JoePos:
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.”