Fay Vincent, whose idealism and self-styled independence as baseball commissioner clashed with owners eager for war with the players’ union, leading to his resignation under pressure in 1992, died on Saturday in Vero Beach, Fla. He was 86.
The cause was complications of bladder cancer, according to The New York Times, which cited his wife, Christina.
As Major League Baseball’s eighth commissioner, Vincent served the shortest term — just shy of three years — besides the five-month tenure of his predecessor, Bart Giamatti, who died of a heart attack on Sept. 1, 1989. Vincent had been deputy commissioner to Giamatti, whose time in office was consumed by the Pete Rose gambling investigation, which led to Rose’s lifetime ban from the sport.
Vincent’s term was similarly eventful. He presided over a World Series interrupted by an earthquake; a spring-training lockout by team owners; a banishment of George Steinbrenner from the daily operations of the Yankees; and, ultimately, a showdown with owners over the very definition of his job.
Vincent, who had come to baseball after serving in top executive roles for Columbia Pictures and Coca-Cola, had hoped to rebuild trust with the union after the collusion fiasco of the mid-1980s, when owners illegally conspired against players by refusing to bid on free agents. Believing that Vincent would block their efforts to break the union in the next labor negotiations, two-thirds of MLB owners gave him a “no-confidence” vote in early September 1992.
“I don’t want to work for these guys,’” Vincent said in a November 2024 interview, recalling his reaction to the vote. “I know that there’s going to be cheating, and I don’t want to be the policeman without community support. I mean, it’s hopeless.”
With Vincent out of the way, the owners and players careened toward a strike in August 1994 and the first cancellation of a World Series in 90 years. The owners hired replacement players for 1995 and planned to unilaterally impose a salary cap, but the gambit failed when a judge — the future United States Supreme Court Justice Sonia Sotomayor — restored the terms of the previous bargaining agreement, bringing the players back to work.
“I wanted to help baseball and I wasn’t at all successful,” Vincent said. “(But) it turned out maybe I helped them because they realized, after 1994, that there was no way they were ever going to get anywhere at war with the union. So they kept the war, sort of, with ordinary weapons.”
Indeed, while the owners and players still argue bitterly, MLB has not missed any games due to labor issues since the strike that Vincent had wanted to avoid.
Fay Vincent sits with George W. Bush at a Rangers game in 1990. (A. Kaye / Getty Images)
Francis T. Vincent, Jr., was born May 29, 1938, in Waterbury, Conn., and raised in New Haven, where his father, Francis Sr., had been captain of the Yale baseball team. Fay Sr. worked for a utility company and also officiated baseball and football games, including for the NFL; as commissioner, Vincent said, he would visit the umpires’ room before every game he attended.
He described his mother, Alice, as an avid reader who was quiet but tough. Vincent was bigger than most kids, with a feminine nickname, and Alice had an answer for bullying.
“You may have a big head, but it’s filled with brains,” she told her son, according to his memoir, “The Last Commissioner” (Simon & Schuster, 2002). “If someone calls you Miss Fay Vincent, smack them right in the mouth.”
After graduating from Hotchkiss, a Connecticut boarding school, Vincent attended Williams College and played tackle for the freshman football team in the fall of 1956. But that December, after a friend had locked him in his fourth-floor dorm room as a prank, Vincent tried to leave the room through a window and slipped on an icy ledge, breaking his back on a steel railing as he fell from about 40 feet.
Vincent was initially paralyzed from the mid-chest down, but learned to walk again after doctors took a bone from his hip to reconstruct two crushed vertebrae. Even so, his athletic career was over, and Vincent would often walk with a cane. As commissioner, he would enjoy batting practice from a golf cart, inviting visitors to chat in the passenger seat.
To get to that job, Vincent took an unlikely path. He practiced law in Washington and served as an associate director at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission; then, through a college friend, he was named chairman of Columbia Pictures in 1978 and eventually became executive vice president of Coca-Cola, which had bought the company in 1982.
