Yes, I know, there are a lot of issues out there that need addressing but today I just want to put in a few words on Marvin Miller. For those of you less inclined to follow sports, Miller was the man who transformed the baseball players union into a real force. Granted, most people in society don’t view baseball players–or any athletes–as the downtrodden of society. But, the fact is, 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. No single person outside the lines, in my opinion, has had more of an impact on the game than Miller.

    And, yet, he is still denied a place in Baseball’s Hall of Fame. If you are not a player, you can be elected to the Hall as an executive in the sport or someone who has helped shape the sport. When it comes to Miller, who is now 90 years old, the owners have carried a grudge with them for all these years, refusing to induct him as a sort of punishment for empowering the players. It’s a sham.

    Yesterday, the sham continued when a newly-reconfigured veterans’ committee voted to induct the odious former Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Walter O’Malley and a few other completely irrelevant individuals–but denied Miller induction. Murray Chass has it right in The New York Times:

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.

    See the rest of his column here.