Marvin Miller Adds a Missing Piece of Baseball’s Story to the Hall of Fame

SAN DIEGO — The big story on the first full day of baseball’s winter meetings on Monday was Stephen Strasburg becoming the richest pitcher in major league history. Strasburg reached an agreement to stay with the Washington Nationals for seven years and $245 million. If he had wanted to sign elsewhere, perhaps with his hometown San Diego Padres, he could have done that. But now he is back with the team he just led to a title, and he probably will never pitch for anyone else.

This is the world that Marvin Miller — and perhaps he alone — envisioned decades ago. Miller, the first executive director of the players’ association, was finally elected to the Hall of Fame on Sunday night, posthumously, by a 16-person panel of executives, historians and former players who also elected the former catcher Ted Simmons. The game has not withered because of the free agency rights players gained under Miller; it has thrived.

“There was some anxiety at first, because there was this stigma about unionizing athletes — who did they think they were?” said Jim Kaat, the former pitcher, by phone on Monday. “What Marvin did, gradually, was show us our value and give us more self-esteem.”

It is hard to imagine that player mind-set now, in an era when Gerrit Cole wears a cap with his agent’s logo minutes after his Houston Astros lose Game 7 of the World Series to forecast his coming bonanza on the open market. But in 1966, when the players elected Miller to lead their union, they had been trained to think of themselves as easily replaceable.

Source: The New York Times

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