Marvin Miller: Cooperstown’s Greatest Snub No More

In December 2019, on the “Modern Baseball” ballot for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, longtime catcher Ted Simmons was elected, and, finally, so was Marvin Miller, the former Executive Director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Miller was on a ballot with 9 players who had a significant impact on the game between 1970-87. Going back to 1981, this was the ninth time that Miller had been on one of these ballots. (The Eras Committee used to be referred to as the Veterans Committee). Miller (posthumously) and Simmons were supposed to be inducted in the summer of 2020 but, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, the ceremony was postponed. Tomorrow, finally, Simmons and Miller (along with Derek Jeter and Larry Walker) will have their Cooperstown plaques revealed.

After many years of disappointment, which prompted Miller to ask NOT to be considered anymore, the labor leader finally was selected two years ago when 12 out of the 16 members of the Modern Baseball Eras Committee cast ballots in favor, giving him exactly the 75% tally needed to get a plaque in Cooperstown.

Because he was a labor leader, Miller had a longtime adversarial relationship with baseball’s owners. As I’ll show later in this piece, Miller had a few close calls with the Hall of Fame voting, once finishing a single vote shy of induction. One of the challenges has been the makeup of the committee members. Virtually every 16-member committee that has voted on Hall of Famers for the last two decades has included 4 to 5 current or former MLB owners. (There were also some other ill-conceived voting systems used which I’ll chronicle shortly).

Anyway, the presence of multiple owners on the voting committees had for many years served as a shield to keep Miller out of the Hall while conferring Cooperstown plaques on owners and commissioners (notably Bowie Kuhn) against whom Miller waged his labor wars.

The 2020 vote was different. The 16-member panel of the Modern Baseball Committee contained 6 Hall of Fame players, 6 executives, and 4 long-time media members. One can assume that the players (for whom Miller helped make millions) voted in favor. Additionally, most members of the media have been sympathetic to the Cooperstown candidacy of the labor leader. Theoretically, that would have given Miller 10 of the 12 votes he needed. In reality, he got 12 on the nose. What may have helped is that five of the six executives on the committee were former General Managers (not owners). Additionally, these GMs almost exclusively plied their trades after Miller’s time with the MLBPA. Regardless of who voted for whom, Miller got his 12 votes and is going to the Hall of Fame.

This is an update of an article originally posted on November 28th, 2019, a couple of weeks before the Modern Baseball election that put Miller into the Hall of Fame. Most of the balance of this piece is left as it was before the election.

(cover photo: TMW)

Who was Marvin Miller and why does he belong in Cooperstown?

Marvin Miller was an economist by trade, not a lawyer, and he changed the economics of baseball forever. In the spring of 1966, Los Angeles Dodgers aces Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale formed their own mini-union by refusing to report to training camp. Their goal was to demand bigger raises than management was willing to give after the pair combined for 49 wins and a World Series title in 1965. When the dust settled, Koufax got $125,000. Drysdale got $110,000. At the same time as the famous Koufax-Drysdale holdout, Miller was visiting with the players of all 20 teams, extolling the benefits of a strong union.

A little over ten years later, thanks to Miller, full-fledged free agency was in place, and players of Koufax’s and Drysdale’s skill were inking multi-million deals. Today, thanks to the pioneering work of Miller and others, the top seven starting pitchers in the 2019 World Series had already earned nearly $900 million combined, with guarantees of $466 million in the years to come.

Red Barber, the Hall of Fame broadcaster for the Brooklyn Dodgers and the Yankees, once referred to Miller as one of the three most influential men in the history of baseball, the others being Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson. Mets legend Tom Seaver once called Miller’s exclusion from the Hall “a national disgrace.”

“If I had to pick one person who is missing from the Hall of Fame and I think should be there, it’s Marvin Miller… I don’t think that you could make a list of the 10 most influential people in the history of the game without including Marvin Miller.”

— Bob Costas, in The Chicago Tribune (12/14/2019)

“The right thing was to have elected Miller into the Baseball Hall of Fame many, many years ago. It’s both baffling and unconscionable to me that it didn’t happen. Veterans Committee members found their collective voices in electing pro-owner shill Bowie Kuhn, racist owner Tom Yawkey, owner Walter O’Malley, who moved the Dodgers out of Brooklyn, and controversial commissioner Bud Selig. But enough of them held such heartfelt grudges that they repeatedly shut the door on Marvin Miller.”

