The Chris Moeller Archives

Marvin Miller 1917-2012

Marvin Miller, a man far too intelligent, too honest, too tough, and too revolutionary to warrant induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame, died this morning in New York City at the age of 95.

The founding director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Miller made everybody associated with professional baseball much wealthier than they otherwise would have been. Miller worked to create the sport’s pension system and an arbitration process for salary disputes. He chipped away at the federal anti-trust exemption enjoyed by baseball owners that kept a ballplayer contractually-bound to his club for the rest of his natural life. The average annual player salary in MLB jumped from $19,000 to $240,000 between Miller’s first year on the job in 1966 and his last in 1983, and thanks to the evolution of free agency, guided forward by Miller during the 1970’s, it has increased over three subsequent decades to more than $3 million. Umpires have also unionized successfully since the establishment of the Players Association, minor league players and umpires have seen significant improvements to their salaries and benefits, and baseball club owners, who had to be almost literally dragged, kicking and screaming, by Miller into the Progressive Era, witnessed exponential increases in the financial value of their franchises thanks to the large employee investments forced upon them.

Many Miller obituaries today are misstating the union leader’s legacy. The LA Times claims that the new financial structure in baseball, propelled by Miller, resulted in the higher ticket prices we see today, but to believe this nonsense, you have to also believe that club owners had been keeping ticket prices artificially lower than public demand prior to Miller’s ascendancy. This is a ludicrous proposition on its face. The Times also erroneously suggests that Miller’s tenure sparked a “growing commercialism in sport,” but it’s as ignorant to say that this particular trend began in 1966 as it would be to say that the use of “performance enhancing drugs” first sprouted in professional baseball in the late ‘80s.

Miller, who had previously spent 16 years working with the United Steelworkers, was not universally loved, or even respected, within the game of baseball. A union leader that was wouldn’t be worth a bag of shit. At his first meeting with players in spring training, 1965, he told the assembled athletes they should fire him if they ever heard management personnel praising him. As difficult as it is to believe now, Miller’s predecessor as “union leader” in Major League Baseball had been handpicked for the position by the owners.

Before Miller’s arrival on the scene, it didn’t even occur to most Americans that baseball players were also workers, and as capable of organizing for their own employment benefits as those in any other trade. Miller is controversial among fans even today because so many of them have bought into that stubborn lie-- promoted by the people charging them for entry into the ballparks-- that professional baseball is a game and not a business. I would make the case that Marvin Miller is nothing less than the most socially-significant individual in the history of American sports, on par with Jackie Robinson, Muhammad Ali, and Jack Johnson. His impact on and off the field of play is felt daily in the culture of sports, in the sports media, within the local business dynamics of America’s largest cities, and in labor circles generally.

Marvin Miller was not a moderate politically, even for a trade unionist. He was a proud man of the Left. In the American public conscience, he married the principals of individualism and personal freedom to the collectivist workers’ movement in a way that perhaps no other American has since Gene Debs. His economic principles were so prescient, and his cause of employee emancipation so just, that under him, socialist philosophers could find common ground with neoliberal economists like George Will, and with Republican baseball players like former U.S. Senator Jim Bunning and Nolan Ryan. The latter singled out Miller for thanks during his Hall of Fame induction speech in 1999.

Miller was interviewed by the great humanist Studs Terkel for Terkel’s book,“Coming of Age," in 1995. Miller told him, "Even though baseball is called a team sport, the team players are great individualists. When you step into the batter's box, you are all alone. When you're on the pitcher's mound, you are all alone. More than in most games, it is a sport of individualists. What I am most proud of in my whole career with baseball is that I was able to educate players in the importance of acting together. That's what it's all about."

Miller is survived by his two children.

posted by CM @ 10:32 PM