Monday, February 14, 2000

In 1947, the minimum salary for a major league baseball player was $5,000. In 1967, it was $6,000. Out of the goodness of their hearts, the team owners unilaterally gave the players one $1,000-per-year raise in twenty years.

You might counter by saying, "Well, almost nobody made the minimum." This is true; only rookies and players who were deemed washed up or nearly so made the minimum. Most players made a few hundred to a few thousand more than the minimum, but that was totally up to each team's management. There were no standards by which pay was equal amongst players with similar statistics across franchises. Players with multiple productive years found that they were asked to take salary cuts, because some owner thought they'd had their last good year. The reason given: "Well, we just think so." The next season, they might hear, "Well, we were wrong, but now we think last year will prove to be your last good year."

Superstars made $100K a year. That figure was established before World War II, for DiMaggio and Williams, among others (though its origins are in a long-before time -- the heyday of one George Ruth), and the owners stuck with it until twenty years after the war was over.

If a player thought he was worth more, he had one option: he could retire. He couldn't quit and play for another team because of the Reserve Clause. There was also no mechanism for impartial arbitration, as there is today. Despite the growing attendance, ticket prices, and revenues of the sport from television (which, by 1966, were becoming gigantic and would soon become astronomic), the owners set the price for talent, and if you didn't like it you could try your hand at farming.

In Marvin Miller, the owners got exactly what they deserved.

In case you don't know, Marvin Miller was the first Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. I don't think I've ever seen a flattering story about Miller in a newspaper or sports periodical. I do think it is fair to say that during his time with the MLBPA, he was demonized in the press. This isn't surprising: in order to maintain access to the players, journalists must stay on the good side of management, or they don't get allowed in the clubhouse. Marvin Miller put baseball beat writers in the position of having to write about the difference between a strike and a lockout (something those writers would have preferred not to do) during a time when the owners did not want the public to know the difference. Most writers took the line they got from the owners (understandably; after all, their jobs were at stake).

Marvin Miller, however, was doing his job. He was educating the players about their rights as employees and humans, and in turn, educating the public. A Whole Different Ball Game: The Sport and Business of Baseball (1991 Birch Lane Press, New York) is not his autobiography. It is a history of a period in baseball, written by a man who was a huge part of that history. A ghostwriter did not write it (though Allen Barra helped). A very smart, very opinionated man who loves baseball and has a lot of respect for his readers' intelligence and no tolerance for bullshit wrote it. He wrote it about his subject, not about himself.

If you want to know about the Curt Flood case, you need to read this. If you want to understand free agency, ditto. (Hint: free agency was always there in the standard contract that every ballplayer signed, but the owners blackballed every player who tried to use it.) If you think Commissioners of Baseball were or ever might be independent, get disabused here. If you thought Bowie Kuhn was a moron... get in line.

Marvin Miller was not a rabble-rouser or a communist. He was hired as a contract negotiator. The players employed him, and that's what he did. A contract negotiator (like a politician) compromises. He does what his employers tell him, but also looks out for their best interests, and educates them about all the details that they need to make informed decisions.

In 1966 Robin Roberts, Jim Bunning, Harvey Kuenn, and a few others were starting up the MLBPA from scratch, a grassroots organizing effort. Their chief concern was the pension fund, and some promises the owners broke over payments to it. Specifically, All-Star Games were traditionally played to add revenue to the players' pension fund. The owners got the gate receipts for every other game played during the year, but this one (or two) generated just about the only income that went into the pension. One year, the owners decided they hadn't made enough money, so they split the revenue for an All-Star Game between themselves. Just because.

At that time, Miller was the chief economist and assistant to the president of the Steelworkers Union. He was not a lawyer. In his initial interview for the Executive Director position, Roberts told him that Richard Nixon was the guy they wanted to be the union's general counsel. Yes, Richard Milhous Nixon: future non-denying denier, self-appointed non-crook, and noted non-friend to labor. Um, I think later he was a president, too. Clearly, these ballplayers didn't have a clue, beyond knowing that they needed to organize to protect their pensions.

So Miller took the job, but then he had to be elected to it. The first thing he did was meet everybody. In spring training 1966 he went to meet every player on every major league team everywhere, in the Grapefruit and the Cactus leagues. An enormous task. And so the ride began. It took him a year, mostly without pay, to win the job, but win it he did.