— Joe Posnanski, The Athletic (11/8/2019)

Cooperstown Cred: Marvin Miller

• Executive Director of the MLB Players Association (1966-82)
• Oversaw the dismantling of the reserve clause, which kept players bound to their teams in perpetuity
• Secured rights for players to salary arbitration and free agency
• During his tenure, the average MLB salary rose from $19,000 to $241,497

If you’re a young fan watching baseball today, it’s hard to fathom how different life was for players in the first century of recorded baseball history, which goes back to 1871. Until Marvin Miller came along, many Major League Baseball players had to take jobs in the off-season to supplement their incomes. Players had no leverage in contract negotiations unless they simply refused to play.

In 1966 players were not much more than indentured servants to their teams, thanks to the long-standing “reserve clause” and a 1922 Supreme Court decision that gave MLB an antitrust exemption. The reserve clause (Paragraph 10 of the Uniform Player Contract) gave a club the right to renew a player’s contract for a period of one year in perpetuity.

Miller, previously from the United Steel Workers of America, became the Executive Director of the Players Association after touring the teams in spring training. Miller had to overcome the inherent hostility of the players towards unionization.

“Players had been taught that baseball was a game, not a business; the owners were sportsmen, not businessmen; the commissioner was there to serve the game, not the owners (by whom he was hired and to whom he answered). The party line was that players should feel privileged to be able to play for a living while the average American had to work for a living. Unions, they were reminded, meant work stoppages, mafia involvement, and violence. The most important issue in that list was work stoppage. No work meant no pay, and few players could afford to miss a paycheck.”

— Michael Haupert (Marvin Miller and the Birth of the MLBPA, the SABR Spring 2017 Baseball Research Journal)

The owners overplayed their hand, however. As Miller toured the spring camps from California to Arizona to Florida, he began to win over the players. On April 12, 1966, the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) announced Miller as the Executive Director of what had been, up to that point, a largely ineffective association.

Slowly but surely, Miller worked to change the balance of power from the owners to the players. He negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement in 1968, which raised the minimum salary from $7,000 to $10,000 and put in place a formal structure to resolve disputes. Miller’s united players went on strike in the spring of 1972 (the first work stoppage in MLB history) in order to get better pension benefits. In 1973, the salary arbitration process was established.

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The Establishment of Free Agency

As for free agency, it took a couple of court challenges for Miller to be able to force the owners’ hands. The first and most famous challenge to the reserve clause was from 6-time Gold Glove winner Curt Flood, who did not want to accept a trade from the St. Louis Cardinals to the Philadelphia Phillies. Miller advised Flood that the odds were against him but, once convinced that Flood was determined, went to the union’s executive committee, which agreed to finance the lawsuit. The case (Flood v Kuhn, with “Kuhn” being Commissioner Bowie Kuhn) went all the way to the Supreme Court, where Flood lost his case on a 5-3 vote.

Although Flood lost his case, the long-term benefit to the players came when Miller negotiated the right to have grievances settled by an impartial arbitrator as a way to avoid long, drawn-out suits like Flood’s. That arbitration process led to Catfish Hunter being allowed to become a free agent after the 1974 season on the basis that Oakland Athletics owner Charles Finley had violated his contract. Just over two weeks after being granted free agency on December 16th, Hunter signed a five-year contract with the New York Yankees that was estimated at the time to be worth a robust $3.75 million.

In the spring of 1975, pitcher Andy Messersmith refused to sign his contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers because he wanted a no-trade clause. Late in the season, still unsigned, Messersmith took the Dodgers to the same binding arbitration that Miller had negotiated in the wake of the Flood decision. Miller got Dave McNally to join the challenge to the reserve clause. The long-time Orioles lefty was contemplating retirement but was in a contract dispute with his new team, the Montreal Expos.

Just before Christmas, arbitrator Peter Seitz accepted the players’ contention that, if they went a year without a contract, the reserve clause was null and void. He essentially declared the two pitchers free agents. Messersmith signed a three-year, $1 million contract with the Atlanta Braves (with a no-trade clause) while McNally decided to retire, satisfied in his role to help other players.

The owners, starting to see the writing on the wall, eventually agreed to a new CBA with Miller in which all players would be eligible for free agency after six years of service time. I’ll never forget the winter of 1976-77 when a couple of dozen players switched teams under the new free agency program. As a 9-year old kid, I couldn’t wait to open the sports section every day to see which players had shifted teams.

Unfortunately, the collateral damage of Miller’s work on behalf of the players was the owners’ insistence that teams losing free agents be compensated. The issue over compensation ultimately resulted in the 50-day strike of 1981, which wiped out approximately a third of the schedule.

At the end of the 1982 season, the 65-year old Miller retired, having seen the average player salary grow to $241,497. He remained active as a consultant and a member of the union’s negotiating team for years.

