Fay Vincent, a lawyer who presided over Major League Baseball as its eighth commissioner during a time when it was shaken by labor strife, the first shadows of steroid use and, quite literally, a powerful earthquake that interrupted the 1989 World Series, died on Saturday in Vero Beach, Fla. He was 86.
His death, in a hospital, was caused by complications of bladder cancer, his wife, Christina, said. Mr. Vincent lived in Vero Beach.
Before reaching baseball’s highest office, Mr. Vincent overcame a debilitating injury as a college student to become a law partner, an official in the Securities Exchange Commission, chairman of Columbia Pictures and vice-chairman of Coca-Cola.
But he was most visible to the public in his time as baseball commissioner, from Sept. 13, 1989, to Sept. 7, 1992, rising to that post in a period of grief. He had been deputy commissioner under his good friend A. Bartlett Giamatti when Mr. Giamatti died of a heart attack suddenly at 51. The owners of the major league teams then handed Mr. Vincent the reins.
A little more than a month later, he was present when, shortly after 5 p.m. on Oct. 19, 1989, the Bay Area experienced a severe earthquake — 7.1 on the Richter scale — that caused San Francisco’s Candlestick Park to rumble, as if ready to fall apart.
There, the San Francisco Giants were preparing to face their Bay Area American League counterpart, the Oakland A’s, in Game 3 of the World Series when the earth shook, forcing cancellation of the game and a postponement of the Series
Sixty-seven people died in the region, and destruction was widespread. Candlestick Park itself, home of the Giants, was damaged when pieces of concrete fell from the baffle at the top of the stadium, and its power was knocked out. There were calls for the Series to be canceled for the first time in World Series history.
But when the Bay Area had recovered sufficiently a week later, Mr. Vincent ordered the Series to resume — a play-ball stance that was widely praised.
Within months, in 1990, talks between Major League Baseball and the Players Association stalled, prompting the league to impose a lockout. It ended in a settlement but delayed spring training and Opening Day.
Mr. Vincent later suspended George M. Steinbrenner of the Yankees, the most fractious owner of all, for paying $40,000 to a known gambler, Howard Spira, ostensibly in return for gossip about Dave Winfield, a Yankee who had played below Steinbrenner’s expectations.
In between conflicts, Mr. Vincent never seemed happier than when he was going around on a motorized cart, because of his injury, schmoozing with umpires and groundskeepers as well as players and reporters and fans. The owners? Not so much.
Accustomed to being involved in major issues during his previous careers, he inserted himself in contract talks, though many owners resisted.
In the same period, people began to suspect that some bulked-up players were using bodybuilding drugs. Mr. Vincent issued a statement that warned against using illegal drugs, but he could not impose testing without the agreement of the Players Association and its leader, Donald Fehr, who claimed that such testing would violate the players’ rights.
In the end, by an 18-9 margin, the owners issued a no-confidence vote in Mr. Vincent, and on Sept. 7, 1992, he resigned. To replace him the owners appointed Bud Selig, owner of the Milwaukee Brewers. It was the first time an owner had been named commissioner.
In an interview for this obituary in 2017, Mr. Vincent said he might have survived “if I had been better at keeping the owners from trying to kill the union.”
“I think I failed,” Mr. Vincent said, adding, “I still feel badly about it.”
Francis Thomas Vincent Jr. was born in Waterbury, Conn., on May 29, 1938, to Francis and Alice (Lynch) Vincent. His mother was a teacher, and his father — who was also known as Fay Vincent — was a former football star and team captain at Yale University and an official of the National Football League.
“Six feet, 200 pounds, built like Charles Atlas,” Mr. Vincent said of his father, who instilled in his son ambitions to follow in Fay Sr.’s footsteps. “All I wanted to do was play football,” he said. “I was 6-2, 225 at 14. A good student. But only a mediocre athlete.”
Like his father, he was recruited on a scholarship to attend the private Hotchkiss School in Lakeville, Conn.
