It is difficult
to make a Hall of Fame case for Marvin Miller. It’s just that his impact on
baseball has been so great that it’s hard to appreciate the difference between
the hidebound old world he entered and the thriving modern game he left behind.
To understand how
Miller changed the National Pastime, try to picture the game as it existed in
the mid-1960’s. Team ‘owners’ really lived up to the name - they had absolute
control over their employees due to a standard reserve clause in all player
contracts. The clause meant that salary negotiations were strictly my-way-or-the
highway affairs where management whims determined how much players earned.
Absolutely. Forever. Anyone who didn’t like it could go out and get a day
job.
It was an ‘old
fashioned’ system, to be sure, if your definition of ‘old fashioned’ goes back
to the Dark Ages. Still, the players couldn’t do anything about it because their
so-called representatives weren’t watchdogs, but tame little puppies. Whenever
players had the nerve to speak up about the unfairness in the lowball offers,
much less management sleaze like retaliatory trades or blacklists, the players’
leadership didn’t make a peep. The owners’ club liked their pet player reps so
much that it even offered to finance them.
All that changed
when Miller took over as Players’ Association president back in 1966. The man
treated stale old establishment thinking like Barry Bonds treats 85-mph
fastballs. Yes, he insisted, the player interests could be represented by
independent agents. No, players shouldn’t be fined or demoted without some kind
of fair hearing. Yes, they deserved pensions and minimum salaries. No, they
didn’t have to put up with unsafe playing conditions.
Most of all,
Miller changed the game by demolishing the old reserve clause. He simply argued
that all professionals - lawyers, plumbers, teachers, even ballplayers - should
have the right to negotiate their own salaries. It was a really revolutionary
idea - for the 1700’s. The only thing that made it so shocking in the baseball
establishment’s worldview was the fact that America’s game had been shackled with decidedly un-American
economics for nearly a century.
Once arbitrator
Peter Seitz agreed to Miller’s eminently sensible argument, all
H-E-Double-Hockey Sticks broke out. Miler insisted that the games would go on,
but fans fretted that the game would be destabilized. Owners howled that open
bidding on player contracts would mean bankruptcy, so that multiple teams would
fold. Commissioner Bowie Kuhn once suggested that an entire league might go
under.
Didn’t happen.
The serene Mr. Miller was completely right. All his hysterical critics were
completely wrong.
After the
freedom-loving summer of ’76, free agent signings became the talk of baseball.
Old-line fans cheered as high-profile, high-impact stars like Reggie Jackson and
Goose Gossage revitalized the Yankee dynasty. Droves of new fans came into the
game when stars like Rod Carew and Pete Rose their drove new teams into the
playoffs. Others booed when the likes of Richie Zisk and Oscar Gamble proved to
be overpaid busts.
Did all the fresh
new storylines, team shake-ups, and Hot Stove League signings of the new era end
up destabilizing the game? They sure did. Annual Major League attendance went
from 31 million in 1976 to over 70 million in 1993 and up to an estimated 75
million fans in 2005. Marvin Miller’s free agency destabilized its way to tens
of millions of new baseball fans per year, and untold hundreds of millions in
new media viewers.
And Miller’s old
adversaries among in the elite little owners’ club? They ended up the biggest
winners of all in the union’s victory. As attendance exploded, the business of
baseball exploded. The Major Leagues’ gross revenues increased from about $300
million in 1973 to about $4.8 billion in 2005. Far from losing teams, the Major
Leagues have added six new teams since free agency came along. Franchise values
went through the roof, with appreciations of tens of millions in windfall sales
profits quickly becoming a ho-hum norm for any
seller.
Miller was a
player advocate, of course, and he did a bang-up job on that score, too. First,
he won player rights. Most notably, superstars - those who played six full years
(or nearly 1,000 MLB games) - won the right to determine their salary through
the open market. With that right in place, Miller’s players won their money,
too: the average player salary rose
from about $51,500 per year in 1976 to about $2.6 million in the new millennium.
Not quite in
owner territory, but still, pretty good
scratch.
To understand how
Marvin Miller’s free agency ‘changed everything’, however, it’s important to
look beyond those numbers. Standing up for the players meant far, far more than
bigger money. It meant standing up for the principle of competition and that, in
turn, directly led to the radically overhauled and improved game.
