Sunday there will be yet another ceremony at the National Baseball Hall of Fame--and it will be, without anyone saying so, a ceremony that continues the despicable behavior towards the one man who did more to change baseball outside the lines than perhaps any single individual: Marvin Miller. Despicable because, simply because Marvin Miller built the players' union into a serious union, the owners have refused to vote him into the Hall of Fame. It's even more despicable because, after Miller died at age 95 in November 2012, you would think that people would have an ounce of decency, a bit of humanity, to tamp down the animosity enough to be big and do the right thing. But, they have not.
I've had a small obsession for a number of years about somehow getting Miller his due, largely because his story is the story of the power of unions and of the transformation of peoples' consciousness.
I have loved baseball since I was a kid. Just for the game itself. But, as I got older, and worked as a labor activist/writer and generally politically engaged person, it was baseball, and other sports, that quite clearly were the great connector: you can walk into any meeting, any union hall, any community, sit down with someone you never met and begin to forge some relationship with a simple sentence: "How about that no-hitter last night?"...
Before Miller arrived in 1966 to take over as executive director of the players association, baseball players were effectively the property of the teams they played for–-they couldn’t leave of their own accord to play for another team. Their pensions were crappy and they basically had very little bargaining power.
Miller transformed the union–and the entire industry–largely by engineering what would become free agency, but, in the bigger sense, he made the Players Association into a union.
There is a forward and introduction in Miller's fascinating 1991 autobiography, "A Whole Different Ball Game: The Inside Story of Baseball's New Deal" (I proudly own an autographed copy). The amazing Studs Terkel writes:
Marvin Miller, the founding executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, came along and not only changed the rules of the game but brought an end to the age of innocence: for some of our finest athletes, it was a liberating experience. They discovered that "union" was not a dirty word. They discovered a sense of community. One of the most aspects of this book concerns ballplayers, including the stars, fighting not only for themselves, but for the old-timers as well as for the kids yet to come. In these days, when union-busting is the fashion of the day, and mean-spiritedness the new religion, this is pretty thrilling stuff.
Marvin Miller, I suspect, is the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis. Though the times may be out of joint for trade unionism, though "scab" is no longer a dirty word in too many quarters, something remarkable has happened to our pro athletes: they have discovered where the body is buried, who gets what and who earns what he gets. And it began with the baseball players.[emphasis added]
Bill James, who is probably the leading baseball statistician, wrote, in part:
If baseball ever buys itself a mountain and starts carving faces in it, one of the first men to go up is sure to be Marvin Miller...
...Miller's battle was not for himself, but for what he saw as being right, the right of players to control their own careers and participate in the enormous wealth generated by major league baseball. He worked hard to keep the spotlight off himself and on the issues, on the absurdity of the status quo--but the simple fact that so little was know about him, as a man, enabled his opponents to patin onto him whatever image they chose. He courted enmies among the wealthy and powerful and became the target of their animus. Because he attacked the settled issues of power, it was so easy to portray him as powerful. The irony of Miller's greatness is that he became larger than life by trying hard not to be, by trying simply to slip into the role he had created for himself.
One of the most powerful weapons used against unions is to essentially write them out of history: children don’t learn about unions in schools. Most politicians only mention unions when they are slumming for a check for their campaigns or they promise to put on sneakers and walk picket lines when elected but somehow that promise is forgotten once the election is over; they talk great rhetoric about the “middle class” but you almost never hear, unprompted and certainly not in front of crowds outside a union hall, a great speech about unions and their central place in making a healthy economy.
Now, the refusal, posthumously, to pave the way for Miller's induction is a continued denial of labor's role. I am still hopeful that maybe this campaign might still take off...in the near future.
Most sports "journalists" ignore this story. I use "journalist" quite loosely because, largely, they avoid the social aspects of sports particularly when it comes to labor rights. It doesn't fit with the narrative--and most of them are beholden to teams and leagues for access so they came their mouths shut (come to think of it, they aren't much different than political journalists these days...but I digress).
Murray Chass of The New York Times had a strong column on Miller back in 2007 on the occasion of the snub of the day:
The National Baseball Hall of Fame has become a national joke. Its latest electoral contrivance elected three former executives to the Hall yesterday, none named Marvin Miller. Making the committee’s decision even worse, one of the three is named Bowie Kuhn.
For any committee of 12 supposedly knowledgeable baseball people to elect Kuhn, Barney Dreyfuss and Walter O’Malley and not Miller defies reasonable and logical explanation.
Of the three men elected by this newfangled panel, O’Malley deserves the honor because by moving his Brooklyn Dodgers to Los Angeles 50 years ago, a move for which he is still reviled in Brooklyn, he opened the entire country to baseball. The new geography made a significant impact on Major League Baseball.
Few men, if any, however, made as significant an impact as Miller on Major League Baseball. You don’t have to like what he did to recognize that impact. The game today is what it is in great part because of what Miller did as executive director of the players union from 1966 through 1983.
I hope, probably in vain, that someone like Joe Torre would use the moment on Sunday of his well-deserved induction to at least mention Marvin Miller's role. After all, Torre was, during his playing years, an active union rep for his team (Atlanta). A few years ago, I traveled to Major League Baseball's winter meetings to try to drum up support among players for Miller's induction. I saw Torre, and asked him: isn't it time? His response: no doubt (Though, after handing him a card, I never heard from him subsequently).
Personally, I will not watch the induction ceremony, nor set foot in the Hall of Fame (which is not a far drive away) until Marvin Miller is inducted. It would feel like scabbing, crossing a picket line. Certainly, it would feel like ignoring a small, and invisible to most, dab of venom running through the building, an ugly stain that divides--and that is not what baseball should be about.