A graduate of Yale Law School, Vincent had met Giamatti, the university president, at a Yale-Princeton football game in 1978. Giamatti was named president of the National League in 1986, and when Vincent returned to his old New York law firm, the two grew closer, meeting for lunch almost every day. With Giamatti in line to succeed Peter Ueberroth, he asked Vincent to negotiate his contract with MLB.
Fred Wilpon, an owner of the Mets, suggested that Vincent come along as deputy commissioner. It was a newly created position, and Vincent, with his extensive business experience, would be a good pairing with Giamatti, a writer and poet from academia.
“We went into baseball to have fun together,” Vincent wrote in his book. “That was our high goal. For a brief while, there was the most delightful lightness in everything we did together in baseball. It all seemed a bit unreal to us.”
When reality soon struck, it was hard and relentless, swallowing both men’s time in the game.
The Rose gambling investigation had gripped baseball all through the 1989 season. It culminated with Rose, the sport’s career hits leader, agreeing to be placed on MLB’s permanently ineligible list for betting on games he managed with the Cincinnati Reds.
Giamatti made the announcement on Aug. 24, eight days before his fatal heart attack at his home on Martha’s Vineyard. The owners elevated Vincent to the job on Sept. 13, with a term to run through April 1, 1994.
“I don’t like the designated hitter; I don’t like aluminum bats; I do like grass,” he told reporters that day, in vowing to uphold baseball’s traditions. “I do like baseball as you and I knew it growing up.”
The next month, Vincent was in the commissioner’s box at Candlestick Park when the Loma Prieta earthquake, with a magnitude of 6.9, struck San Francisco just before the scheduled start of Game 3 of the World Series between the Giants and the Oakland Athletics. The next morning, in a candlelit hotel meeting room in the ravaged city, Vincent announced that the series was suspended.
“Our modest little game is not a top priority,” he said.
Baseball donated $1 million to the American Red Cross to aid in relief efforts, and as the days went on, Vincent resolved that the World Series would continue. The stadium had retained its structural integrity, and the resumption would be a powerful symbol of San Francisco’s resolve. The league, of course, also had an economic incentive to finish the Series.
“Let me be blunt with you,” Vincent wrote in his memoir, recalling his conversation with San Francisco Mayor Art Argos. “I have to make a decision within the next few days. We have clearance to play the rest of the Series in Anaheim. The mayor of Oakland is happy to have us play the remaining games, including your home games, in his city. We will resume this Series someplace and we will do it soon.”
The Series resumed in San Francisco on Oct. 27, 10 days after the earthquake, with Vincent sitting in a field-level box with Willie Mays. When the Giants’ first baseman, Will Clark, dove into the box to catch a foul ball in Game 3, Mays alertly grabbed Clark’s ankles to keep his spikes from striking the commissioner. (The A’s soon finished off a four-game sweep.)
Vincent liked players — Clark was a personal favorite — and met regularly with some during the owners’ lockout the next spring training. Each morning, he would meet with eight or so players to try to resolve the issues; Orel Hershiser, the star Dodgers pitcher, would bring a box of donuts to each session as a peace offering.
The stalemate ended after 32 days with expanded arbitration eligibility, a raise in the minimum salary and a plan to study revenue sharing. But the alliance was fragile. After negotiators reached a deal, said Gene Orza, then the union’s chief operating officer, they retreated to different rooms. As union leaders congratulated each other, Orza said, they heard a different reaction behind the owners’ doors.
“All of this yelling took place, and it was obviously the owners yelling at Fay for agreeing to this contract,” Orza said. “And I turned to (player liaison) Mark Belanger and said, ‘If you think this last one was rocky because of the lockout, wait until the next one. They’re going to try to prove they know how to negotiate.’”
As negotiations go, none could have been smoother than the one that concluded the next crisis of Vincent’s administration.
