The Chris Moeller Archives

For your Hall consideration...

Baseball Hall of Fame voting season has arrived again. On Sunday, two separate Veterans Committee groups will vote from a pair of lists of managers, umpires, executives, and pioneers, with the results to be announced Monday. The most obvious candidate for induction on these ballots is Marvin Miller, the man who built the players association into what is arguably today the strongest union on the planet. Sadly, the latest voting configuration for the Hall puts the candidacy of the now-90-year-old Miller predominately in the hands of his former adversaries from the front offices of the Major League ballclubs. A 12-member panel will vote on the executives and pioneers, and 7 of those members are or were executives themselves. Gone from his jury are many of Miller's long-time associates and allies among the Hall of Fame players, as well as the Spink and Ford Frick Award winners for print media and broadcasting.

Miller's impact as the union's executive director from 1966 to 1982 is best measured by a rise in the average player's annual salary during that time from $6,000 to more than $500,000. Miller also helped to steer Curt Flood's legal challenge of the reserve clause, a uniform contractual item of the time that bound a player to a single team for life. But what's often not included in discussions of Miller's impact on the game were the changes that resulted from the union's principal successes-- revolutionary improvements in team travel conditions and ballpark facilities. He was also the springboard for the establishment of salary arbitration, which stripped away the power to decide salary disputes from the commissioner, the owners' "handpicked toady," as Miller has often referenced the position.

In truth, baseball's executives also owe a debt to Miller, and to the former chief counsel of the union, Richard Moss, and to Miller's successor, Donald Fehr, for much of their accumulated wealth today. It's been the driving up of players' salaries that has largely spurred the exponential increase in franchise values in the financial market. In 1973, George Steinbrenner and a minority partner bought the New York Yankees from CBS for $10 million. This past April, Forbes magazine placed the estimated value of the franchise at $1.2 billion.

"I was exposing the whopping lie of the owners that they don't make money," Miller told oral historian Studs Terkel in 1995, "I took the most recent figures from Fortune magazine. The total payroll figures, the total gate receipts, the TV income. It was public knowledge. I (told the players), 'I know what you've heard about unions, but you must understand that only by working together can you have any impact.

"Consider the player who fights back, who's a holdout. The company sends him a damn contract that is an insult. He's had a great year and they offer him a cut. You may not know this, but Jimmy Foxx, who won the Triple Crown, was offered a pay cut the following year. Even a Joe DiMaggio, holding out after his second and third years, probably the greatest two consecutive years any player ever had, was holding out for $35,000. He had to crawl back and take whatever Colonel Ruppert, the owner, offered him. That's the fate of an individual as skilled and valued as Joe DiMaggio. But all of you together are something else. There's no way to deny anything that is reasonable, because you're irreplaceable as a group."

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Whitey Herzog, the former Cards' manager, both skipper and front office architect of the 1982 World Champions, needs 12 of 16 votes from the managers-umpires panel this weekend to earn Hall of Fame induction. "I'd be elated," the 76-year-old "White Rat" tells the Post-Dispatch's Rick Hummel, "but everytime I talk about it, I don't make it. I (think) umpire Doug Harvey will make it. I think it's going to be close... I'll probably get nine or 10 votes, but I don't know if I'm going to get 12. It's very uncertain."

Herzog elaborates, "I didn't get along with Harvey on or off the field. He was very dishonest. But he was the best-dressed umpire. And he thought he knew more than the weatherman." Then recalling a rain-related incident in which Harvey called off a sold-out game against the Cubs before it even started, "We had to have the banks open up so we could give the people their money back."

That being said-- "I'd go in with Jesus Christ or I'd go in with the devil," Herzog quipped, "It wouldn't make any difference. I'd even go in under an assumed name."

posted by CM @ 12:37 PM