Mr. Vincent’s presumed path to Yale changed when Len Watters, the football coach at Williams, recruited him to play for the college on an academic scholarship.
Before his freshman year, Mr. Vincent went with a teammate, William (Bucky) Bush, to work in the Texas oil fields, forming a lifetime friendship with his teammate’s older brother, George H.W. Bush, and his wife, Barbara.
After dominating as a lineman on the freshman team, Mr. Vincent was in his dormitory in December, when a roommate pulled a prank and locked him in his fourth-floor bedroom. Needing to use the bathroom, Mr. Vincent decided to climb out his window and into an adjacent one but slipped on an icy ledge and fell. A railing on the second floor broke his fall and may have saved his life, but he was left with two broken vertebrae and it appeared that he would be paralyzed and bedridden for life.
After a year of physical therapy and a grueling regimen of exercise, he became mobile enough to return to school, though he would use a cane for much of the rest of his life. He knew he would never play sports again.
“I was in every honor society; I loved every minute of it,” he said. “But to this day I still dream about playing football. I never got over that.”
Mr. Vincent attended Yale Law School and, after getting his degree in 1963, worked for five years as an associate in the New York law firm of Whitman and Ransom before moving to Washington and becoming a partner at Caplin and Drysdale. In 1978, he joined the Securities and Exchange Commission as associate director of its corporate finance division.
But after four months, Mr. Vincent was recruited by Herbert A. Allen Jr. (Williams, class of ’62), whose investment bank, Allen & Company, had just purchased Columbia Pictures. Mr. Vincent insisted that he knew very little about Hollywood, but Mr. Allen wanted him to be president of Columbia. Mr. Vincent recalled Mr. Allen’s saying, “You are not the most exciting guy in the world, but you are predictable.’”
When Coca-Cola purchased Columbia in 1982, Mr. Vincent was made vice-chairman of Coca-Cola but left after four years to work with a new friend, Mr. Giamatti, a Renaissance scholar who was president of Yale at the time. Mr. Vincent was about 40 when the two met, finding they had much in common — New England roots, fathers who had gone to Yale, a passion for baseball and middle-age unrest.
Mr. Giamatti’s writings about baseball led him to the presidency of the National League, a position that has since been eliminated. And when baseball owners offered him the commissioner’s job in the spring of 1989, he persuaded Mr. Vincent to join him as deputy commissioner.
Soon they were dealing with evidence that the Cincinnati Reds’ manager and former All-Star Pete Rose had been betting on games. Mr. Vincent used his legal training in helping to negotiate an agreement with Rose to leave the game, and on Aug. 24, 1989, Mr. Giamatti announced that Rose would be banned from baseball for life.
A week later, on Sept. 1, Mr. Giamatti died of a heart attack at 51 at his summer home on Martha’s Vineyard, Mass., having held the post for only four months. Team owners named Mr. Vincent to complete his friend’s five-year term.
After he was removed as baseball commissioner in 1992, Mr. Vincent, at 55, took a six-month sabbatical, living in a country manor outside Oxford, England.
His first marriage, to Valerie McMahon, ended in divorce. She died in 2007. He married Christina Clarke Watkins in 1998. She survives him, as do his children from his first marriage, Anne Vincent and William and Edward Vincent, who are twins; three stepchildren, Jake, Ned and Nilla Watkins; his sisters, Dr. Joanna Vincent and Barbara Vincent; and several grandchildren. He had a home in New Canaan, Conn., as well as one in Vero Beach.
After he came home from England, he was a commissioner for the New England Collegiate Baseball League for seven years, retiring in 2004. He embarked on a baseball oral history project in which he interviewed stars of the game spanning six decades. He wrote a memoir, “The Last Commissioner: A Baseball Valentine” (2002). And he held firm to a belief that Major League Baseball, though occupying a crowded and competitive sports landscape, would endure.
“I don’t think people should worry about baseball,” Mr. Vincent said in 1993. “It has its ups and downs, its ebbs and flows, but it will be around. It is the perfectly designed game.”
Jack Kadden contributed reporting.