The Economic History of Professional Baseball, Part 4: Marvin Miller Was The Most Successful Union Leader in History. So Why Do So Many in Baseball Loathe Him?

 

 

There’s an argument among certain writers on baseball arguing in the 1960s a ‘new breed of journalism’ was responsible for the ‘demystification’ of so many sports idols. It argues that after that point an athlete’s character was far more important than his play on the field. The most prominent example came during the Maris-Mantle home run chase when that new journalism turned Maris into the heavy and Mantle in to the hero based purely on how they treated the press.

I’m of two thoughts of this. First of all, this kind of journalism was long overdue and can only be considered beneficial to both sports and writing. Does anyone truly believed the all-too fictionalized books on baseball of that era are somehow a true picture of sports legend? Was the sports world a better place somehow when we regarded DiMaggio as a god even though he was clearly a contemptible human being? How did it help baseball when we covered up all the indiscretions that Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb committed in their careers? Indeed, that kind of narrative was a large part of the argument whenever Pete Rose’s name came up for Hall of Fame consideration. By extension, the fact that Ruth and Cobb were put into Cooperstown despite their behavior is an argument for Rose. (There’s more to it than that, of course, but that’s for another day.) Hero worship among journalists was never a good thing in any field.

Second, in a very critical way, there was no difference between the old school and the new. Both may have taken a different approach to the athlete going forward, but neither seemed capable of understanding the stands they took. This was very clear in the case of Muhammed Ali and to an extent Carlos Leon and Tommie Smith in the 1968 Olympics, but it was also true in baseball, particularly when it came to people of color. And both schools of journalism were utterly incapable of dealing with the drive players began to have towards their freedoms in the 1960s.

Between 1912 and 1966, there had been two World Wars, two police actions, a Depression, and integration was becoming the law of the land. The country was changing in many ways, but when it came to ballplayers’ right, they might as well have been in stasis since the Federal League had folded. There had been a few futile attempts at rebellion immediately after the Second World War – a few attempts at strikes, the brief existence of the Mexican League – but basically nothing had changed. When Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale attempted a holdout for the World Championship L.A. Dodger in 1966, demanding a million dollars for both of them, and that owner Walter O’Malley negotiate with their agent, it generated more headlines than progress for the players. O’Malley waited them out and they eventually had to sign separately for far less than they wanted. (Koufax later admitted the only reason he’d gone along was because he was planning to retire at the end of the 1966 season.)

In 1965, the players hired Marvin Miller as Executive Director of Players Union. Miller was a veteran of multiple labor organizations over time, and he would remain in his position for more than twenty years. In Burns’ documentary, Studs Terkel says that the three people who changed the game the most were Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, and Marvin Miller.

Miller is almost certainly the most successful union organizer in history in terms of the benefits that he managed to win for professional baseball. But it was not until this past year that he was voted posthumously into Cooperstown, and one is hardly surprised when one hears Chub Feeney, then the head of the Giants, interviewed in Baseball. “Clearly Miller was very helpful when it came to the players…On balance, I’m not sure he was good for baseball.”

Note the phrasing. Only someone in management would dare think that the players are less important than the game. I imagine that for the twenty years Miller was in charge of the union, ownership lived in a very happy delusion that all of its players were perfectly happy being exploited by ownership, being traded like pieces of property and the club having ownership of them even after they died until that uppity agitator Miller (many used anti-Semitic terms in private) came along and convinced them that working on the plantation was somehow a bad thing.

We shouldn’t be shocked by that attitude; every time a group of workers try to collectively bargain and fight for their freedoms, corporations become hostile and try to break them. (I have little doubt that if they thought they it wouldn’t hurt their teams, some might have considered threatened them with violence.) What has hurt Miller in the eyes of the world is that essentially so much of the sportswriter establishing was on the owner’s side. Writers like Dick Young thought that Miller was essentially ‘brainwashing’ the players when he convinced them to organize and that image no doubt came into play every time the players threatened or went through with a strike over the next fifteen years.

And it doesn’t help matters one bit when so much of the nostalgia complex that forms around baseball yearns for this kind of thing. I’ve already mentioned Doris Kearns Goodwin’s blindness for this kind of thing, but she’s far from alone. I’ve seen dozen of documentaries about baseball over the years, and I don’t remember one players from fifty or sixty years ago ever being asked about being paid so badly or how unhappy they were at being traded. If they are asked, we either never see the footage or the players deflect. (There are, of course, exceptions and I’ll get to them in a bit.)

