November 27, 2012

Marvin Miller Passes

Marvin Miller, the man who created the MLBPA and helped the players to big paydays, died at age 95.

In 1968, Miller negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports, one that increased the sport’s minimum salary from $6,000 to $10,000.

Among the other concessions Miller won from the owners was salary arbitration, which also resulted in better salaries for the players. He also is credited with improving players’ benefits and working conditions.

My thoughts go out to his family and friends.

As you look at the history of Major League Baseball, it is incredible how owners held back their own game. They resisted almost everything that improved their product; integration, radio, television, and freedom of movement for ball players. Free agency brought a renewed interest to the game, as teams were able to rebuild quickly, and single team domination came to an end. (Note that the domination returned in the 1990s, when owners made their last stand against free agency.) Owner could have easily avoided a union with a minimum of freedom for players. It’s a reminder to us all to be a bit more open minded to changing the way things have always been done.

The owners were not, and Miller used that stubbornness to create a sports union. It’s a unique organization, in that it tends to be about setting the rules for employment, rather than protecting every individual job and setting every individual salary. It’s not perfect, as younger players tend to be underpaid and older players overpaid. Good organizations like Oakland and Tampa Bay use this to their advantage. Miller helped make all this possible.

Miller deserves Hall of Fame recognition. It’s too late for him to enjoy it, but it’s time to do the right thing and vote him in.

3 thoughts on “Marvin Miller Passes

  1. A.G. Block

    Not surprising that baseball owners acted like the mining industry, auto industry, steel industry, et al, in resisting change — and having that change foisted on them by the collective action of workers and/or government. Baseball is not unique in this regard.

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  2. Pft

    Finley supposedly wanted to go one step further than Miller, and offer free agency to all players without any service time requirement.

    Miller supposedly rejected this feeling limited free agency would inflate salaries due to supply and demand principles.

    So today Millers system is one which young players are underpaid relative to the market and subsidize higher salaries for older players with more service time.

    I like Finleys model as it would force teams to tie up young talent with multi year deals much like the Rays did with Longoria. Some top players would wisely go Y2Y until they had their breakout year but most would opt for security. This would leave less
    Money for absurd deals for 30ish players paying them 20+ million into their late 30’s.

    But Millers model has worked pretty well for players who can stay healthy for 6 years at the MLB level.

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  3. M. Scott Eiland

    The funny thing is that Finley’s model wouldn’t have helped him personally–he was an abusive SOB who wouldn’t (and, to a certain degree, couldn’t) pay market value to most of his players. The talented ones would have fled at first opportunity and left him with the dregs, as ended up happening more slowly in reality until the draft brought in more talent and gave the franchise a brief rebirth in the Billy Ball Era. Between keeping arbitration out of play and flooding the market with talent, it would have saved most of the other owners countless millions, but they hated Miller and Finley too much to do anything but engage in a futile effort to save the old system, then bleed money as it collapsed.

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