Marvin Miller Hall of Fame Snubs

Marvin Miller retired in 1982. The first time he was ever considered for the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum was 19 years later, in 2001, a little shy of his 83rd birthday. Going back to 1939, the Hall of Fame has honored more than just the best players. There has been a “Pioneer/Executive” category for Hall of Famers as well. The same is true for managers and umpires.

It’s not the same as the Frick Award for broadcasters or the Spink Award for writers, who are honored in a separate wing of the museum in Cooperstown. “Pioneer/Executive” inductees in the Hall have plaques that are the same size and in the same magnificent hall as the game’s great players.

Three men in the Pioneer/Executive category were inducted into Cooperstown in the 1990s while Miller was not even considered: Bill Veeck (longtime owner of the Indians, Browns, and White Sox), William Hulbert (the “father” of the National League, who died in 1882), and Lee MacPhail (longtime exec and former President of the American League).

“For twenty years, Joe Brown (the former Pittsburgh Pirates GM) was chairman of the committee that picked Hall of Fame executives. His deupty was Bob Broeg, a St. Louis baseball writer who was viciously anti-union and wrote that the only way I’d get into the Hall of Fame was through the janitors’ entrance… I was told by a member of the committee that Brown and Broeg had refused to even put me on the ballot. They said I didn’t qualify as a baseball executive.”

— Marvin Miller (in Zev Chaffets’ Cooperstown Confidential, 2009)

In 2001, Miller finally did get on the Veterans Committee ballot but was not elected. Bill Mazeroski (the hero of the 1960 World Series) and Negro League star Hilton Smith were chosen. As Bill Madden noted in the New York Daily News, “while no one had more impact on the game than Miller, one-third of the committee was comprised of executives who were on the other side of the bargaining table.”

The 2003 Vote

Starting in 2003, the Hall of Fame completely revamped the Veterans Committee voting procedure from a small committee to the entire body of Hall of Fame players, managers, executives, Spink and Frick Award winners. There were two ballots, one for players and one for non-players. Marvin Miller was on the non-player ballot. There were 85 eligible voters; 81 participated in the player balloting, 79 in the non-player vote. All told, there were 26 names on the player ballot and 15 on the manager/executive/umpire ballot. As with the BBWAA process, 75% of the vote would be required for a Cooperstown plaque.

Not one man received more than 62% of the vote. The process resulted in a shutout. Gil Hodges did the best among the player candidates, with 50 out of 81 votes; umpire Doug Harvey did the best among the non-players, getting 48 out of 79. Miller came in 3rd among the non-players, getting 35 out of the 79 ballots cast (44%). Bob Gibson said, “I voted for a couple of guys although I’m not going to tell you who. But I did vote for Marvin Miller, I’ll tell you that.” Joe Morgan said that he was “shocked Marvin didn’t get in considering how many Hall of Famers he affected.”

“I was astounded that Marvin was not elected. I’m a big believer in the historical aspect of the Hall of Fame, and from that standpoint, nobody had more impact than Marvin.”

— Tom Seaver (New York Daily News, Feb. 27, 2003)

Reggie Jackson was one of the players who did not return a ballot, saying that none of the player candidates were worthy of the Hall and also that the Hall of Fame itself “should only be for players.” Jackson was using one of the maddening arguments about what the Hall “should be” instead of what it actually is. Jay Jaffe, in his profile of Miller, noted that Jackson eventually realized the error of his ways while also reporting that Mike Schmidt also voted for nobody.

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It took the Hall of Fame six years before its board members finally realized the flaw in this particular voting system. Although the electors could choose up to 10 names (just like the BBWAA), they didn’t have to. A Hall of Fame spokesman noted that the electors only chose an average of 5.4 players and 4.2 names on the non-players side. That might work in the BBWAA process, which happens every year and in which there are sometimes super-obvious first-time players. But on a “second chance” players ballot, all of the players are by definition “second tier.”

This doesn’t explain why Marvin Miller, a super-obvious choice if there ever was one, didn’t get as many votes as Harvey or even as many as former Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley. One possible explanation is that only 41 of the 58 Hall of Fame players who voted played in the majors after 1966 when Miller took over the union. That only explains it to a point, however. This was a big fumble by the players; they had the numbers to get Miller close enough that he almost certainly would have gotten the needed 60 “yes” votes. The only explanation about why it didn’t happen is that some of the players just weren’t thinking and that the pre-1966 players didn’t care about what happened to their successors.