Under Miller’s
new ballgame, team owners couldn’t survive in the stagnant reserve-clause
economics that tolerated decades of third-rate marketing, crony-riddled front
offices, and racial segregation. Skyrocketing player salaries forced baseball
men to become real businessmen, the kind who had to find new fans through
improved outreach and new talent through color-blind personnel policies,
international recruiting, smarter front office signings, and upgraded minor
league systems.
As time went on,
baseball’s businessmen have become fairly obsessed with innovation through
popular, fan-friendly new features. As much as they paid out to the best
ballplayers in the world, they sought to gain even more money by introducing
interleague scheduling, wild card playoff schedules, and a generation of
gleaming new ballparks. As a result, the oldest professional sports league in
the country still thrives as America’s favorite game.
When I was growing up in the early 1980’s,
Mr. Miller was sometimes known as “the most hated man in baseball,” at least
among his hard-line opponents in the press and in management. Today he’s an
88-year old retiree, as sharp and witty as ever. When he greeted me at the door
of his Manhattan apartment, he
shared his thoughts on his own past and the game’s future.
The latest major news on the sports labor front is the
collapse of the player’s union for the National Hockey League. As you know, they
lost the recent season, only to give in to an owner proposal that included
industry spending caps, team spending caps, and maximum salaries . . .
Including a 24% pay cut for players’
contracts.
Sure. Existing player contracts. I’m not even sure that’s
legal.
(laughs) I’m not, either.
But that deal just brings the NHL players more or less in
line with the NFL and NBA, which have similar kinds of restrictions in their
collective bargaining agreements
Well, the first thing I’d say about that is, what
fans don’t understand, is that the other player unions in professional sports,
whether in football or basketball or hockey, are not really legitimate unions.
They are company unions in the worse sense of the phrase - they’re owned and
dominated by the team owners and they always have been. There never has been a
period when there’s been a legitimate trade union in football, basketball, or
hockey, so it’s not surprising when something like this happens.
Well, Gene Upshaw of the NFL and Billy Hunter of the NBA
aren’t exactly amateurs . . .
As trade unionists, of course they are. They don’t
have any advisors from any unions. It’s a terrible error for professional
athletes to think that if they get a former player as their leader, that’s their
filling the role.
Why do you think that’s the case? The NFL players have
gone through two strikes since 1981 and the NBA has gone through one. What is it
about the players’ union in baseball that sets it apart in terms of independent
leadership?
Well, I’m certainly not going to tell you that
it’s all my doing. The fact of the matter is, none of these other sports unions
have sat down and said, ‘Our problem is that we don’t have experience in
labor-management relations, so we shouldn’t try to recruit a leader from the
rank and file of the ex-players’.
It’s fairly simple. They’ve always felt more
comfortable if they would have an ex-player. In baseball, it was [Miller’s
predecessor] Judge [Robert] Cannon, who was a familiar figure to them for years.
If you start with that as the base, you’re really not going to go anywhere, not
in hockey, not in any sport or business.
Would you say that there’s something in baseball players’
culture or background that made them more accommodating to independent
leadership? I mean, presumably, football players and other athletes must have
noticed that the baseball players have been 1) highly successful in standing up
to management and 2) led by outside, non-players like yourself and [current
Executive Director] Don Fehr.
Well, one thing that’s occurred to me is that
baseball is the one sport where the players have a pre-existing relationship. As
minor league players, they worked together, they played together, they lived
together, they suffered together - if you know minor league conditions - so they
had a greater unity than, for example, football players who came from separate
colleges and were big men on campus. Same thing for basketball, who mostly came
from the college ranks and were mostly unknown to each other or
rivals.
The one thing, I think, distinguishes baseball
players is that. Maybe that’s why they listened.
Do you think the NHL deal will influence the Major
Leagues’ new collective bargaining session in 2006?
It’s hard to anticipate, but we can do a little
guessing.
I think what’s happened in hockey will make the
baseball bargaining situation much more difficult than it would otherwise have
been. I think there always at least a few hard line owners who maintain that
they’d somehow be better off if they put the screws to the players, even if they
sacrifice a season, two seasons, what have you. They’ll look to the hockey
situation as proof of their theory.
It’s not inevitable that this will happen, because
baseball’s in a very good position, a very popular position.
