His Clout Hit Where It Counts

He never hit or caught a line drive, never threw out a runner, struck out a batter, stole a base or laid down a bunt, but he has written a book about his career in baseball and he hopes--and expects--it will be a best-seller.

The dust jacket quotes authorities suggesting he is one of two men who have changed the face of baseball the most. The other is Babe Ruth, to give you an idea.

So, why isn’t he in the Hall of Fame? Why isn’t somebody paying $490,000 for his bubble gum card?

Because Marvelous Marvin Miller did it all with a telephone and an adding machine. He didn’t build the New York Yankees or the Big Red Machine or win pennants from the dugout. He won concessions from management. His monument is something called the Major League Players Assn.

As a union, it was a lineup of banjo hitters when Miller came along, inserted himself in the batting order at cleanup and began to take the leagues apart with homer after homer at the bargaining table.

The players couldn’t hit the curves management was throwing at them, but to Marvin they all looked like hanging sliders. Gopher balls. He knocked them all out of the lot.

His book is titled, “A Whole Different Ball Game,” but it could be called, “How I Saved Baseball, Got the Players--and the Owners--Everything That Was Coming to Them.”

The owners of baseball--a chorus of hard-minded House Of Lords types for whom the word mogul was coined (or expropriated)--had the last slave market in the western world when Miller came along. Ballplayers were in semi-bondage. This Moses led them out across a sea of red ink. The figures are irrefutable. When Marvelous Marv came along, the minimum salary had risen but $1,000 in 20 years, from $5,000 to $6,000. The average salary in the big leagues was $19,000.

The average salary today is $890,000 a year. The minimum is $100,000, or $20,000 more than Babe Ruth made in his heyday.

If that sounds like pretty heavy hitting at the bargaining table, it was. Miller found a fragmented hodge podge of a nonaggressive union, a company union manipulated and controlled by the owners. “Baseball players were not only ignorant about unions, they were hostile to the idea,” he writes. “Ballplayers simply didn’t know how to voice . . . complaints--there was no place to go.”

Miller gave them a place to go. He gave them arbitration, better hours, wages and working conditions, grievances.

Miller, no violet, would have you think this was a tremendous tour de force for his organized labor. In a way, it was. But he portrays the owners and commissioners he faced as such bunglers, ignoramuses, Colonel Blimps, clodhoppers, mindlessly greedy mid-19th Century reactionaries that you tend to wonder what he had to beat. He sees himself as St. George vs. the Dragon, but it comes out more like Batman vs. the Keystone Kops.

Actually, the monster exponential increases in salaries are due not so much to Marvin’s manipulations as to an owner’s blunder and an arbitrator’s ruling. In 1974, Charles O. Finley neglected to pay an agreed-upon insurance policy for his pitcher, Catfish Hunter. The arbitrator ruled the pitcher to be a free agent.

Then owner George Steinbrenner committed what some management types would consider a bigger blunder: He offered the pitcher $3.75 million. The floodgates were open. No one in the game had ever made more than $100,000 before. An arbitrator named Peter Seitz (who will never make the Hall of Fame, either) did more to skyrocket salaries and undermine the reserve clause than Marvin Miller or anyone in history.

Not to worry. Miller tells you he was behind the scenes every step of the way. Besides, he wants to know, who put the arbitrator in?

In 1975, the Dodgers’ Walter O’Malley, of all people, committed blunder No. 3. He refused to give pitcher Andy Messersmith a no-trade clause in his contract. Big mistake. Andy refused to sign the proffered contract; he played out his season without one. Enter arbitrator Seitz again. Messersmith was ruled a free agent. He signed with Ted Turner for $1.75 million. (Two weeks before the ruling, the owners passed up a chance to fire arbitrator Seitz--twice. Right after the Messersmith ruling, then they fired him.)

This does not downplay Marvin Miller’s contributions. He put in the machinery. But the wounds from runaway inflated salaries for free agents would seem to be largely self-inflicted. As Richard Nixon said in another context, they gave them the sword.

Miller was a foreman worthy of the steel. He sliced the owners like Zorro. He was the real commissioner of baseball for the better part of two decades. The commissioner had the owners. Marvin had the players. It was no contest.

Miller’s contempt for commissioners was monumental. He heaps such scorn on Bowie Kuhn, portrays him in such an unflattering light, you begin to picture poor Bowie coming onstage like the second banana in a third-rate burlesque. Marvin Miller’s straight man. Say good night, Bowie.

Miller didn’t have much use for my profession, either. We were all lackeys of the owners, to hear him tell it. You twitted Marvin at your peril. I once complained (mildly) that Miller would have us believe his major league players were the modern equivalent of the girls in the Triangle shirtwaist fire--he may be the only labor leader in history to represent a constituency of millionaires. Marvin didn’t see the humor of it. I was a tool of ownership. (That would come as a considerable surprise to Walter O’Malley, Charles O. Finley and George Steinbrenner. But I have to admit I was a little partial to Phil Wrigley--he played afternoon games so as not to disturb his neighbors. I like that in a man.) But Marvin’s anti-sportswriter stance hurt relationships in a sport which was, after all, built by the inordinate press attention showered on it by us press box romanticists throughout history. Marvin wants hard-edged, cynical reporting when it serves his purposes, but if the game got it through history, there would be no sport for him to get famous in.

Never mind. Miller’s impact on baseball, indeed on sport, was major. He was like a general who found a powerful army, disorganized, leaderless, not knowing its own strength--and he won every battle with it. All the owners had going for them in 1970-80-90 America was an archaic (1922) Supreme Court ruling that held ludicrously enough that baseball was not a business, it was a sport, a position upheld lukewarmly from time to time by the court, which querulously requested Congress at the same time to do something about making the game less unconstitutional.

Marvin didn’t find that crimp in the antitrust laws too insurmountable.

As considerable as his contributions were, all sport rode a wave of mammoth salary increases at the time. Television did more to jack up the prices than unions. TV threw money at the sport by the sackfuls. Miller merely made sure the players got in on it. All he had to elbow out were a bunch of obtuse owners and their ventriloquist’s dummy commissioners.

Marvin is not entirely happy with the plutocratic caste he has created. He hates agents. They get in on his gravy train at no risk or input. Of course, so do union leaders--Marvin’s successor gets $500,000 a year, which doesn’t please him too much, either.

And the new commissioner finds no more favor with Miller than his predecessors. He fits Fay Vincent with his private dunce cap when he reports that 10 clubs lost money in 1990. Marvin suspects his old nemesis, double-entry bookkeeping, for the vows of poverty. “How much of these so-called losses was due to creative accounting?” he wants to know. “And why are the latest expansion franchises drawing astronomical prices ($95 million) from businessmen across the country?”

I’d like to know the answer to that last one myself. But Marvin is experienced in bucking poor-mouth industrialists. He spent 16 years as chief economist and assistant to the president of the United Steelworkers Union bucking the steel industry. We used to have one in this country.