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The longest introduction for a Hall of Fame inductee at Cooperstown final Wednesday was for the homo few in the audition knew most. Several malcontents hooted at the speaker, erstwhile caput of the Major League Baseball Players Clan (and current head of the hockey players' union) Don Fehr, wanting him to wrap it up. Apparently they were non aware of witnessing the induction of 1 of the most important figures in baseball history,

In 1990, while writing for the Hamlet Voice , I was asked by Marvin Miller to help him with his memoir, A Whole Dissimilar Ball Game: The Story of Baseball'due south New Deal . The volume, I'yard proud to say, is all the same in impress. If yous want to know how the players' marriage started, in 1966, how they came together to radically change the business of baseball game, the battles with owners that resulted in lockouts and strikes, and finally, how the players were able to strength the owners into granting gratis bureau, information technology's all there: Short Flood taking his instance to the Supreme Court in 1972, the heated negotiations in smoke-filled rooms, Miller's personal relationships with Reggie Jackson, Dave Winfield, Jim Bouton, George Steinbrenner, Jackie Robinson, and every other important figure in the game for nearly four decades.

What you won't read about in the book is the bitter behind-the-scenes politics that kept Marvin Miller out of the Hall of Fame for more 20 years. The late great Dodgers announcer Red Barber, in a line that has been quoted many times since, told me, "Marvin Miller is one of the three most important people in the game's history, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson."

How could a man who has had then much impact on the game exist kept out of Cooperstown? And why was he kept out?

The 2d question is easy: No affair what you read or hear, the Hall of Fame is rigidly controlled by Major League Baseball game and the commissioners and owners whose butts Miller and the union soundly whipped, and they didn't want to honor him in any fashion. Bowie Kuhn, the stuffed shirt of a commissioner who played the Washington Generals to Miller's Harlem Globetrotters from 1969 to '84, was elected into the HOF in 2007. But every year as Miller's name appeared on the ballot, at that place was some technicality or unspecified resistance; one year at that place were rumors that Miller was ineligible considering as head of the marriage he wasn't technically connected to Major League Baseball.  This, of course,  was nonsense, and after violent criticism from sportswriters, old players, fans, and even from a few MLB executives, that argument was dropped.  Some other was that non-players could just exist elected to the Hall by a unanimous vote, and afterward a careful review of the rules, this objection, too, evaporated.  In 2007, Bowie Kuhn, whom Marvin had bested in every spousal relationship-management conflict, and whom the owners had, in result, fired by non renewing his contract subsequently the 1984 season, was elected. The bulletin couldn't have been clearer, and Miller read it.

After Kuhn'south induction, he  wrote a alphabetic character to Jack O'Connell, secretary of the Baseball Writers' Association of America, which read, in part:

Paradoxically, I'1000 writing to thank you and your assembly for your part in nominating me for Hall of Fame consideration, and, at the same time, to enquire that you not practise this again. The anti-union bias of the powers who control the Hall has consistently prevented recognition of the celebrated significance of the changes to baseball brought about past collective bargaining … I find myself unwilling to contemplate one more rigged Veterans Committee whose members are handpicked to reach a particular outcome while offering pretense of a democratic vote. It is an insult to baseball fans, historians, sportswriters, and specially to those baseball players who sacrificed and brought the game into the 21st century. At the age of 91, I can do without farce.

Miller solemnly asked me non to cooperate or participate in any conciliatory ceremony if he was elected to the HOF afterward his death (equally he knew he would be). I promised to laurels his wishes.

Over the years, Miller'south achievement has been somewhat distorted and misunderstood. This is from a much-discussed piece by Malcolm Gladwell in 2010, in the New Yorker:

If one side and so thoroughly dominates another in the marketplace, is it really market place pricing whatever more? A negotiation in which a man tin become paid xx-ii million dollars for striking a baseball is not really a negotiation, information technology is a capitulation, and the lingering question left by Miller's revolution is whether the scales ended up being tilted too far in the direction of Talent — whether what Talent did with its newfound power was simply create a new authority ranking, this fourth dimension with itself at the top. A few years agone, a group of economists looked at more a hundred Fortune 500 firms, trying to figure out what predicted how much money the C.Due east. fabricated. Compensation, it turned out, was but weakly related to the size and profitability of the company. What really mattered was how much money the members of the compensation committee of the board of directors fabricated in their jobs. Pay is not determined vertically, in other words, co-ordinate to the characteristics of the system an executive works for; it is determined horizontally, co-ordinate to the characteristic of the executives' peers. They determine, among themselves, what the right amount is. This is not a market.

Gladwell is wrong in and then many ways it's difficult to know where to brainstorm.  Let's start here: Yes, executive pay is decided by other executives, and this is non a marketplace. The salaries of baseball players (and other professional person athletes) are decided by negotiations between the team, the role player, and his representative. The bottom line is that no 1 puts a gun to a baseball executive'due south head to force him to offering a histrion a contract.

In 2000, the Texas Rangers offered Alex Rodriguez a $250-plus million contract not out of generosity or because they were forced to or because Rodriguez demanded it but because it helped them bring in tons of revenue from new cablevision networks. In 2007, the Yankees paid him even more money, not because someone twisted their collective arm but because they had the money and believed he was worth it — in TV ratings and ticket and merchandise sales. (I can't say that on paper A-Rod was worth the money, only he did win two MVP awards and helped them win their only World Series in the unabridged decade.)

The bespeak is that in any negotiation, no ane forces a baseball game executive to do annihilation, let alone to bear witness a modicum of common sense. No pro athlete gets together with their peers to decide how much the athlete's salary would be — it'southward determined, as information technology should exist, past negotiation.

The larger signal that many, including Gladwell, did non encounter — and however don't — is that the Major League Baseball Players Association is a union , and achieved spectacular success because the players held together as a union .

Oddly, the prejudice against the MLBPA is as prevalent among lefties as it is among those on the right. Conservatives, at to the lowest degree some of them (George Will, for example), grasp the concept that anybody deserves to be paid a fair share of the wealth their labor has helped generate. Liberals believe, or should believe, that negotiation betwixt management and labor should be dictated by commonage bargaining — which, by definition, means labor must be represented past unions. Still, there are a lot of libs who, when faced with a work stoppage in their favorite sport, say things like "Who cares which side wins the negotiation? They're all but a bunch of multimillionaires." They should empathize that the players aren't being paid for hitting baseballs. They're being compensated for the acquirement generated by fans who pay to see them hit the baseball.

This concluding point is 1 that needs to exist made over and over, because each new generation of fans needs to exist educated. The baseball players' matrimony may non seem to have much in common with, say, the steelworkers' union (though Miller, who was chief economist for the steelworkers' union for many years, would take consequence with that) or Amazon workers desperately trying to course a union, but the case and the inspiration of the MLBPA is there, and it's there at a fourth dimension when we run across a resurgence of unions.  What Miller told baseball players when he became executive director of the matrimony in 1966 can be true for whatsoever matrimony member, "If you concord together, you can have things yous want inside reason."

Which is why, reluctantly, I went back on my promise to Miller not to support his election to the HOF. His plaque needs to be at that place, with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.   ❖

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Source: https://www.villagevoice.com/2021/09/15/marvin-millers-finally-in-baseballs-hall-of-fame-though-he-didnt-want-to-be/