The appropriate way to begin a column about a series of interviews with baseball Hall of Famers would probably be to name the players Fay Vincent, the former baseball commissioner, interviewed for his oral history project, which became three books and a 13-part half-hour television series, “The Boys in the Hall,” that will run on Fox Sports Networks from May 29 through Aug. 21.

Vincent set out to get older players on tape while he still could. As if to demonstrate the wisdom of his plan, four of the 13 players in the Fox series have died in the past year, including the first two in the series, Duke Snider and Bob Feller. The others are Robin Roberts and Harmon Killebrew.

In writing about the series, however, I prefer to write about some of the players who won’t be in it and don‘t appear in the books. They were omitted because they declined Vincent’s requests for interviews. The players I am referring to are Willie Mays, Bob Gibson, Henry Aaron and Sandy Koufax, four Hall of Famers anyone and everyone would have been eager to hear from.

“Mays wanted a lot of money,” Vincent recalled in a recent telephone interview. “He’s the only one who said he’d do it only if we paid him a fortune.”

Vincent offered the players a nominal fee, but the project was not funded with loads of cash. Herbert Allen, a long-time friend and head of Allen & Company investment bankers, had funded the project with $200,000 and Vincent added $50,000 of his own.

Along the way of the approximately 55 interviews he did with video crews provided by George Cooney’s production company, Vincent enlisted the aid of a few friends to do some of them. I offered to try to get Aaron, but when he heard that the interview would require three or four hours, Aaron declined, saying there was no way he would sit for that long.

What would have happened had the length of time not been mentioned? “After half an hour at most,” an aide said, “he would have gotten up and left.”

Vincent had a similar experience with Gibson.

“I tried very hard to get Gibson,” he related, speaking from his winter home in Vero Beach, Fla. “When he was here for spring training, he gave me the runaround. He said he’d do 15, 20 minutes but wasn’t willing to do more.”

Vincent, in other words, had the same experience as reporters who have tried to talk to Gibson, both during his playing career and since.

Gibson, by far, was the most irascible player I ever encountered. Retirement and advancing age (75) haven’t mellowed him. A few months ago I called him for a column I was writing about Stan Musial and Curt Flood. Gibson, a teammate of Flood, was in position to confirm or reject as false a story about Flood at Musial’s St. Louis restaurant, but he didn’t return my calls.

When his wife answered one of the calls, she said, “He probably won’t call back.” And he didn’t.

Koufax, on the other hand, was the classiest, most gentlemanly player I ever knew. The opposite of Gibson, he went out of his way to be cooperative the first time I met him. But he wouldn’t do the Vincent interview either, though for a different reason.

Recalling his sales pitch to the former great pitcher, Vincent said he told him, “Imagine 50 years from now a kid going to the Hall of Fame and seeing your interview.” All of the interviews will be available for viewing at the Hall.

Koufax, however, wasn’t sold. “Fifty years from now,” Vincent quoted Koufax as saying, “no one will know who I am.”

Sadly, Sandy was serious. His hyper but genuine modesty kept him away from Vincent’s video crew. I don’t know how the tapes were selected for the Fox Sports series, which will be hosted by Tom Brokaw and shown Sundays at 6 p.m. Eastern time, but I am certain Koufax would have made the cut.

The schedule of airings is:

• May 29           Duke Snider
• June 5            Bob Feller
• June 12         Frank Robinson
• June 19         Buck O’Neil
• June 26         Warren Spahn
• July 3             Harmon Killebrew
• July 10           Robin Roberts
• July 17           Whitey Ford
• July 24           Brooks Robinson
• July 31           Ralph Kiner
• August 7        Juan Marichal
• August 14      Yogi Berra
• August 21      Larry Doby

“The first interview I did was with Doby,” Vincent related. “I knew he was sick. Claire Smith was with me, and we sat in his living room for four hours. We had four hours of Doby talking about growing up in New Jersey and playing for the Newark Elite Giants, going to Cleveland and talking about Bill Veeck.”

Eighty-one days after Jackie Robinson became the first black major leaguer, playing for Branch Rickey in Brooklyn, Doby became the first black player in the American League, playing for Veeck in Cleveland.

“I was focused in the beginning on capturing the Negro League guys,” Vincent said. “We did Joe Black, Buck O’Neil, Monte Irvin.”

Why, though, did Vincent initiate the oral history project?

“The greatest, most successful baseball book ever done was Larry Ritter’s book, ‘The Glory of Their Times,’” Vincent said. “A friend gave me an audiotape of Ritter talking to old players around the ‘50s. The book came out, and there were tapes that were done that you could buy. They were wonderful. I listened to them. He was an economics professor and he took a tape recorder and talked to these players. It was just great stuff.

“The thought occurred to me: who was doing that today? And I thought maybe I should be. I didn’t have books in mind. I just thought I’d do it as long as I could manage it.”

Besides the reluctant players, Vincent encountered other setbacks.

“Joe DiMaggio said he would do it, but he got sick,” Vincent said. “Stan Musial agreed to do it, and I was about to fly to St. Louis but his office called and said he was sick. It was Alzheimer’s. But I wanted to get Tommy Henrich to talk about Gehrig and Ruth, and I got him. We didn’t get Mantle, but we got Ford and Yogi. I’m proud of what we did.

