Inside Man

Ten minutes before a Miami Beach press conference, called last week to announce the new commissioner of baseball, one reporter asked an official if the name that was leaked earlier was indeed the choice of the team owners. "Yes," the reporters were told, "it is Bowie Kuhn, but please, gentlemen, act surprised." They did--but it was no act. Sportscaster Red Barber's reaction was typical: "Who? I never heard of the man."

After two months of dickering and dallying, the owners of the 24 major league teams were in agreement on only one point when they met in Miami Beach: the new commissioner should come from "inside baseball." Kuhn, 42, the attorney for the National League since 1950, was so far inside that he was lost in the shuffle of names mentioned for the job, which included everyone from Stan Musial to Hubert Humphrey. Kuhn's appointment was as big a surprise as the owners' previous choice, William D. Eckert, a retired Air Force general who was so far outside baseball that he had little feel or flair for the sport and its problems of modernization.

Action-Mad Fan. Like Eckert, referred to as the "Unknown Soldier" during his three years in the job, Kuhn was a compromise choice. Caught in a squeeze play between Mike Burke, president of the New York Yankees, and Charles ("Chub") Feeney, vice president of the San Francisco Giants, the squabbling owners surprised themselves by deciding unanimously on Pinch Hitter Kuhn on the first vote. Said Chicago White Sox Owner Arthur Allyn: "The two leagues have been feuding for so long I didn't think we could even agree on the sun rising in the east."

Mending relations between the two leagues is only one of the problems confronting Kuhn. At the moment, his most pressing concern is the boycott of spring training that is threatened by the Major League Baseball Players' Association if its pension-fund demands are not met. The players want to channel a fixed percentage of the leagues' income from TV contracts into their fund; the owners are offering a flat $5.1 million. Kuhn, who listed player relations among his National League duties, is a skilled negotiator. But it will take more than persuasion for baseball to keep pace with the speedy '70s. Not only does the organization of the major leagues need to be restructured, but the game itself must be streamlined to attract the action-mad modern fan.

Real Buff. Bowie Kuhn, a distant relative of the knife-wielding frontier hero, Jim Bowie, may be just the man to cut through the encrustations of baseball. At 6 ft. 5 in. and 230 lbs., he looks more like a retired tackle than a Wall Street lawyer whose chief passion is gardening. The great-great-grandson of Maryland Governor Robert Bowie, he was raised in Washington, D.C. As a boy he worked inside the Scoreboard at Griffith Stadium, then the home of the Senators, for $1 a day. He played no sports in high school or at Princeton, but his wife Luisa describes him as a "real baseball buff. He can tell you who played the outfield for the St. Louis Browns in 1920, and things like that."

Though Kuhn's appointment is for only one year at a salary of $100,000, many owners think he should stay at the job permanently. But last week, after appointing a committee to study the modernization of baseball, he observed that he and the committee may decide "that baseball does not need the office of commissioner."

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