Friday, May 16, 2008
As the head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, he challenged the assumptions that players are chattel and that labor unions have no place within sports.
Aug 8, 2001 | Chances are, Marvin Miller didn't receive a thank-you note from Alex Rodriguez last winter after the shortstop signed a 10-year, $252 million contract to play for the Texas Rangers. That's a shame because Rodriguez, the highest-paid athlete in the history of team sports, owes nearly every dollar he banks to Miller.
These days it's impossible for sports fans to wrap their ESPN-addled brains around the concept of underpaid athletes. But in the not-so-distant past, professional athletes were grossly underpaid relative to the enormous revenue their skills generated. Most took second jobs -- selling insurance or cars -- during the off-season. Worse, the teams they played for owned them, quite literally, for life. About the only thing an athlete could do about it was, well, play.
Marvin Miller fought to change that. As executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association from 1966 to 1983, he challenged the assumptions that players are chattel and that labor unions have no place within sports. Going head-to-head with team owners and commissioners, he emerged with victory after victory that benefited the players. Free agency, salary arbitration, pension rights: Miller ensured that players gained workers' rights and were compensated commensurate with their place in the game. By the time he retired, Miller had created one of the most powerful unions -- sports or otherwise -- in America.
As oral historian Studs Terkel once wrote, Miller was "the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis."
To connect Miller solely with baseball, however, would be to understate his role, because the systemic changes he initiated were emulated by other sports leagues. By making it possible for all athletes to exercise their rights, Miller tilted the balance of power in sports. Last year, the Sporting News acknowledged Miller's significance in its survey of the "100 Most Powerful People in Sports for the 20th Century." Miller ranked fifth.
To give an example of what players were up against, 35 years ago, during spring training in 1966, Los Angeles Dodgers pitchers Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale staged a joint holdout. Koufax, the most dominant southpaw of his era, had gone 26-8 in 1965, with 382 strikeouts. The imposing Drysdale was 23-12, with 20 complete games. The Dodgers had won two of the last three World Series.
Seeking a multiyear contract, Koufax and Drysdale hired an agent to help them negotiate with owner Walter O'Malley. They got nowhere. O'Malley, who'd made untold millions by uprooting the Dodgers from Brooklyn, N.Y., in exchange for a sweetheart deal in Los Angeles, refused to meet with the pitchers' agent. The pair were forced to cave and signed one-year deals.
Why did two future Hall of Famers have little more bargaining power than, say, weak-hitting catcher Bob Uecker? The answer: the reserve clause, which allowed baseball owners to hold down salaries and control where players could ply their trade; they "owned" the players' rights in perpetuity. That's because Major League Baseball operates as a monopoly, a "right" established in 1922, when Supreme Court Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes decreed that baseball was not involved in interstate commerce and thus not subject to federal antitrust laws. (Baseball remains the only professional sports league with this antitrust exemption.)
Born in the Bronx and raised in Brooklyn -- yes, he grew up a Dodgers fan -- Miller worked exclusively in labor. He had stints with the National War Labor Board during World War II, the International Association of Machinists and the United Automobile Workers. In 1950, Miller became a staff economist for the United Steelworkers of America. By 1966, he was chief economist and assistant to the president of the Steelworkers Union, then the third largest in the country.
Miller says that when he was offered the baseball post in 1966 he almost declined because he was asked to hire Richard Nixon as the union's legal counsel. Miller won that battle, but he soon encountered more serious obstacles. Despite the fact that baseball revolved around the players -- and that most of the revenue (from admission tickets to television rights) was generated by fans eager to watch their favorite players -- these immensely skilled athletes had been cowed into believing they were "lucky" to play baseball for a living. Most didn't understand how unions operated; fewer still wanted to rock the boat.
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