Miller: Lockout Has No Chance of Success : Baseball: Former players’ union head says the faces have changed, but owners’ collective bargaining mistakes are the same.

He smiles as he hears baseball players and owners firing verbal salvos, but Marvin Miller gets no real joy out of seeing baseball head toward a spring training lockout Thursday.

Miller, who helped change the course of the game as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Assn., finds no joy in seeing the same claims and posturing he remembers from so many long sessions over so many bargaining tables.

“The cast is different, but the scenario is the same,” said Miller, who presided over the union from 1966 through 1983 and helped lead players to free agency, arbitration and lucrative salaries.

“Not much is different. Everybody talks about the great success we had, moving the players’ association from non-existence to prominence, but all along the way we were helped tremendously by the errors of the owners. All along the way, every time there was a crisis, we waited for them to make a mistake and they inevitably did. I am so grateful to their errors, I can’t tell you.”

Miller said fans tend to see players signing contracts for astronomical sums and figure they are acting on greed in the current negotiations. He pointed, however, to owners’ insistence on inserting protective “lockout language” in players’ contracts for the last two years as proof that they have not been bargaining in good faith.

“If any union two years in advance of negotiations had talked with such hostility or taken hostile action it would have been murdered by the media,” said Miller, who is not involved in the current talks except for occasionally speaking to Don Fehr, the executive director of the players’ association.

“This is infuriating. . . . We have seen so-called ‘concession’ bargaining in the last 10 or 15 years in industries or companies where there’s a lot of red ink. In my entire history of collective bargaining I’ve never seen an industry at the height of prosperity say it’s going to have a lockout and nobody’s taken them to task.”

Miller wasn’t hesitant to blame owners for what he sees as compounding all their previous errors with an impending lockout.

“A lot of people--including the owners--don’t seem to understand that a lockout can’t accomplish anything,” said Miller, who lives in New York City and is at work on his autobiography.

“The owners are shooting themselves in the foot. They’re going to prevent people from training. . . . It’s a very profitable period in baseball now and the first thing a lockout is going to do is cut into their profits. As Fehr (recently) pointed out, once you go down the road, it’s going to have an impact on the season because, after a short time, the season can’t start on time.

“It’s obvious what they’re trying to accomplish: They’re trying to get the players so panicked at the loss of pay that they’ll cave in and give the owners everything they want. That’s a great delusion. It’s not going to happen. The players’ association has always been a very strong association.

“You want my opinion on whether it’s going to work? Not a chance.”

FO Marvin Miller

FO Marvin Miller