Baseball Commissioner

NEW YORK -- In removing himself from consideration for the U.S. Supreme Court, Sen. George Mitchell put himself into position yesterday to be named the next baseball commissioner.Baseball officials would not say that Mitchell was their man for the job, which has been unfilled the last 19 months. But people familiar with their thinking said they were prepared to move quickly to get him before someone else did.Mitchell, D-Maine, who announced last month that he would not seek re-election, has not said that he would accept the job of commissioner if it were offered.

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. -- The search for a baseball commissioner was expected to take a major step forward during the three-day major-league meeting that ended yesterday at the Marriott Harbor Beach Resort, but a group of 11 owners pulled the plug on the search committee before it could make a recommendation.Search committee chairman Bill Bartholomay announced yesterday afternoon that he had been passed a letter during a late-night Executive Council session Tuesday in which representatives of 11 teams advised him that they would block the election of a commissioner until a new collective bargaining agreement is forged with the players union.

It's nostalgia time. It's time to look back fondly on the Bowie Kuhn era.You remember Bowie, don't you? He was the guy who was dubbed "the village idiot" by former Oakland Athletics owner Charles O. Finley. He was the brunt of one joke after another during his 16-year tenure as baseball commissioner.He looks pretty good, in retrospect.Baseball has gone 11 months without a commissioner . . . and it shows. The game is controlled by the Executive Council, which is fine for negotiating a television contract and negotiating a labor agreement, but the sport no longer has a moral or ethical rudder.

Andrew Ervin is one of many fans who think they could run Major League Baseball.What separates Ervin from those who only dream about the chance is that he actually applied for the job.Ervin, 22, a native of Media, Pa., and a senior philosophy major at Goucher College, said he "was looking for a summer job, and I realized that the commissioner's office was open."So, Ervin sent a 1 1/2 -page letter and resume to Milwaukee Brewers president Bud Selig, head of baseball's ruling Executive Council, in March, saying "why I'd make a great commissioner."

SOME TEXANS want Gov. Ann Richards to send herself to the Senate when Lloyd Bentsen resigns to become secretary of the Treasury.Governor Richards can't take this seriously. She must know the history of such self-promotions. Nine times in the past, governors have, in effect, appointed themselves to the Senate, and eight times they have then been defeated when they ran for election to the office.The one exception was A.B. "Happy" Chandler, whose name I left out of last Monday's column about senators who resigned to take higher office.

The forced resignation of Fay Vincent as baseball commissioner is a skirmish in a longer battle. Every commissioner except the legendary Kennesaw Mountain Landis, who pioneered the position in the wake of the Black Sox scandal of 1919, and A. Bartlett Giamatti, who died after just five months in office, has struggled with the sport's owners over the powers of the office. One way or another, they all lost. Though Mr. Vincent cast his initial refusal to resign in the face of a no-confidence vote last week as a defense of the commissioner's power to act in the best interests of baseball, the issue may be narrower than that.

THE hubbub over Fay Vincent, commissioner of baseball, who resigned at the request of 18 of the 28 major league team owners, could have been avoided if a proposal we heard the other day had been enacted.The proposal: Have the American people elect the commissioner in the quadrennial presidential elections.It's the "national pastime," after all, so why shouldn't the nation have a say in who runs the game? Besides, having an election for baseball commissioner will bring out the vote.Most of the Joe (and quite a few of the Jane)

NEW YORK -- Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent sat in his New York office last week, surrounded by photographs of friends and heroes, including George Bush, Whitey Ford and his father.AHe wore a summer suit and a floral print necktie. He occasionally reached for an ashtray with a large cigar parked inside. For about 50 minutes, he spoke directly and indirectly about his troubles with baseball's most demanding, most fickle audience -- the 28 major-league baseball owners.Vincent has had plenty of trouble.

Edward Bennett Williams's greatest sporting ambition was to own a major league baseball team. The boy who had sold "ice colds and red hots" for the minor league Hartford Senators wanted to own the big league Washington Senators. He had bought into the football Redskins only after he failed to win a baseball franchise in Washington in 1961. In 1972, he had tried again to get a team in Washington but failed in an attempt to move the San Diego Padres. Undaunted, he kept searching for weak franchises that might want to move to the nation's capital.

Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent was among the VIPs who attended the final game. He sat in a field box beside the Orioles dugout, and he spoke affectionately of the ballpark he visited often during the 1970s, when he worked in Washington."