Former MLB commissioner Fay Vincent is making a multimillion-dollar donation to Yale to fund the baseball coaching position there in his father's name.
Francis T. Vincent Jr. was baseball commissioner from 1989 to 1992 and was a 1963 graduate of Yale Law School. His father, Francis T. Vincent, graduated from Yale in 1931 and captained the football and baseball teams.
Vincent's father played baseball at Yale under coach Smoky Joe Wood, who went 3-1 when the Boston Red Sox won the 1912 World Series. He became an official for high school, college and the NFL.
“He wanted to do something that meant something to him and tied him to Yale baseball, which he loved…I think his prominence at Yale had something to do with my interest in sports,” Vincent said before Thursday's announcement. “I was never the player he was, but I certainly enjoyed playing.”
Brian Hamm, who became Yale's baseball coach ahead of the 2023 season, met Vincent in 2007 while coaching the North Adams SteepleCats in the New England Collegiate Baseball League. Vincent was president of the league at the time.
They were both friends with Tom Hutchison, a Yale infielder in the early 1990s whom Vincent helped get a post-playing job with the New York Mets. On Dec. 5, Hamm and Hutchison, now CEO of Merrill Lynch Wealth Management, traveled to Vincent's home in Florida to float the idea of staffing the coaching position.
“We basically spent the day with him, had lunch and started talking about my experiences and the baseball team and the current tenor on campus,” Hamm said. “We started talking about his father and his interest in doing something for his father and then we basically came to the decision that naming the baseball coaching position after his father was in line with what you would like to do.”
Hamm said most of Yale's head coaching positions in other sports had already been endowed and named.
Vincent became MLB commissioner in September 1989 following the death of A. Bartlett Giamatti, who was president of Yale from 1978 to 1986. Vincent resigned three years later under pressure from a group of owners who wanted to force a labor confrontation. .
In 2021, Yale's baseball stadium was renamed George H.W. Bush Field in honor of the former president, a friend of Vincent. As a first baseman, Bush captained the Bulldogs and helped them reach the College World Series in 1947 and 1948.
Yale's softball field is named William O. DeWitt Family Stadium in honor of the family that has controlled the St. Louis Cardinals since 1995.
Red Sox baseball boss Craig Breslow and Baltimore Orioles general manager Mike Elias pitched for Yale, as did current Mets broadcaster Ron Darling.
