When Boss Says Go, Why Stay?

Fay Vincent has been put on waivers for the purpose of being given his unconditional release.

This happens in baseball all the time. But when it happens to baseball’s commissioner, it only goes to show that nobody is bigger than the game, not even the person who runs it.

He is going, going, gone.

A resignation has been requested from the man who occupies baseball’s throne. Day before yesterday, he was someone treated with deference and respect--Fay Vincent, ballyard czar. Today, his presence no longer is required or desired by his once-loyal subjects, to whom he has become as expendable as a utility infielder and as inconsequential as Faye Throneberry.

They voted to throw him out of the game like a scuffed ball.

The vote was 18 to 9, with one abstention. The proposition before the voters was plain and simple: “Does he work for us or do we work for him?” They already knew the answer, of course. But it was time he knew it.

And so the man who made tough decisions--the man who decided to continue a World Series in the debris of an earthquake, the man who sentenced and paroled George Steinbrenner, the man who whited out Pete Rose’s name from the Hall of Fame ballot, the man who exiled pitcher Steve Howe and the man who dispatched the Chicago Cubs to another division--this man suddenly found himself on the receiving end of a hard-headed ruling, knowing how it feels.

They wanted him out.

Was it something he did? Something he said? Had he condoned scandalous behavior? No. On the contrary, he was a hard-liner as commissioners go. But when one of the game’s least voluble owners, Peter O’Malley, was asked which decisions of Vincent’s his colleagues disagreed with, O’Malley’s rather startling reply was that it was more a case of being unable to name many with which they had agreed.

Their impatience grew and grew until, finally, the owners called a meeting. They became like cattle ranchers, gathering to discuss what to do about this homesteader who had been welcomed in the beginning but now was putting up fences and barbed wire. Vincent no longer was their good neighbor. He was an interloper. He was trouble.

All the while, the commissioner acted like an elected official who knew that his popularity had slid but never in a million years dreamed that anybody would go so far as to have him impeached.

Vincent’s position before the owners’ vote had basically been: “Hell, no. I won’t go.” He dug in for a fight. He clutched his contract in his fist and said he would leave on his own terms. No way would he stand for reelection--not after all he had been through--but no way was the commissioner about to capitulate to the very men who had hired him to make their tough decisions in the first place.

The trouble began with the very first commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He demanded and received not only $42,500 in salary but “absolute power” to do as he pleased. His first act was to arbitrarily expel eight players from the game, permanently, even though none of the eight had been convicted of a crime with which they had been charged.

As a federal judge, Landis once slapped a fine on John D. Rockefeller and Standard Oil of $29,240,000. And this was 80 years ago.

Vincent, too, played hardball. He took hard stands on union contractual issues, alienating management. He used--misused, abused (choose one)--a loosely translated “best interest of baseball” clause that permitted him to uproot the Cubs from their division, a decision that seemed preposterously insignificant at the time.

What it was, perhaps, was the last straw.

For years, baseball commissioners had been mocked for being indecisive. Vincent was hardly that. Yet neither were Peter Ueberroth and the late Bart Giamatti, Vincent’s immediate predecessors. Were those men the marionettes of the owners? They never seemed such. Ueberroth and another former commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, recently rallied to Vincent’s defense, saying the owners had gone too far. Thursday, they went farther.

As strongly as Vincent might be inclined to fight, it must have felt useless to do so. When the people who employ you no longer want you around, it is unseemly to stay. What good would it accomplish? Severance pay was offered, and Vincent knows from his time in the movie business that even studio heads with contractual guarantees often come to work and discover that the locks have been changed.

If they have to vote you in, then they ought to be able to vote you out. Fay Vincent has held the fate of many a human being in his hands. Now he should accept his.