One of the things that blew me away as I was reading this book was Miller's incredible capacity for hard work. Only once or twice during the course of the book does Miller mention his exhaustion. He was loyal to the players, and performed in a superhuman fashion, but he never makes a big deal about it. He makes a big deal about the victories, how freedom results from them, and how baseball players now have the same rights as employees everywhere. And he gives you all the nuts and bolts of how it happened, from the perspective of a guy who was sitting at the table. Yet he doesn't whine about how stressful it is to sit at that table. Or about the public's or media's perception of him. The wire photo image of his smiling mustachioed face is beaming under headlines like "Why There Is No Baseball" and "The Man Who's Killing Sport" on the front page of the sports section in every local newspaper. Plus, there are those nasty caricatures in the op-ed cartoons. All the while he's spending 18-hour days in negotiations, against a tag-team of ownership lawyers whose strategy is to prolong and obfuscate the process. And there he was, when the negotiations were over. Sometimes smiling and shaking hands with the owners and their lawyers. Sometimes glaring and not shaking hands. But always victorious, gaunt, and spent.

Who would you think Marvin Miller's favorite owner would be? Certainly not Charles O. Finley, the legendary jerk/owner of the Athletics. But Finley is, and Miller tells us why: Finley was the only owner who understood the ramifications of everything that was going on in the contract negotiations. Finley, in fact, came to want all players to be free agents every year, so that the glut of players on the market would keep salaries more constant. An irritating man, but not a stupid one. This cannot be said of most of the owners of that time. Except for the irritating part.

Heroes are given their due in this book. Great players, like Willie Mays and Brooks Robinson, show up big time for the union; Mays with a memorable speech, and Robinson and his wife Connie housing younger and less well-off Orioles players in their home during a strike. There are villains, too, but Miller treats them with detachment, as most of them later apologize for their villainy. Don't get me started on the buffoons.

Portions of the late chapters of the book are difficult reading. Miller uses them to settle old scores, some of which don't need to be settled. Two of them did, however: Reggie Jackson and Catfish Hunter conveniently ignored any mention of the Players Association in their books, and that's just flat-out stupid. Jackson was one of the most effective Player Reps ever. Catfish Hunter thanked the Yankees management for making him a rich man in his Hall of Fame speech, but didn't mention the MLBPA -- who made him aware of his possible free agency, took the case, and won it for him -- in his speech or his book. What an ingrate. But now he's a dead ingrate.

Miller was a very smart, self-aware man who got hired by baseball players to protect their employment rights. During a time when Jim Bouton was writing about how ballplayers were deriding each other as being "intellectuals" for reading magazines on airplanes, Miller gave them an education and worked for them like a crazed weasel. Bouton was a great admirer of Miller's, and created a hilarious baseball card of Miller, which lists his hobbies as "Rational Discussion" and "Fighting Injustice." His position, of course, is "Free Agent." Bouton's blurb for this book calls Miller "the true commissioner of baseball."

Marvin Miller's achievements are extraordinary. He is often blamed for free agency, but as I've said, free agency was something that was always in the players' standard contract. Miller merely required the owners to obey parts of the contract that they wrote. He is, however, the author of the arbitration and the grievance procedures in baseball, and, as any union worker knows, it is the threat (not necessarily the use) of arbitration and grievance that makes the workplace hospitable to workers. In sixteen years as the Executive Director of the MLBPA, he created the fairest union in American sports and changed the way all sports operated. Red Barber describes him as the second most influential person in baseball history, next to George Ruth.

Had I a vote, I'd use it to put the guy in the Baseball Hall of Fame.

When I go to hell (which I'm certain I will, thanks to my loving upbringing), and I am punished by having to renegotiate the original 1994 union contract for Green Apple Books in San Francisco over and over again every day (which I do in my dreams every night, so what's the damn difference?), I expect I'll pull a note out of my pocket every day that has Marvin Miller's phone number on it. It will be off by one digit. Nur ni neep. We're sorry, but the number you have reached has been disconnected or is no longer in service. Please try again....

Copyright © 2000 by David Fox

E-mail David at dfox@best.com

Gregg Pearlman, gregg@EEEEEEgp.com

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