Baseball's Greatest Scandal ... It Wasn't Steroids

By Peter Drier and Kelly Candaele, The Nation. Posted July 28, 2008.

When the Baseball Hall of Fame holds its induction ceremony in Cooperstown, New York, July 27, three pillars of baseball's corporate establishment will join the ranks. But the man who freed ballplayers from indentured servitude will not. This is not only a travesty, it's the result of a coup engineered by the conservative cabal that controls the Hall of Fame.

Baseball owes a huge debt of gratitude to Marvin Miller, who, as director of the players union from 1966 to 1983, dramatically improved players' pay and working conditions. It's time for the union and players -- Hall of Famers, veterans and current players alike -- to speak out on behalf of this baseball and labor pioneer, now 91, before it's too late.

Miller has been snubbed three times by the Hall of Fame -- in 2003, 2007 and this year. The selection committee for executives (non-players who contributed to the game) isn't scheduled to vote again until late 2009, but the movement to put Miller in the hall should begin now.

Miller, a Bronx native, worked as an economist for the Steelworkers Union before the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) hired him in 1966 as its first full-time director. Union leaders, led by star pitchers Robin Roberts and Jim Bunning (now a Republican U.S. Senator from Kentucky) recruited him to help transform the sport's outdated labor relations. The owners, and their hired commissioners, fought Miller at every turn. Most sportswriters at the time sided with the management, severely attacking Miller and the very idea of a players union. Even some players, glad just to be getting paid to put on a uniform, initially resisted the idea.

Before Miller, team owners ruled baseball with no pretense of giving players the same rights enjoyed by workers in other industries. Players were tethered to their teams through the reserve clause in every player's contract. Under the reserve clause, contracts were limited to one season. The contract "reserved" the team's right to "retain" the player for the next season. Other teams were not permitted to bid for the player and players were not permitted to negotiate with other teams. Teams offered players their contracts on a take-it-or-leave-it basis. Players had no insurance, no real pensions, and awful medical treatment.

With Miller's guidance, the players association negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement in 1968, which established players' rights to binding arbitration over salaries and grievances. Players also won the right to have agents to negotiate their contracts. In 1976, they gained the right to become free agents, allowing players to decide for themselves which employer they wanted to work for, to veto proposed trades and to bargain for the best contract. Under Miller, the union won increased per-diem allowances, improvements in travel conditions, better training facilities, locker room conditions and medical treatment.

In 1967, the minimum salary was $6,000 and the average salary was $19,000. The first collective bargaining agreement the next year raised the minimum to $10,000 -- paltry by today's standards, but a giant improvement in players' standard of living back then. When Miller retired in 1982, the average player salary had increased to $240,000. Today, the minimum salary is $390,000 and the average salary is over $2.8 million.

Like all business leaders, baseball's owners at the time warned that the union, higher wages and stronger workplace rules would destroy the industry. In fact, baseball is more popular and prosperous than ever. Last year, Major League Baseball reached a record of over $6 billion in revenues and a record 79.5 million in attendance. The union simply gave players the power to win a greater share of their employers' growing revenues.

Before the union could challenge the owners, however, Miller had to get the players to stand up for themselves. "People today don't understand how beaten down the players were back then," Miller observed in a recent telephone interview. "The players had low self-esteem, as any people in their position would have -- like baggage owned by the clubs."

Miller instructed ballplayers in the ABCs of trade unionism: fight for your rights to be treated as more than property, stick together against management, work on behalf of players who came before you and who would come after you, prepare yourself -- professionally and financially -- for life after your playing days are over and don't allow owners to divide players by race, income or their place in the celebrity pecking order.

And like any good union negotiator, Miller helped the players focus on pension issues. Most professional athletes are lucky to have ten-year careers. The average stay in the big leagues for baseball players is 5.6 years -- but less for pitchers. So increasing payments and shortening the number of years needed to qualify for a pension became critical issues. The 1972 baseball strike was primarily about pensions for players. Today, unlike many ex-National Football League players who scrape by because of a much weaker union, even baseball players who had short and less-than-illustrious careers have good retirement benefits. Duane Kuiper -- a second baseman for the Cleveland Indians and San Francisco Giants from 1974 to 1985 -- told the San Francisco Chronicle last year, "I don't think any of us really appreciated Marvin until we all got older."

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Peter Dreier, professor of politics at Occidental College, is coauthor of "The Next Los Angeles: The Struggle for a Livable City" and "Place Matters: Metropolitics for the 21st Century."