Steinbrenner, the volatile Yankees owner, had paid $40,000 to a man named Howie Spira, a gambler who claimed to have damaging information on star outfielder Dave Winfield, who had become a Steinbrenner nemesis. Vincent was incredulous; if Steinbrenner really believed there were improprieties involving Winfield, or that he was being shaken down by a small-time hustler, he should have contacted the commissioner’s office.
An investigation by John Dowd — a lawyer and Vincent ally who had also investigated Rose — convinced Vincent that Steinbrenner deserved a two-year suspension from the day-to-day operations of the Yankees. But Steinbrenner — who feared that a “suspension” would jeopardize his place on the United States Olympic Committee — asked to be placed on the permanently ineligible list instead. So it was, and fans at Yankee Stadium cheered the news when it broke during that July. (Steinbrenner would return to baseball in 1993.)
Vincent had grown up a Yankees fan — his favorite player, pitcher Spec Shea, who lived near the family in Connecticut, had visited him in Waterbury Hospital after his college accident — and helped settle a famous pinstriped dispute. In 1991, Vincent formed and chaired a committee on statistical accuracy that removed the mythical asterisk from Roger Maris’ single-season home run record.
Maris’ feat of 61 home runs was never technically given an asterisk. But as he approached the mark in 1961 — the first season with a 162-game schedule — commissioner Ford C. Frick ruled that Babe Ruth’s 60 would remain the official record unless Maris did it in 154 games, as Ruth did. Maris broke the record on the final game of the season, and it took until Viincent’s committee for MLB to officially recognize him as the record holder.
The inspiration for that committee — which also established stricter definitions of official no-hitters — came from an article in The New Yorker by Roger Angell. Vincent had an abiding respect for the news media and was known for uncommon accessibility.
“The conversations could go on and on, and he welcomed them,” said the Hall of Fame writer Claire Smith. “If you wanted to talk to the commissioner of baseball back in the day, just call information, and you could speak with him. He never made a secret of that, and he was always open.
“I think that openness to speak with the media and to actually sit in a golf cart with (union officials) Don Fehr or Gene Orza or Lauren Rich was the beginning of the end for him. But it was who he was. Don Fehr used to call it commissioner-itis. When a commissioner begins to show that he cares not only for the owners, but the umpires and the players, that’s the beginning of the end for the commissioner. Because in reality, he’s supposed to work for the owners and not the other two groups.”

Fay Vincent speaks with Sparky Anderson before a game between the Baltimore Orioles and Detroit Tigers in 1990. (Janice E. Rettaliata / Getty Images)
To Vincent, it was vital for the sport to escape the shadow of collusion, which meant repairing relations with the union. An arbitrator had ruled in favor of the players in 1990 — awarding $280 million in damages to cover three offseasons of illegal collusion — but the issues ran deeper.
Vincent technically worked for the owners, who were preoccupied with market discrepancies brought on by local TV rights deals. But owners were intent on solving their issues by cracking the union, which Vincent thought was foolish.
“Trying to break the union after collusion made no sense,” he said in 2024. “When you cheat people and then try to manage them into a situation where they work with you and trust you, you have no trust left. You just stole from them. Once they committed collusion, the union had a rallying cry like ‘Remember the Alamo.’ They could never get away from collusion.”
Vincent had bothered some owners with plans to realign the National League’s two divisions (the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Cardinals would have moved to the NL West and the Atlanta Braves and Cincinnati Reds to the NL East) and with the distribution of expansion fees.
But the owners mostly feared that Vincent would use the “best interests of baseball” to override their wishes. Bud Selig, then the owner of the Milwaukee Brewers, wrote in his memoir, “For The Good Of The Game,” that he implored Vincent to address the income disparity among the teams, but that Vincent was partial to big-market teams and “didn’t want the hard work of uniting owners” behind a common cause.
“As a group,” Selig wrote, “we wanted Fay gone so we could get a fresh start and begin working toward curing the disease that was spreading throughout baseball.”
