Gambling, steroids and other threats to the game
June 19, 2006
There have been nine commissioners of Major League Baseball since the office was established in 1921. Fay Vincent, Waterbury-born, Hotchkiss-educated, is one of them, the eighth of them and, if you care to believe the title of one of his books, he was the last of them, too.
Taking office days after the death of his friend, A. Bartlett Giamatti, Vincent spent three turbulent and controversial years as commissioner. It started with the death of Giamatti, then the earthquake that delayed the 1989 World Series, labor strife, a spring-training lockout, the Steve Howe drug ban, kicking George Steinbrenner out of the game, letting George Steinbrenner back in the game and, of course, Pete Rose.
Vincent spoke his mind while in office, without bluster, and he does so today, now 68 and living in retirement in Connecticut and Florida. He came to town last week to promote an audio-visual history of baseball he is producing for the Hall of Fame. We asked him about the state of the game and, as usual, he shied away from nothing.
Such as Pete Rose: "Poor Pete and I are locked up together in this. We'll go to our graves with this."
Did he just say "Poor Pete?" Does that mean there is hope for Pete Rose? I asked the ex-commissioner point-blank: Can baseball ever forgive Pete Rose?
"The beginning of forgiveness is contrition," he said. "Pete never convinced people that he was sorry about what it did. If he had said he was sorry, this whole thing would have ended a long time ago. He just doesn't get it. This is not about Pete Rose. This is about the threat of gambling to baseball. If he understood that and acted as though he was truly sorry, he'd be out of this mess by now. Pete Rose played his hand terribly. The living members of the Hall of Fame say that if Rose is let in, they'll never come back."
Bye-bye, Pete.
Then the commissioner waded into deeper water.
"That is also relevant to Barry Bonds. If Bonds does what Rose did, thumb his
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nose at baseball, he will reap a very, very bad harvest."
It was on Vincent's watch that steroids entered the sports lexicon in a dramatic way. Peter Ueberroth established the most aggressive drug-testing policy the Olympic Games ever saw in Los Angeles in 1984, and he came on board as commissioner from 1984 to 1989. That led to the Giamatti-Vincent era, when steroids gained a foothold in
baseball.
Were we asleep at the switch?
"Drugs were a big problem in baseball then, but it was cocaine," Vincent explained. "I threw Daryl Strawberry out. I threw Steve Howe out. We thought steroids were a problem for football, to try and build 300-pound linemen. I dismissed Jose Canseco as an anomaly. I was wrong. I didn't know anything about steroids. I had never heard the term 'performance enhancing drugs.' Five years later, the problem became enormous."
And still it was ignored. What should we do now?
"Appointing (former U.S. Senate Majority Leader George) Mitchell to an investigating committee was a good move. He'll give us a report on all that went on. We know it will be ugly. The game has been polluted the last 10 or 15 years. From the time of the Greek athletes, we have tried to get an advantage. This is the biggest problem since the Black Sox scandal. We need testing, auditing and severe sanctions. Baseball hasn't had a gambling problem because we threw out a guy like Pete Rose and everyone got the message. It doesn't matter who you are: If you cheat and you get caught, you're not coming back."
After the owners forcibly moved Vincent out of office in 1992, they did something unusual: They put one of their own, Selig, in.
"That hasn't been the wisest move," Vincent remarked. "Fans tend to look at him as the owners' guy. The commissioner is supposed to stop the owners when they do stupid things. You're the CEO, but you have to discipline the members of your board."
As for Selig and the state of the game right now, Vincent added this: "Baseball needs a moral vision. Bart had it, Peter Ueberroth had it, I had it. It is not (Selig's) strength to be a moral leader. He is uncomfortable in the public eye. Baseball has to recapture the moral high ground. It has to stand for the model virtues. It is a game, and it has to be played by the rules. Using drugs is cheating, and some of the players are cheaters. That screws up baseball mightily. Baseball has to deal with it.
"It is a great game when played by the rules. It has to stand for the rules."
That last statement probably describes the three-year commissionership of Fay Vincent better than any other, and it offers a very simple road map for the future, if anyone cares to listen.
Joe Palladino can be reached at jpalladinorep-am.com.
