My one personal interaction with Marvin Miller, who died Tuesday at 95 after a yearlong battle with cancer, came about seven years ago, when I was serving as chapter chairman of the Boston Baseball Writers Association.
I had nominated Miller as our Judge Emil Fuchs Award winner, named after the one-time owner of the Boston Braves and given annually to recognized "long and meritorious service to baseball.'' It was our most prestigious award and the rest of the chapter thought Miller fit the qualifications perfectly.
Others, we were to discover, couldn't have disagreed more. The late Lou Gorman, who attended the dinner each year, was mortified by our choice. Lou sputtered that Miller had "ruined baseball'' in his role as the head of the Players Association from 1966 into the 1980s and vaguely threatened to boycott the dinner over Miller's inclusion.
By this time, Miller had been retired from his position of Executive Director for more than 20 years and Gorman had, for all intent and purposes, had been retired for more more than a decade.
In the interim, free agency had become a fact of life -- not just in baseball but in all sports -- in large part because of Miller and his pioneering work on behalf of players. I was stunned that such anger could still be directed at Miller, but perhaps I shouldn't have been.
After all, Miller changed the game more than any individual since the tandem of Branch Rickey and Jackie Robinson stood baseball on its head in 1947. Before Miller, players were essentially indentured servants, bound to a single team for life -- or until that team decided otherwise, by trading or releasing the player.
The reserve clause which Miller helped strike down seems positively archaic with the benefit of hindsight. Imagine graduating from high school or college, being told who your first -- and, as it turned out, last -- employer would be and knowing that you were bound to that employer for the rest of your working days.
Boston Red Sox
Sound un-American? Marvin Miller thought so, too.
Before Miller, the minimum salary hadn't been raised in 20 years. When he retired, the average salary had gone from 19,000 to 240,000. Some twenty years later, the average salary now tops 2 million annually.
It wasn't just free agency -- the ability to choose where and for whom you would work -- that Miller won. He also bargained for the right for matters to be determined by an arbitrator and vastly improved contributions to players' pension funds.
And despite the rantings of the commissioner and owners -- and decades after the fact, a former general manager -- Miller didn't ruin the game. To the contrary, the sport prospered as never before.
It expanded geographically -- not only in the U.S., but across the globe. Its revenues grew to the point where baseball is now a 7 billion per year industry. Attendance -- at both the minor league and major league levels -- grows annually. Contrary to the predictions of gloom and doom, the game has never been healthier.
Of course, that doesn't mean that Miller isn't blamed for a host of things. Even today, some fans charge that the rising tide of salaries corresponded with a similar boost in the cost of tickets.
But that argument is fraught with economic misconceptions, not the least of which is ignoring the fact that ticket prices are largely driven not by the cost of labor but by consumer supply-and-demand. To think that owners would still be charging 1970s prices if they could only pay players 1970s-era salaries is the height of naivete.
And fans who decry the explosion in player salaries by offering "I'd play for free!'' miss the entire point: No one would pay to watch you play.
The enmity toward Miller, however, lasted until his death. Five times his name came up for consideration for induction into the Hall of Fame and five times he came up short, thanks to the efforts of some former executives who never forgave Miller for dragging the game into the 20th century.
Oh, well. No plaque or posthumous enshrinement is needed to validate Miller's great contributions to the game and no amount of revisionist history can counteract his enormous impact.