“I think of all the interviews we did the most significant ones were early ones – Henrich and Warren Spahn. Spahn was probably the most intelligent person I ever talked to in baseball.”

Vincent’s lone regret about the books that came from the interviews is that they haven’t made more money for the Hall of Fame, where Vincent’s share of the book sales has gone.

“We have not been as successful as we had hoped generating money for the Hall of Fame,” he said.

Published by Simon & Schuster, the books are now in paperback: “The Only Game in Town,” “We Would Have Played for Nothing” and “It’s What’s Inside the Lines That Counts.”

Vincent’s dedication of the second book is not part of the Fox Sports series, but it’s my favorite part of the Vincent series:

“To the estimable Marvin Miller – whose contributions to baseball continue to be ignored by those blinded by their own ignorance. With respect, regret, and apologies.”

**

NOT NECESSARILY THE GOOD OLD SUMMER TIME

Baseball lifers sometimes complain that they never get a chance to have a normal summer with their wives and families. Before anyone complains again, though, he might want to check with Jeff Torborg, who until the last few years spent his entire adult life playing, coaching, managing and announcing baseball.

Free from the baseball tether, Torborg travels during the summer with his wife, Susie. This summer they took a three-week cruise on the great rivers of Europe. They returned home to Florida last week with memories far more vivid than most vacationers have, but the important thing is they returned home.

“The next to last night we were on the Rhine River,” Torborg related by telephone last Friday night. “We had just turned off the TV and all of a sudden there’s an awful crash like a huge explosion. The window blew in in our cabin, and I jumped on Susie to shield her.

“As I’m jumping, this huge anchor chain crashes against the window. Why is an anchor chain in front of our window? If that snaps, we’re dead. It was the anchor for a fuel tanker that hit us. The tanker had just loaded a full tank of diesel fuel.”

The anchor, Torborg said, tore through the ship and stopped six inches from his wife’s pillow.

“When we got back to the cabin,” he said, “we got a little flashlight and I said that looks like a 4 by 8 sticking through the wall. We went closer and saw that it was an anchor. A steel piece was sticking in her pillow.”

Torborg said they later learned that their cabin window was one of only two windows that were broken. After their window blew in, he added, water came rushing through the open space. “I thought we were sinking, and we put our life jackets on,” he said. “But through it all we didn’t get a scratch.”

The ship incident, however, wasn’t the only excitement the Torborgs experienced on the trip. Earlier, when the passengers were off the ship for a visit to one of the local towns, a tire on their bus blew out.

Later, when they were on the plane waiting to take off to return home, the former catcher said, a large barricade, which he compared to a highway median barrier, crashed against the plane.

“We had to wait four hours,” Torborg said. For the third time in three tries, however, again they suffered no injuries. Next summer, though, the Torborgs may want to consider spending the summer in their living room watching baseball on television.

*

HITTING HOMERS AT THE COMMISSIONER’S HOME

When David Einhorn met Commissioner Bud Selig at his office in Milwaukee last week, it was the first time they had met but not the first time Einhorn had a relationship with Selig. They previously had shared a backyard.

Einhorn is the 42-year-old hedge fund manager who is reportedly buying a third of the Mets for $200 million and one day, thanks to Bernie Madoff, may very well succeed Fred Wilpon as the majority owner of the team.

He paid a courtesy call to Selig, who has to approve him as an owner, and told the commissioner about their mutual past.

“You don’t realize it,” Selig said Einhorn told him, “but your yard was right-center field.”

Einhorn’s family spent his early years in Milwaukee, living near the Seligs, and young Einhorn played with boys whose house was adjacent to the Seligs’ house

“He played with our neighbors,” Selig said. “I remember the kids, but I didn’t know David.”

Selig said he has since bought the property where Einhorn played.

*

GIANTS INTRODUCE NEW CURSE

Everybody seems to be coming up with curses these days to explain a team’s extended misery. The latest suggested curse is what awful things have happened to the Mets since Carlos Beltran took a third strike with the bases loaded for the last out of the last game of the 2006 National League Champion Series against St. Louis.

Here, however, is one more recent than that. Look at what happened to Buster Posey, San Francisco’s brilliant young catcher, last Wednesday.

Posey took the brunt of a home plate collision with Scott Cousins of Florida and emerged with a broken left leg and three torn ligaments in his left ankle, the worst catching injury in years.

Posey suffered the devastating collection of injuries May 25, four days before the first anniversary of his belated recall from the minor leagues last year.

I suggested at that time and since that the Giants kept Posey in the minors until May 29 to manipulate his major league service time and give them an extra year of control over him.

Because of the timing of the recall, Posey finished the season 11 days short of a year of service. That shortage means he has to play with the Giants for seven years instead of six before he becomes eligible to be a free agent.

So where does the curse come in? Maybe this is payback for the Giants’ questionable treatment of Posey, the way they treated him and the way they treated their fans, who have a right to expect the Giants to put the best team on the field. It’s called a lack of integrity.

Of course, the problem with this curse, if it is a curse, is that it affects Posey and the fans by having him sidelined for who knows how long. But that is true of any curse worth its name. Innocent people will suffer.

Look at how many generations of players and fans suffered in Boston with the curse of the Bambino and the players and fans who continue to suffer in Chicago with the curse of the Billy Goat. Maybe you don’t believe in curses. I don’t. But I’m not Posey or the Giants fans.