3rd and 4th Times not a Charm

The futile “everybody votes” system continued with another shutout of the players in 2005 and a dual shutout (again) of players and non-players in 2007. This time, 81 ballots were cast with 61 votes needed for 75%. Miller finished 2nd this time (with 51 votes for 63%), with Harvey getting 54.

Bill Madden argued that the players weren’t suited or “didn’t care” when it came to voting for the men in the managerial or pioneer/executive category.

“I would submit that the Baseball Writers, many of whom (like myself) had their share of differences with Miller through the years, would agree that he was a giant figure in the game’s history and belongs in the Hall of Fame… This process hasn’t just been an exercise in futility; it’s been an exercise in cruelty.”

— Bill Madden (New York Daily News, Feb. 27, 2007)

The powers that be at the Hall of Fame (sort of ) took the argument of Madden and others to heart, creating two separate ballots in December 2007, one for managers and umpires only and the other for executives, using small voting committees.

The committees combined to elect five new members to Cooperstown but Marvin Miller was not one of the five. The umpires/managers committee elected two skippers, Dick Williams and Billy Southworth. The pioneers/executives committee voted in former Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, former Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley (who passed away in 1979), and former Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss (who died in 1932). Nine votes were required for election. Miller got a grand total of three.

As Jaffe noted, “that Miller received just three votes on a panel that elected Kuhn (who had received just 17.3% from the larger group the year before) was a sick and twisted joke given that the labor leader beat the commissioner like a rented mule at every turn.”

“The decision by the Hall to overlook Miller is grounded in a bad reading of history. Miller had a bigger impact on baseball than any commissioner, owner or player in the past 40 years… The members of the committee that elected Bowie Kuhn and passed on Marvin Miller should feel ashamed. But they do not. They almost surely believe that Miller and the union won the war, but they refuse him the honor of his victory. This is a set of actions by little men making small-minded decisions. Electing Kuhn and Miller together might have been a tolerable result. But electing Kuhn alone is intolerable.”

— Fay Vincent, MLB Commissioner 1989-92 (op-ed in The New York Times, Dec. 8, 2007)

How did this happen? Elementary, Dear Marvin. There were only three ex-players on the 12-person committee; just one of them (Harmon Killebrew) played the game while Miller was with the MLBPA. The other committee members included three writers and six owners. By all appearances, this was a rigged game designed to keep Miller out of the Hall of Fame.

Marvin Miller Asks not to be Considered Again

Six months after his 4th unsuccessful appearance on the Veterans Committee ballot, the 91-year-old Miller asked the Hall not to include him on another ballot, writing in a letter to the BBWAA (whose Historical Overview Committee constructs the ballots):

“Paradoxically, I’m writing to thank you and your associates for your part in nominating me for Hall of Fame consideration, and, at the same time, to ask that you not do this again. 

The anti-union bias of the powers who control the Hall has consistently prevented recognition of the historic significance of the changes to baseball brought about by collective bargaining. As former executive director of the players’ union that negotiated these changes, I find myself unwilling to contemplate one more rigged Veterans Committee whose members are handpicked to reach a particular outcome while offering a pretense of a democratic vote. It is an insult to baseball fans, historians, sports writers and especially to those baseball players who sacrificed and brought the game into the 21st century. At the age of 91 I can do without a farce.”

Miller did acknowledge to the New York Times that the management-heavy committee might have been designed as much to put management people (including Kuhn) in to the Hall more than to keep him out. “It’s really a stretch to ask management people to put me in the Hall of Fame,” Miller said. “Not just that I’m not a player. My job was to be an adversary, not an ally.”

Closer but No Cigar

Despite his wishes, Marvin Miller was back on the Veterans Committee ballot for the Hall of Fame Class of 2010. This time, with a few more players (including Seaver) on the 12-man committee, Miller received seven votes, two fewer than needed. Still, the fact that former Detroit Tigers owner John Fetzer received the most votes (with eight) is indicative of the oversized role that team owners who are not Hall of Famers themselves continued to have in the voting process.

In another ill-advised move (my opinion), after the 2010 vote, the Hall of Fame decided to stop separating players from non-players, instead combining them on the same ballot. Thus, in December 2010, as the Veterans Committee voted for the Hall’s Class of 2011, Miller found himself on a ballot with eight players (Dave Concepcion, Ted Simmons, Steve Garvey, Tommy John, Vida Blue, Ron Guidry, Rusty Staub, and Al Oliver), an owner (George Steinbrenner), a manager (Billy Martin) and a General Manager (Pat Gillick).

For this vote, the committee composition was (on paper) potentially more friendly to the 93-year old Miller. There were seven players on the 16-man committee, one Hall of Fame manager (Whitey Herzog), four team owners, and four longtime members of the media.

