Glimpses of a Golden Age

While Major League Baseball opens its season Tuesday showcasing its future—the Oakland A's face the champion Boston Red Sox in Tokyo—former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent has kept a keen eye on the game's past. His second volume of oral histories, "We Would Have Played for Nothing," featuring stars of the '50s and '60s, hits stores next week. He talked with NEWSWEEK's Mark Starr.

That's a sentimental title.
It came from Brooks Robinson, who said, "The owners weren't very smart. We would have played for nothing." I wondered about the title because, of course, in some sense it's not true. But it does get at the generational difference. We're all looking back at what was considered to be a rosy time in baseball. It was never what we think it was.

Why are these oral histories so important?
I knew that my great friend, Larry Doby, the first black player in the American League, had cancer. I started this endeavor [because] I was concerned that people were going to die away and we wouldn't have their stories.

How distressed are you by recent issues about steroid use?
This off-season was awful. But people are voting with their feet. They go to the ballpark. Baseball is booming again.

Is MLB immune to the damage?
The cheating is a very big threat. There is the potential of losing the belief that it's a fair competition. I don't think fans will stay if the cheating is pervasive. Take the 100-meter dash. Will we ever again look at women running the dash and not think of Marion Jones cheating at the Olympics?

Does baseball have any credibility left in tackling this problem?
I think the Mitchell Report was a noble one. It was flawed only because the union wouldn't participate. The union's record is both consistent and abysmal. It never wants to deal with these issues.

Isn't baseball a special case because of the reverence for numbers? Has that been lost?
The last 10 or 15 years, everything is tainted. I don't know if we could have stopped it. Look, I was there, I was part of the problem. I never thought steroids was going to be as big an issue as it became because I thought it was a muscle-building drug. I looked at [Hank] Aaron and [Willie] Mays and they weren't muscle guys. It was all about quickness. I thought it was a football problem. I thought Jose Canseco was an anomaly.

© 2008