Predictably, Bud Selig’s election to the Baseball Hall of Fame last week was accompanied by criticism that he was, shall we say, timid on the issue of drug testing for much of his near quarter-century as MLB commissioner. The gurgling PED cesspool overflowed for years by the time Uncle Bud and the players/users/cheaters finally reckoned with the fetid, and still lingering, stench.
In turn, and again predictably, the criticism of Selig grew into a “then why not?’’ case to be made for the litany of alleged PED scoundrels — Barry Bonds, Mark McGwire, Manny Ramirez, et al — to gain entry to the Hall. After all, if the Commish lacked the gumption to do something about it, why should the needle-users, pill-poppers, and ointment spreaders be denied Cooperstown enshrinement?
Or so the argument goes, and will continue, I imagine, until all the lyin’ miscreants have their bronzed likenesses (albeit with embedded asterisks) hung in the Great Hall. I hope that doesn’t happen, but I think it will, because we all know time has a way of making us, you know, misremember the important stuff such as rules and moral underpinnings.
Frankly, there’s a bigger, far more bitter, pill to swallow here, folks, and it’s the one that Marvin Miller forced down daily for the quarter-century or so before his death in 2012.
No one deserves to be enshrined in Cooperstown more than Miller, the first executive director and unparalleled leader of the Players Association. No builder. No Cy Young winner. No 500-home run hitter. No Triple Crown winner. No one.
All the bountiful riches and benefits the players enjoy today trace back to the Brooklyn-born Miller, the soft-spoken, CBA-thumping economist/unionist whose only true two equals in Cooperstown are Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson. Ruth gave the game the home run. Robinson provided it with conscience. Miller delivered the players their dignity, their spine, their fortunes.
A strong case could be made for Curt Flood, the fine ex-St. Louis Cardinals outfielder, being enshrined the same day. With Miller’s help, Flood challenged the game’s Reserve Clause all the way to the Supreme Court in 1972. Flood lost (a 5-3-1 decision), but it was his singular courage, which ultimately led him to retire as a pariah, that in short time emboldened Miller to obliterate the Reserve Clause with cases involving Catfish Hunter, Andy Messersmith, and Dave McNally. The financial floodgates swung wide.
Until Miller was hired as the union’s executive director in 1966, players were chattel, believing the owners’ decades-refined prattle that they were fortunate to make a paycheck for playing a kids’ game. The players bought it, lock, stock, and rosin bag, or at least most of the herd did, until Flood stuck a finger in the owners’ eyes.
The same was true across the sports industry, be it in the NBA, NHL or NFL. A tiny few, the biggest stars, made real money. The rest lived within the rules and off the psychic income of flattering headlines, fan adulation, and the extra bucks they could make selling insurance or driving a truck in the offseason.
Consider: The average MLB salary was $19,000 when Miller was hired away as a top dog with the United Steelworkers Union. That is not a typo. On average, over a six-month MLB season, they made around $800 a week.
“I loved baseball and I loved a good fight,’’ Miller wrote in his 1991 memoir “A Whole Different Ball Game.’’ “In my mind, ballplayers were among the most exploited workers in America.’’
There in fact was no collective bargaining agreement between the players and owners at the time he was hired. Miller created the CBA and then used it as the wellspring that saw him grow the average player salary to $326,000 by the time he stepped down as the day-to-day executive director in 1982. Upon his death just four years ago, the average MLB salary had grown tenfold to some $3 million. It’s now pushing $4 million in a league, unlike all the others, that still doesn’t have a salary cap restricting wages.
Today, each MLB team can spend up to $195 million before an onerous luxury tax is triggered. But the players otherwise feed from the bottomless trough of cash that Miller created through a series of unyielding negotiations that added up to one thing: the players believing in themselves as the game’s most important asset.
Before Miller, the owners convinced the players, and the consumer, that the game was the show. Miller convinced the players, and ultimately the country, there was no show without them. He made the self-evident evident to themselves.
Little wonder that Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner during a string of velveteen hammerings Miller dealt the owners, had a jaundiced view of his adversary. In his memoir “Hardball,’’ Kuhn compared Miller’s demeanor to that which “one would find in an abused animal’’ adding that “it precluded trust or affection.’’
Kuhn, by the way, is in the Hall of Fame. If for no other reason, and perhaps only because, he was able to stand up and take liquids after the series of maulings he withstood from that so-called abused animal.
A year from now, Miller again will be up for induction, this time by the recently formed “Today’s Game Era Committee’’ that last week hustled Selig and John Schuerholz to Cooperstown’s door. He has been denied six times, five of those before he died.
In 2008, at the age of 91, Miller wrote that he no longer wanted to be considered, convinced over time that the cards had been stacked against him by the owners and their toads on the voting committee.
“At my age,’’ he wrote, four years before succumbing to liver cancer, “I can do without farce.’’
Not only had the cards been stacked, but reshuffled and stacked anew as the Veterans Committee, previously charged to vote yay or nay, changed its composition among voters and the guidelines for induction. Absurd, unfair, farcical.
The time is far overdue for that to end. There has to be space made for Marvin Miller in Cooperstown. Until there is, his legacy remains diminished and unrewarded, exactly the ground where his players stood when they hired him in 1966.
Kevin Paul Dupont’s “On Second Thought’’ appears regularly in the Sunday Globe Sports section. He can be reached at dupont@globe.com. Follow him on Twitter @GlobeKPD.