Gillick was elected to the Hall with 13 votes while Miller fell just one vote shy of a plaque in Cooperstown. One vote short. Although we can’t know this for sure, the odds are decent that the four owners on the panel voted “no” while 11 of the 12 others voted “yes.”

Miller released a statement noting that the union he helped create in 1966 had transformed Major League Baseball from a $50 million per year industry into a sport that rakes in $7 billion per year.

“That is a difficult record to eradicate, and the Hall has failed to do it. It is an amusing anomaly that the Hall of Fame has made me famous by keeping me out.”

— Marvin Miller (statement released on Dec. 6, 2010).

Last Two Eras Committee Votes

On November 27, 2012, just under two years after the committee ballot that put him one vote shy of Cooperstown, Marvin Miller passed away from liver cancer at his home in Manhattan, New York. He was 95 years old at the time of his death.

Before passing away, Miller passed on his feelings about the Hall of Fame to his children and closest friends. “If they vote me in after I’m gone,” he told writer and friend Allen Barra shortly before he died, “please let everyone you know it is against my wishes and tell them if I was alive I would turn it down.” In November 2013, when Miller’s name was placed on the “Expansion Committee” ballot for the Hall’s Class of 2014, Miller’s son Peter sent an email to former Times writer Murray Chass and others, emphasizing his father’s wishes and that nobody in the Miller family would attend or speak at any Hall of Fame ceremony in Cooperstown regardless of the outcome of the vote.

As it turns out, Miller’s family had nothing to worry about. His name was one of 10 in another “rigged” ballot, rigged this time because of the Hall’s decision to put players, managers, and executives on the same ballot. The Expansion Committee ballot for 2014 featured recently retired managers Joe Torre, Tony La Russa, and Bobby Cox, all obvious selections. The three skippers were all unanimously voted into Cooperstown.

I am NOT claiming, in this instance, that the Hall deliberately rigged the ballot process against Miller. The “rigging” was a function of the rules of the vote. The problem for Miller and the six other men on the ballot was that the committee members were limited to four votes each. With Torre, La Russa, and Cox gobbling up 48 of the 64 available votes, there were only 16 votes left to be split among the others.

Four years later, Miller was back on the ballot again; this time it was called the “Modern Baseball Era” ballot, featuring players and others whose primary impact was from 1970-87. Jack Morris and Alan Trammell were elected to Cooperstown, with Ted Simmons falling one vote short with 11 votes. Miller received 7 votes in the affirmative, the fourth most but still five fewer than needed.

Miller and the 2020 Modern Baseball Ballot

The family wishes aside, Marvin Miller was on the ballot again in December 2019, for the 9th time. That’s hardly a record. The fans and family of Gil Hodges have been through a whopping 34 election failures, 15 of them via the BBWAA and 19 different incarnations of the Veterans Committee, with the elections spanning 47 years. Ouch!

To finish this piece, I want to address the tough issue that faced the 16 members of the Modern Baseball Committee. Miller was on the ballot with nine great players from the ’70s and ’80s. Those players were Thurman Munson, Don Mattingly, Tommy John, Steve Garvey, Dave Parker, Dale Murphy, Ted Simmons, Dwight Evans, and Lou Whitaker.

Remembering that each committee member is limited to four votes, how does one choose between these great players and the man who helped them all make millions?

“The other nine people on the ballot are great baseball players… Comparing Miller to any of them is illogical and nonsensical, like comparing apples and, you know, something that isn’t an apple.”

— Joe Posnanski, The Athletic (11/8/2019)

Posnanski is echoing my strong belief that the Hall should go back to what it used to do and do separate ballots for players and non-players. But Joe and I don’t make the rules.

In the context of historical significance to the game, Miller obviously reigned supreme on this 10-man ballot and finally got his due. My personal preference for the future is that non-players be considered separately from players. Because Miller was on this ballot, the math was harder for any other players to make it. Simmons got 13 votes and will be on stage tomorrow.

Other players fell short: Evans got 8 votes while Parker got 7. Garvey and Whitaker received 6 each. Remember, the 16 voting members of the Modern Baseball Committee were only allowed to vote for 4 names out of 10. Could one of those players made the Hall if they didn’t have to compete for votes with Miller? The process is shrouded in secrecy so we don’t know the answer to that question.

Anyway, the point is now moot. Miller will, finally, posthumously get the recognition that he has long deserved. His role in shaping the history of baseball in the last 50+ years is undeniable. He’ll finally have a plaque in Cooperstown with his visage upon it.

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