In early September 1992, acting on a suggestion from then-Pittsburgh Pirates chief executive Doug Danforth, the owners convened at a hotel near O’Hare Airport in Chicago to vote on Vincent’s fate. In an 18-9 vote, with one abstention, they gave Vincent a “no-confidence” verdict, essentially a decision to oust him at the scheduled quarterly meeting a week later.
Rather than fight the expecting firing in court, Vincent stepped aside.
“Some want the Commissioner to represent only owners, and to do their bidding in all matters,” Vincent said in a statement. “I haven’t done that, and I could not do so, because I accepted the position believing the Commissioner has a higher duty and that sometimes decisions have to be made that are not in the interest of some owners.”
With Vincent gone, so went the last, best hope for a true partnership between owners and players in that era. The commissioner, it was clear, would be an employee of the owners more than a steward of the game’s greater good.
“Fay was a very, very smart guy who made the crucial mistake of thinking that he was more than what the owners wanted him to be,” Orza said. “He got to the job thinking he could do great things and transform what was otherwise a rocky relationship and not realizing that the clubs were not interested in that.”
Orza added: “He was a guy who thought he was a real commissioner.”
With Selig in charge as acting commissioner — he would not be formally named until 1998 — the owners made plans for a salary cap when the collective-bargaining agreement expired after the 1994 season. The players went on strike that Aug. 12 and a month later Selig canceled the World Series.
The work stoppage lasted 232 days and shortened the 1995 season by 18 games. In the end, the owners got nothing but a restoration of the existing CBA for 1995 and 1996.
The intense backlash from fans subsided in coming years as steroid-fueled sluggers broke home run records. The owners, by then, were in no mood to seriously challenge the players on drug testing, which could have provided a backbone to a memo Vincent had circulated in 1991.
“The possession, sale or use of any illegal drug or controlled substance by Major League players or personnel is strictly prohibited,” it read. “This prohibition applies to all illegal drugs and controlled substances, including steroids.”
By 2002, when the owners and players finally agreed to a steroid-testing plan, Maris’ record had been eclipsed by Mark McGwire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds, and Bonds was on his way to overtaking Hank Aaron as the career home run leader.
Vincent was 54 years old when he resigned and spent his remaining years serving on various boards — he was a trustee at Williams College, chairman of the board at Hotchkiss and a senior director on the board at Time Warner. He was president of the New England College Baseball League and wrote on sports, business and history for various publications, notably the Wall Street Journal.
He also interviewed nearly 60 retired players for an oral history project available at the Hall of Fame’s library. It led to three books: “The Only Game in Town” (2006), “We Would Have Played For Nothing” (2009) and “It’s What’s Inside That Counts” (2010).
Among the interviewees are Negro League players, who received a formal apology from Vincent, on behalf of MLB, in a ceremony in Cooperstown in 1991. The long-overdue gesture included health insurance for the players and their wives, and in 2024 Vincent called it his greatest source of pride.
“You just sat there and listened to how these men and women fell in love with the game, and it just made me fall in love with it all the more,” said Smith, who helped Vincent with the project. “And that wouldn’t have happened if it weren’t for Fay. He underwrote the whole project, all the interviews, provided transportation, the crew. It was just an amazing endeavor.”
The conversations — with Bob Feller and Warren Spahn, Larry Doby and Monte Irvin, and Ralph Branca and Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe and many more — represented the kind of tenure Vincent had hoped to have, celebrating the game and its players. The sport, alas, was as much a business as the world of movies and soft drinks that he had left.
Yet there were moments to cherish. In 1991, Vincent was hospitalized with an infection after the removal of his spleen. One of his visitors was Eddie Lopat, a star Yankees pitcher from his youth who was very ill and would die the next year.
“He came into my room and said, ‘Fay, you’re sick, I’m sick,’” Vincent wrote in his memoir. “‘You don’t want to hear about my problems, I don’t want to hear about yours. Let’s talk baseball.’
“And that’s what we did, for three hours. It was one of the best times of my life.”
(Top photo: Jonathan Daniel / Getty Images)