In a sense, baseball’s current boom in attendance and
revenues can be a double-edged sword. It’s been proven that you don’t have to
tinker with the current system to get very, very rich under the current system,
but it’s also encouraged some to say, ‘Hey, just think of how much we can make
if we finally do break the union’.
I think that’s right. And, the losses and pain
that occur in a hard-line policy have to be reckoned with. There are also a
number of people in ownership and management who will say, ‘I’ve been around ‘x’
years and I’ve seen this union operate. They’re not the hockey union and they
won’t fold’.
Well, MLB revenues have grown at least 15 times over in
little over 30 years and the average player salary has, famously, increased from
little under $50,000 per year to over $2.3 million or more nowadays. It may grow
harder and harder to encourage players to stick together in standing up to
management’s rollback proposals.
I agree. Probably the biggest problem Don Fehr and
his people have to deal with is the fact that not a single player has had any
experience playing major league ball without free agency. Not one. Think about
that. It’s such a problem, in that there was no way to compare what it was like,
no way to figure out that it was the union that brought it about.
One of my real frustrations in trying to talk about
baseball’s labor relations, I
guess, is that, first off, most people don’t want to talk about it. Baseball’s a
kind of release from the real world and the sports pages aren’t the business
pages. But, beyond that, it’s the willful insistence that labor-management
relations are some kind of millionaires vs. billionaires money-grabs.
There never seems to be an acknowledgement that, hey, the
union’s fight for free agency has lead to incredible increases in attendance,
revenues, international outreach, new ballparks, and the rest, and the boom
basically happened because the union fought tooth-and-nail to open up the game’s
off-field financial competitions.
Well, consider that the fans, as such, don’t still
don’t have their own sources of information. They get information from the
media, from newspapers, magazines, radio, television, so on, and I don’t mind
saying that I think the coverage of sports by the traditional media has been
remarkably poor. There’s just no place for fans to get a feel for all of
that.
For example, a typical fan attitude is ‘a plague
on both their houses’. If these people [the media] were covering World War II,
they would say, ‘The Germans and these people are having this war, and they’re
both to blame’.
‘Oh, but the Germans marched in . . .’
‘Yeah, but, you know, but they could have talked
to them, you know . . . ‘ (laughs)
This attitude, I personally came across it, in the
’81 dispute. The contract was only opened by the owners. Yet the attitude was,
‘A plague on both your houses’. I’d say to a writer, ‘What are you talking
about?” He’d say, ‘Well, it’s disrupting the game’.
What is that?
‘The playground of the news’, it’s been
called.
I once came across a writer who suddenly became
hostile during, I think, the ’69 negotiations, which postponed Spring Training.
And I finally said to him, ‘Where did this attitude come from, you know?’ And he
says to me, ‘Here it is in the middle of the winter, and I’m in
Chicago instead of
Florida. And it’s the
union.’
They just didn’t want to hear the merits of the
arguments.
Well, I think of myself when I was much younger. I
didn’t do a lot of thinking about what the reserve clause was, I simply didn’t
know. It took me a long time to realize the injustice of baseball’s drawing the
color line, for example.
Do you regard owner collusion to suppress salaries as a
realistic future danger in the game?
Oh, yeah.
Twenty years after the original collusion/racketeering
case?
Oh, yeah. The single thing I worried most about
after the [Peter] Seitz decision [to overturn the reserve clause in 1976] -
well, the first thing I worried about was what we were going to do to negotiate
a whole new agreement and a whole new system.
But, apart from that, what was worrying me was
that it was fine to say ‘Well, we’ve won, we’re going to have an open market
now, players are going to be able to negotiate their worth in a competitive
market and so on’. Then I stopped to think that this is an industry, that if it
didn’t perfect collusion, it’s very close to the one that did. It had total
collusion in terms of the color line, you couldn’t break that even though there
were some owners, like Bill Veeck, who would have liked to. They could hold the
line even for clubs dying to improve talent.
These were the experts on maintaining the
collusion model, and this cautioned me that we’re not out of the woods yet. I
guess my point is, I don’t think you can ever relax. There are always ways to
beat the system, even today. Could this happen again? The answer is, yeah. I’m
sure there are ways you could happen again, and in ways we don’t even know
about.
You’ve been very skeptical about the steroids issue in
the game, and critical of the union for opening up the Basic Agreement to
toughen up the testing regime. Do you think the controversy will complicate
future labor-management relations?