In 1969, Curt Flood learned that he was going to be traded to the Phillies. Flood, who is interviewed in depth on the subject in the documentary, makes it very clear that in the midst of this horrible decade ‘the freedoms these good men were dying for I didn’t have in my own profession.” He did not want to be traded, and he wrote a letter to Bowie Kuhn expressing among other things: “I am a man, not a piece of property” and that he wanted to be a free agent. Kuhn refused to go along; Flood refused to play and he vowed to take his case to the Supreme Court.

Flood was vilified by the sports media and beyond. (In Philip Roth’s satirical Our Gang Richard Nixon’s advisers decide to deflect a potential PR Crisis for the administration by saying that Flood was responsible.) Flood himself admitted that he could not convince the press or the public to be on his side because he was doing something that ‘they would give their first born child to do.” Miller himself thought his cause was admirable but ultimately futile. (He was working his way towards getting rid of the reserve clause in his own fashion.)The courts were hostile towards Flood, and he was not helped that no active player dared testify. Bob Gibson later said: “they all wanted him to win, but they were terrified to stand alongside him if he lost.” Only former owner Bill Veeck, always the gadfly, and a handful of retired players dared testify for him.

It made no difference. The Supreme Court ruled in favor of Major League Baseball in 1972, in a decision that was embarrassing not merely in its legal phrase but it how much fan service there was. (The majority opinion quoted Franklin P. Adams ode to the double play combinations of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance’ which has to be a first that the chief court should have been ashamed of.) Flood never played baseball again.

While Flood’s case was making it through the course, another major destabilizer occurred. Jim Bouton, a former Yankee starter who had just ended his career in 1969 had published Ball Four, one of the most infamous baseball books of all time. The book laid bare just how ribald major league baseball was in the locker room, showing that athletes drunk, smoked pot and were unfaithful to their wives.

That, however, was not what truly alarmed Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. In this book, Bouton spends an entire chapter making very clear just how one-sided and ruthless Yankee management could be when it came to negotiating salaries, including an incident when then GM Ralph Houk threatened to deduct $100 a day from his 1964 salary if he did not sign his contract. Kuhn knew that if this became the focus of the book, it would be bad PR for baseball. So instead, he helped arrange a campaign in which he said this book was bad for baseball because, among other things, it showed that Mickey Mantle the idol of millions, sometimes didn’t sign autographs, drank, and caroused with his teammates and sometimes spied on women undressing in hotel rooms. To be clear, sportswriters and other ballplayers had known this for decades, it just hadn’t been made public.

The controversy made Ball Four a bestseller, Bouton a pariah – and made sure no one was talking about management’s underhanded tactics.

But the chains Major League Baseball had over its players were becoming weaker with every year. In the spring of 1972, players staged their first strike. Relatively speaking it was short, lasting little more than two weeks. But it began a pattern that has sadly become very clear with every labor stoppage to come and says something all too ugly about the nation’s fealty to unions. We might say in principle that we believe in labor’s right to organize, collective bargain and negotiate for a higher wage – as long as it doesn’t personally affect our lives. At the end of the day, fans don’t care whether ballplayers are being exploited or not, they just want their baseball games. For anyone who argues that Amazon workers should be allow to organize, let’s see how long that holds up after their first strike and you have wait a few extra days for the packages to get to you.

Of course, there’s more to that with baseball, and it unfolded over two separate events over a period of one year, both involved professional arbiter Peter Seitz, who Miller managed to get the owners to agree to as part of the dealing process. In the autumn of 1974, the first blow was struck.

 The Oakland A’s, owned by autocratic Charles Finley had spend the better part of a decade building a championship team – and pissing off every one he came in contact with, from his fellow owners to everybody who worked for him. One writer said that in hindsight, he made George Steinbrenner look like Eleanor Roosevelt, with a couple of exceptions: he paid as little as he could and his team drew extremely poorly.

From 1971 to 1975, the A’s were one of the greatest teams in baseball history, winning five consecutive division titles and three consecutive World Series. In a way, their spirit of unity was as much against Finley as their opposition. The team featured some of the greatest players of the decade – Reggie Jackson, Bert Campaneris and Rollie Fingers – but it also contained many potentially great players whose promise was scarred because of Finley’s harsh ownership.

Rookie pitcher Vida Blue went 24-8 with a 1.72 era and 308 strikeouts and was the biggest thing in baseball in 1971. When he understandably asked for a huge salary bump, Finley made it very clear he would not get it “even though he deserved it.” Blue held out that year, had a poor 1972 season and was never the same pitcher again.

Catfish Hunter was the other ace of the staff, winning 20 games or more 4 seasons in a row. But on the eve of the 1974 World Series, Finley was found guilty of breach of contract. In December of that year, Seitz announced that Finley had violated the contract, which meant that he only Hunter $50,000 – and that Hunter was a free agent.

