Two Takes on the Passing of Marvin Miller: Take Two

BASEBALL’S TRUE CLEAN-UP HITTER:  REFLECTIONS UPON THE PASSING OF MARVIN MILLER
By: Roger I. Abrams*

Lawrence “Yogi” Berra explained it well: “Baseball is 90% mental.  The other half is physical.”  For the late Marvin Miller, however, baseball was 90% personal.  The other half was skilled negotiating and enormous patience.  As the most successful union leader in professional sports history, Miller designed the job of union executive director and then executed a business plan for the Major League Baseball Players Association that would be the gold standard of the union movement.  In the process, he changed the national game.

When Miller accepted the Association’s offer to become its executive director in 1966, the union owned one file cabinet and had $5,400 in its bank account.  He immediately negotiated a licensing deal with Coca-Cola, which increased the union’s coffers ten-fold.  From this modest beginning, Miller and his talented associates grew revenue exponentially, producing millions annually for all major league ballplayers.[1]

At the bargaining table with the club owners, Miller was tenacious and unyielding.  An economist from the Bronx by way of Brooklyn with a pencil-thin mustache, Miller was certainly not a “good ole boy.”  He was a consummate labor relations professional with years of experience—first with the War Labor Board and then the machinists and steelworkers unions.  It would take baseball club owners decades to comprehend that their players, under Miller’s leadership, had transformed their fraternal association into a trade union.  He made the union an economic force that had to be taken seriously.  Every collective bargaining agreement reached between the owners and Marvin Miller was preceded by a work stoppage, either a strike or a lockout.  That only occurs when one side—in this case, the owners—does not fully appreciate that the other side means business.

Marvin Miller’s greatest accomplishment was to win the respect of his membership at the same time he taught the naïve ballplayers about their rights under federal labor law.  He listened to his members and sought their input.  Players on each club selected a union representative and an alternate, and this group became a genuine two-way conduit for ideas and legitimacy.  Built from the ground up with a solidarity that would be the envy of traditional labor organizations, the Players Association became the strongest trade union in the United States.[2]

Miller knew that, to protect the rights and benefits secured at the negotiation table, he needed to institutionalize an enforcement process within the structure of the baseball business.  From his prior experiences, Miller knew the value of labor arbitration, and it was one of his first bargaining goals.  Skillfully using this independent, private internal adjudicatory tribunal, Miller would revolutionize the business of baseball.

Working with Dick Moss, a brilliant Harvard-trained attorney who Miller had convinced to join him at the Association as general counsel, Miller developed the strategy for confronting baseball’s reserve system which had stood for almost a century.  Under the reserve system, a player was paid whatever his club offered without the right to market his service to any other employer.  The Supreme Court had ruled in 1922 that baseball did not affect interstate commerce and, thus, it escaped the constraints of federal antitrust law.[3]  Miller and Moss were certain that the Court would correct its preposterous decision.[4]  The Association supported Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood in his ill-fated antitrust suit against Commissioner Bowie Kuhn.[5]  Undaunted, Miller and Moss designed a second attack, this time using the arbitration procedure.

Using grievances filed by pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, the Association brought its claim to the neutral arbitrator, Peter Seitz, who had been jointly selected for his position by the union and the owners.  The Association claimed that the option provision of the standard baseball player contract allowed a club to renew a player’s contract for one year only, rather than perpetually as had been the case under the reserve system.  Seitz agreed.[6]  The union’s victory—later converted through bargaining into contractual free agency for all players with six years of major league service—substituted a free market mechanism to set salaries for experienced ballplayers.

Marvin Miller retired as executive director in 1982, but continued to advise his successors and, of course, to periodically instruct club owners about how they should operate their business.  He was never shy about expressing his opinion.  He was not always correct in his judgment, but he was rarely in doubt.  He had earned that status, however.  Few in the history of the game have had a similar impact on the national pastime.

Miller was not loved by his adversaries, but, perhaps reluctantly, they came to acknowledge what he had accomplished.[7]  They could no longer ignore the Association or discount the power of its solidarity.  By 2002, a new relationship had emerged.  That year, Michael Weiner for the union and Rob Manfred for the owners negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement not preceded by a work stoppage.[8]  These talented men demonstrated that sports labor relations need not be accompanied by strife, that the business of baseball is 90% personal, and, working within an atmosphere of mutual respect, a baseball partnership is both possible and mutually profitable, much as Miller had predicted.