Sure, absolutely. [Opening up the Agreement] is a
divisive measure, and the whole issue is divisive. It’s designed to get players
who don’t use furious at players who may use.
But the public relations problem is there regardless of
that effect.
Well, one of the first things you have to do is to
say is that you’re not going to mollify the public as long as the press keeps
the pressure on. You simply don’t have the capability to do that. You don’t have
the capability to mollify the public’s general attitude towards drugs, not as
long as the press makes every dispute the fault of the union.
I always had the attitude that, yeah, I’d like to
have the public on my side, but if it’s not going to happen, I’m going to have
to live with that. Sometimes the public is simply wrong. The public can be just
plain wrong.
There was one situation in my career where I had
to worry about public perceptions, when I was working with the steel workers. A
stoppage in steel was like no other in terms of its impact on the economy, so it
was probably going to end up in the White House and arouse anti-labor
legislation, so there was a legitimate worry about public attitudes.
But, short of that, when it got to baseball and we
had anti-union attitudes stirred up by the press, I felt an allegiance to the
players. I would like it to be different, but I don’t have the power to change
that and I don’t think it matters.
Plus, I know there isn’t the slightest evidence,
in scientific terms, that so-called steroids enhance the performance of major
league baseball players.
Major League players, as opposed to sprinters or
weightlifters or swimmers.
I would go to the public, ‘I don’t know [if
steroids enhance major league performance], but neither do you’. There’s been
not one scientific test you could point to. And yet you have one writer after
another, and one Congressman after another, who keeps saying, as if he knows,
‘This is a scandal because this is not a level playing field, this improves
performance’.
Yet you look a the careers of guys like Ken Caminiti,
Jose Canseco, and Jason Giambi, you’d conclude that practical experience
indicates that steroids have a very real, very destructive effect on player
performance and health.
Well, again, I don’t think you have the scientific
data to back that up. I am willing to say that, where the health of the players
is concerned, you should bend over backwards, that you err on the side of
caution. The Congress that wrote the law should enforce the law.
Then how would you protect the players’
health?
How did they go about protecting the health of the
people when you had Prohibition? Congress presumably passed the law because
liquor was damaging to the health of the people. How did they enforce
Prohibition?
Badly.
(laughs) Well, who did you give it to for
enforcement?
The cops.
The Justice Department. The FBI. That’s what you
do with any law - you gather the evidence, but you pay attention to the
Constitution, too. And the so-called Olympics testing is not government testing.
To have nobody tell the Congress holding the
hearings, to have no one tell them ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about
when you say that the baseball testing is not stringent enough ’- I don’t know
what would be stringent enough for some of them - because everyone’s going to be tested
under the current system, and more than once, and during the off-season’.
I
don’t think anyone would dispute your point about federal law and Constitutional
protections, but Fehr might conclude that some compromise is necessary for the
good of the game’s image, if nothing else.
It just leads to more and more and more retreats.
Opening the Agreement [to change the steroid testing regime] was the first
mistake. They said, ‘OK, we’ll open the contract and it’ll mollify these people’
- [laughs, mimics a crowd’s roar] ‘Yeah!’ - ‘we’re going to negotiate new
testing’.
What happens? They said it wasn’t good enough.
They [Congress] said, ‘Let’s do it again, we’ll have hearings, we’ll do more of
this’. And this is still open, an open subject.
No doubt there will be more hearings at some point. The
March show, with Canseco, McGwire and the rest, got the best C-SPAN ratings
since the presidential impeachment hearings.
With each retreat - you don’t have to be a genius
to know this - they get bolder.
Would it be alright if I gave you a round of rhetorical
batting practice?
Sure.
Just a list of lines I often hear whenever the subject of
labor-management relations comes up. For instance, ‘The union always wants
something new’.
Well, the union wants the owners to comply with
Federal law and their contracts. Apart from that, there’s been damn little in
way of demands in terms of working conditions. There’s been updating of the
minimum salary, updating of pensions and health care, those have been improved
with each negotiations and I’d expect that to continue. Other than that, I don’t
see anything startling coming up.
‘The union wants more red tape, rules, regulations, and
interference in ballclubs’.
The critics should understand, in studying this,
that the thrust of the union has been to remove red tape, it’s been to remove
tampering rules.