Everything that free agency would become was evident in that first bidding war. Every team started making offers for Hunter, with San Diego topping out at $4 million dollars over five years. Hunter chose instead to sign with the Yankees for half a million less over that same period. And he only performed superbly for one year – his first – and slowly but surely deteriorated the rest of the way. By 1979, he was washed up as a pitcher at 32. So to be clear, the first ever free agent was a waste of money. By then, it was too late for the owners to go back.

The next year Andy Messersmith, who had pitched the Dodgers into the World Series against Oakland in 1974, announced that he was going to play an entire season without a contract in order to challenge the reserve clause in 1975. (Dave McNally, who was pitching with the Expos, and his career nearly over agreed to put his name on the suit so Messersmith would not stand alone.)

In October of 1975, Seitz again heard the arguments and told the owners to come up with a more equitable solution, something that their own representative John Gaherin had been urging them to do for years. But the owners were as conservative as they always been and refused to do anything. Seitz ruled that the reserve clause was illegal. The owners promptly fired him and tried to get the decision overturned in court. It didn’t work. The reserve clause was dead.

So Marvin Miller won the battle and the war for Major League Baseball and the players had finally won their freedom and the prosperity they deserved. And yet somehow the owners have continued to win the war at least as far as PR goes.

An anonymous owner once said that free agency meant that he had to pay what his dumbest competitor was willing to pay. And that’s the real reason salaries have skyrocketed so much. The owners have always been their own worst enemies and they continued to prove so exponentially during the era of free agency. If Ted Turner is willing to pay $3.5 million dollars for Claudell Washington, a mediocre outfielder and hitter, then by extension it drives up the prices for all the superstars out there.

But the owners also know their product well enough to know that as long as there is baseball people will come to see it. And I think a lot of their attitude in the near half century since the death of the reserve clause has been pure and simple spite. If they can’t control the player’s destinies and how little they pay them, then they’ll just go on the offensive and say that they’re greedy and money grubbing. They’ve been using that message for over a century; it’s just a lot more believable now that players are making $5 million a year instead of $50,000.

And that’s part of the reason that no one will ever speak of Marvin Miller in the tones they do Cesar Chavez and John Lewis. In the eyes of many, he was too good at his job. The owners have passed the immense costs of playing these salaries on to the fan and they make more money than ever.

But even though they still want to destroy the players ability to bargain, get rid of free agency and put everything back pre-Seitz, every time theirs even a threat of a labor stoppage, no one ever takes the side of the players. I imagine there are some union organizers at Starbucks who grouse about how the Yankees paid to much for Aaron Judge this year and do not see any irony.

And the nostalgia factor always favors the players as practitioners of a noble art, not working stiffs. In the last episode of Burns’ documentary, the only player interviewed about the Seitz decision is Bill Lee, a Red Sox pitcher known as the Space Man who in the same sentence refers to the Seitz decision as the ‘Emancipation Proclamation of Baseball’ and one minute later says that the only things that got hurt were ‘the fans, the integrity of the game and the Planet Earth.” Even by Lee’s standards that’s out there, but the thing is I have a feeling that’s what a lot fans of the game believe.

For all the arguments so many on the left make about the importance of unions and collective bargaining, I wonder if they know anything about the history of baseball at all, and if they did would it affect their opinion of unions? Baseball players spent the better part of a century with not even the freedom to leave their job if they were underpaid. Even the best ballplayers had to work second jobs during the winter to make ends meet, and countless hall-of-famers died in poverty. Now they are the premiere example of what a union can achieve – and if the left thinks of them all, it is as ‘capitalism run amok.’

And if that is the case, one wonders if they only care for collective bargaining and organized labor as a concept rather than something that would affect their daily lives. They might cheer the educator who works in public schools and say they should be making six figure salaries – but if they did, would they still think as highly of them if they had to pay for their own school supplies? They want Starbucks employees to organize so that they can make a fair wage – but what happens if the prize of your daily latte doubles as a result? Those who argue against Wal-Mart’s refusal to let unions organize are right – but those low prices would not be as low to shoppers afterwards. To quote Chris Rock in a different context: “Baseball players are rich. The men who sign their checks are wealthy.” The average ballplayer is no more part of the one percent than the rest of America but because they are a millionaire, that means that they don’t earn the same sympathy as the other people who strived for rights, even though they had even less and fought long harder to enjoy the fruits of their labor and their average career will be far shorter than the blue collar worker.

Baseball may not be a plantation any more. The problem is, the publicity machine has made it far clearer that too many people wish it was.

In the final article of this series, I will take a look at baseball in the free agency era and make the argument that the owners are still determined to wreck the game as before – and still take less blame for the players who want to advocate for their rights and protect their careers.