It was with heavy hearts that we at America learned of the death of Fay Vincent Jr. in Vero Beach, Fla., on Saturday at the age of 86. Obituaries today note his important role as the last truly independent commissioner of Major League Baseball and his long and successful career in business, including stints at Columbia Pictures, Coca-Cola and the Securities and Exchange Commission. He was also a good friend of America over the years as a contributor, advisor and benefactor.
Francis Thomas “Fay” Vincent Jr. was born in Connecticut in 1938; his namesake father was an N.F.L. official and a former football star at Yale. The younger Vincent was recruited to Williams to play football as well but was badly injured in a fall. Although he recovered from a short-term paralysis, the effects of the injury would stay with him for the rest of his life.
He went on to get his law degree from Yale in 1963. After five years practicing law in New York and another 10 in Washington, D.C., Vincent was appointed to the Securities and Exchange Commission in 1978 as the associate director of its corporate finance division. Shortly after, he was hired to be chairperson of Columbia Pictures. When Coca-Cola purchased Columbia in 1982, Vincent became senior vice president at Coca-Cola, eventually rising to executive vice president.
In 1988, Vincent was recruited by his good friend and the former Yale president, A. Bartlett Giamatti, to become deputy commissioner of Major League Baseball. Giamatti, who had served as National League president for the previous two years, had been named commissioner that summer; his tenure would be five short months, as he officially took the position in April 1989 and died that September at the age of 51. (You can read Bart Giamatti’s reflections on sportswriting for America here.)
Vincent was quickly elected Giamatti’s successor and presided over a turbulent time in the sport. Giamatti had recently banned Pete Rose from baseball for life for gambling on baseball, a punishment Vincent upheld. Vincent’s first World Series as commissioner, the 1989 matchup between the San Francisco Giants and the Oakland Athletics, was marred by the Loma Prieta earthquake and delayed for 10 days.
Vincent also served as commissioner during a damaging 1990 lockout of the players; later that year, he banned George Steinbrenner from day-to-day control of the New York Yankees. (Steinbrenner was reinstated two years later.) Tensions between him and many of Major League Baseball’s owners—who seemed to want someone more clearly in their own camp than an impartial commissioner, or one who might favor the players’ union—eventually led to a vote of no confidence in Vincent in September 1992. He resigned soon after and was replaced by one of the owners who had forced him out: Bud Selig.
Vincent’s reflections on his tenure and resignation appeared in America (not a likely venue for sports news most of the time!), in part because of his close friendship with the magazine’s editor in chief at the time, George W. Hunt, S.J. The two had met a number of years before (“at the annual Jesuit Mission Dinner at the Waldorf,” Vincent later remembered, “an event I am certain each of us attended with some dread and out of duty”) and had become frequent correspondents, trading book suggestions and reflections on everything from religion and politics to music and art. In a letter to Hunt after his resignation, Vincent confided that this was his effort “to try to put all of the current mess in perspective. Newspapers want something provocative from me at this time, but I’m not interested. The enclosed is more appropriate from me at present.”
Among Vincent’s reflections was this meditation on the nature of the game:
From time to time, baseball fans must wonder and worry about the game we love. Once again, much is being written—if not shrieked—about problems with the game and even with its bureaucrats. But let me remind us all that baseball will survive; our grandchildren will have baseball to love and to introduce to their grandchildren, and this latest turmoil and tumult will not destroy the game that fills our summers with the joy of wondrous play.
After his resignation, Vincent became a private investor and served as president of the New England Collegiate Baseball League for six years. In 2002, he published a memoir, The Last Commissioner: A Baseball Valentine. His writings continued to appear in various outlets including America, where his contributions included a 2001 tribute to Isaac Stern and book reviews on diverse topics ranging from baseball to pilgrimages to Samuel Coleridge to St. John Henry Newman. His last contribution to the magazine was a 2020 reflection on anti-Catholic bias in American public life.
When Father Hunt, who had been editor in chief from 1984 to 1998, died in 2011, Vincent sent the editors a remembrance of their friendship which later appeared in America. “My friend George Hunt is dead and my heart is heavy—not for him because I know he is with the God he served so faithfully all his life—but, of course, for myself,” Vincent wrote. “As I wrote to one of his fellow Jesuits, I hope he will have a good seat at the best ballpark in his new surroundings and that few of the Church hierarchy are seated nearby. A man of remarkable talents and wide learning, George was essentially a priest. In the Thomist sense he gave meaning to the difference between a priestly essence and the accidental aspect of his life as scholar, teacher, editor and writer. To me, however, he was also a wonderful and loyal friend.”
When America teamed up with St. Thomas More Chapel at Yale University to create the George W. Hunt, S.J. Prize for Excellence in Journalism, Arts and Letters in 2015, Vincent was instrumental in setting up and funding the honor.
In 2013, Vincent was interviewed by America deputy editor in chief Tim Reidy on morality in baseball. Vincent decried the influence of performance-enhancing drugs, calling steroids and similar substances “a very pernicious and frightening threat to all of our sports, whether high school, college or professional.”
Baseball, he noted, had always tolerated small infractions of the rules, leading many to conclude that cheating was only wrong if you got caught: “I think one of the problems with baseball has been that we've been too tolerant of what we call innocent forms of cheating. There is no such thing as innocent cheating.”
I made Vincent’s acquaintance very late in his own life, becoming an unlikely pen pal in 2020 and exchanging periodic emails (and, I will admit, trying to cajole him into writing more for us). Our final exchanges this past year were on the University of San Francisco basketball dynasty of the 1950s—Vincent was a longtime Celtics fan and thus Bill Russell and K. C. Jones were among his heroes—and a short reflection he wrote on “baseball and old men.”
Perhaps the best phrase to sum up Fay Vincent’s life of conviction and fidelity is a line he wrote himself in his 1992 reflection for America: “What is real and true and essential cannot be diminished.”
Rest in peace, Fay.