‘Marvin Miller, Don Fehr, and the rest are leading these
naïve -
(laughs)
‘-naïve
jocks to all these hard-line stances against their best
interests.’
‘Against their best interests’? (laughs) Players
used to be pieces of property. They used to have a $6,000 minimum and a $19,000
average and a pension that was pitiful. (laughs) They never decided where they
could play.
‘The union ruined player
loyalty’.
I think that most writers and most fans don’t know
that there was a comprehensive study done by Len Koppett of the Times; he did a
study which dealt with the hypothesis that free agency moving around at this
tremendous pace, ‘You look around and the whole team’s gone’, etc. He did that
for the ten years before free agency and ten years after free agency. (laughs)
Koppett demonstrated that the turnover and change among the players was greater when the owners had total
control over player movement.
‘There’s such a thing as an owner-player partnership for
the good of the game’.
(laughs) Well, it’s theoretically possible. It’s
like saying, well, it’s theoretically possible that General Motors employees
will someday own 50% of GM and the stockholders will give up control. It’s
theoretically possible, but absurd.
You made a lot of enemies during your time as Executive
Director, though you laugh about it now, and I can’t see how it wouldn’t have
hurt you on a human level. Do you feel any kind of lingering animosity directed
toward you still?
No. First of all, even when I was active and the
focus of all this nonsense, I never met a hostile fan in my life. Not ever.
That’s hard to believe.
I know. I can remember - (laughs) - I had to be in
Cincinnati on what would otherwise
have been Opening Day, in April, 1972. I thought, oh, ‘This is really a negative
town’. I knew it from way back. I went to college in
Miami
University, in
Oxford, Ohio,
not far from Cincinnati, so I knew
the newspapers and I knew the newspaper writers from the
Cincinnati papers, and I knew the
general manager and the owners of the Cincinnati Reds. And I thought, what am I
doing in this town on, really, what was the first day of the strike?
It was a period when I had been on television
almost every day and newspaper pictures, et cetera, easily recognizable at that
time, and here I am walking down the street where they’re bemoaning the lack of
baseball and it’s all my fault, you know, and instead people recognized me and
they smiled and came up and they asked what was likely to happen . . . friendly
as could be. Even on a day like that.
In New
York, of course, it’s not surprising. (laughs) Truck
drivers would recognize me and say ‘Give ‘em hell’, you know.
No, the hostility came from individual newspapers
and individual newspaper writers. From individual owners and general managers.
Sometimes managers. A Leo Durocher or sometimes a Gene Autry, and so on. But not
fans.
The only time I can remember sometime even
approaching that was one time in Spring Training; I was with the White Sox in
Florida. And we held the meeting
in the outfield grass. The meeting was scheduled for 90 minutes and it went long
and there were fans on the other side of the fence, they were getting damned
impatient. ‘Come on, get on with the game’, you know.
Maybe, at this point, the union’s successes have been so
deep and long-lasting that people just take them for
granted.
It’s well over 20 years since I retired. I get, I
would estimate, 15-16 requests for autographs every month. Baseballs, shirts,
copies of my book, Topps baseball cards of me, 3 x 5 cards, each one with a
letter saying you ought to be in the Hall of Fame, et cetera, et cetera. This
goes on, each day, week in and week out. (laughs) Sometimes I get no other mail.
So it’s not fans.
To my mind, an eventual Hall induction is inevitable.
When, I don’t know.
Well, Gene Orza of the Player’s Association sent
me an email a few days ago, and it had a quote. And quote said something like
‘Marvin Miller never did a thing to ruin baseball in anything he did’, et
cetera, et cetera., along those lines. Gene Orza says, ‘guess who said
that?’
Steinbrenner.
(laughs) I guessed Steinbrenner, too. A second
guess was the Boston ownership, who
said, when I wasn’t elected [in 2003], that was a terrible thing. But it was
neither of the two. It was [long time opponent] Buzzie Bavasi!
The fact is that there are enough people in either
management or, as ex-players, have become management, or are pre-union, or are
executives or media people, some of whom might vote for me, but mostly not. When
you break it down into numbers, a 75% [vote for induction] is so unlikely. I’m
not going to say it’s impossible, but it’s highly unlikely.
Well, I hope you’re wrong for once.
(laughs). OK.
Thanks for your hospitality and time.