Ex-commissioner Vincent not optimistic strike can be avoided

Watching baseball's latest labor conflagration from the safe haven of his Connecticut home, former commissioner Fay Vincent said Thursday he suspects that Commissioner Bud Selig is so committed to "total victory" that he will miss the opportunity that the players union has provided to avoid another work stoppage.

"You can't get back 25 years of mistakes all at once," Vincent said, adding that he tried to approach labor relations during his own tenure as an "incrementalist."

"You go at it hoping to get 4 percent or 5 percent each time and over time making progress," he said. "Meantime, you have to build a partnership and trust (with the union). That makes so much sense, but nobody has ever been able to persuade Bud to do it.

"I mean, he's been running baseball labor for 25 years and the result is that you have these confrontations every five years, destroying all of the good will you've established, and now you finally have fans throwing up their hands and saying 'that's enough.'"

In his brief tenure as commissioner, Vincent approached the union as a conciliator only to be forced from office on Sept. 7, 1992 by a coalition of hardline owners led by Selig, of whom Vincent said, "I badly underestimated him."