he began to work in baseball, he met some of the great Negro Leaguers of the past. Slick Surratt. Double Duty Radcliffe. Joe Black. Larry Doby. Buck O’Neil. They opened his mind. They widened his world. Surratt was the first person to ever mention to him a Negro League star named Oscar Charleston.

Vincent was not Commissioner for very long, but in his short time, he tried to get a pension and health insurance for Negro Leagues players. He also used his position to let people know just how good those Negro Leagues players were. Three decades later, when MLB officially classified the Negro Leagues as “Major League,” well, that was a process started by Fay Vincent.

Even after he was run out of the game, he never fully stopped loving baseball. Yes, he felt bitterness. Yes, he readily admitted that in the years after the owners fired him, “I lost my capacity to think of baseball in the sweet terms the game deserves.” Yes, he titled his book “The Last Commissioner,” because he felt that in the years since he was pushed, “I don’t think we’ve had a real commissioner.”

But in time, he was a baseball fan again. He wrote a series of oral history books where he conducted interviews with players from different eras …

The Only Game in Town (Baseball of the 1930s and 1940s)

We Would Have Played for Nothing (Baseball stars of the 1950s and 1960s)

It’s What’s Inside the Line That Counts (Baseball Stars of the 1970s and 1980s)

In the first of those books, he interviewed Buck O’Neil, and that reminds me of a call I got from Vincent way back in 2007. This was shortly after a Special Committee voted in 17 Negro Leaguers into the Hall of Fame but

did not vote in Buck. Vincent was a non-voting member of that committee. He called to say that he had pleaded with the other members to reconsider Buck’s whole life as a baseball player, manager, scout, and spokesperson for the game. They still did not vote him in.

“If Buck O’Neil is not a Hall of Famer, I don’t know who is,” Vincent told me. And then he told me about a call he’d had with Buck after the vote. Vincent found himself trying to apologize, but Buck wouldn’t hear of it.

“He told me, ‘Fay, you’re my friend,’” Vincent said, and I thought I heard his voice crack a little. “What an honor that is — to be Buck O’Neil’s friend.”