Marvin Miller
Marvin Julian Miller was an American labor union leader and baseball executive who served as the first executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association from 1966 to 1982. Miller led MLBPA during three strikes and two lockouts. Under Miller's direction, the players' union was transformed into one of the strongest unions in the United States.
Miller grew up in a working-class family in the Flatbush neighborhood of Brooklyn, New York, and began his career with positions at various prominent unions. In 1950, he became a key figure in the organized labor world when he was made the principal economic advisor of United Steelworkers, serving as one of its contract negotiators. In 1966, Miller departed from USW when he won a landslide victory in a players' vote to become leader of the MLBPA.
Miller advised St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood in his 1972 Supreme Court challenge against baseball's reserve clause that prevented players from entering free agency. The same year, Miller presided over the first-ever major league strike that yielded a pension fund increase. In 1974, Miller coordinated with players Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally in a bid for free agency that resulted in the abolition of the reserve clause in the 1975 Seitz decision.
Following his stint as the MLBPA leader, Miller was well-received for his contributions to player rights. In 1992, Red Barber said, "Marvin Miller, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, is one of the two or three most important men in baseball history." Miller was selected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in December 2019, for induction in 2020.
Early life
Miller was born in the Bronx on April 14, 1917, and grew up in Flatbush, Brooklyn, rooting for the Brooklyn Dodgers. His father, Alexander, was a salesman for a clothing company on the Lower East Side in Manhattan and as a youngster, Marvin walked a picket line in a union organizing drive. His mother, Gertrude Wald Miller, who taught elementary school, was a member of the New York City teachers union, now the United Federation of Teachers.Miller graduated from New York University in 1938 with a degree in economics. He resolved labor-management disputes for the National War Labor Board in World War II and later worked for the International Association of Machinists and the United Auto Workers. He joined the staff of the United Steelworkers in 1950, became its principal economic advisor and assistant to its president, and took part in negotiating contracts.
Major League Baseball Players Association
At the United Steelworkers union, Miller worked his way up to be its leading economist and negotiator. In March 1966, Miller visited MLB spring training camps in an effort to be democratically elected executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. He won the election by a vote of 489–136.Miller negotiated MLBPA's first collective bargaining agreement with the team owners in 1968. That CBA, covering the 1968 and 1969 seasons, was a short document. It won the players a nearly 43 percent increase in the minimum salary from $7,000 to $10,000, as well as larger expense allowances. More importantly, the deal brought a formal structure to owner–player relations, including written procedures for the arbitration of player grievances before the commissioner.
The next CBA, a three-year deal signed in 1970, built on this gain. For the first time, owner-player disputes not involving the "integrity of baseball" could be arbitrated not before the commissioner, an employee of the owners, but before a three-member arbitration panel with a neutral chairman selected jointly by the players and owners.
Curt Flood
Throughout the 1969 season, Curt Flood, a perennial standout player for the powerhouse St. Louis Cardinals, argued with Cardinals owner August Busch and General Manager Bing Devine over a $10,000 raise in his $90,000 salary. Shortly after the 1969 season concluded, Devine sent Flood a terse, two-sentence letter notifying him that he had been traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. Flood took the trade as an insult and also viewed it as a punishment by Cardinals management for his increased salary demands. Philadelphia's Shibe Park was known to be the most dilapidated in the major leagues compared with Busch Stadium that opened in 1966. Worse still, Phillies fans had earned a reputation for being virulent racists as was evidenced by the epithets and garbage they hurled at black player Dick Allen. At a conference held in his honor at New York University in 2012, Miller recalled what Flood had said to him about Philadelphia before filing the lawsuit: “On his experiences in Philadelphia, he said he had observed that the people at the ballpark, patrons, were as racist as any he had ever met in the south, and he was not going to live there or work there.” Coincidentally, Allen was the player the "Phils" sent to St. Louis as its part of the bargain for Flood.Flood wrote a letter to then Commissioner of Baseball Bowie Kuhn stating that he did not view himself as "property" and instructed Kuhn to notify all teams in Major League Baseball that he was willing to consider financial offers to play for any team during the 1970 season. Flood had chosen to ignore the age-old reserve clause, which prevented him from negotiating with any MLB team until he had sat out a season. Flood did not take his challenge of the reserve clause lightly and did consult with Miller before suing MLB and Bowie Kuhn. "I told him," recalled Miller, "that given the courts' history of bias towards the owners and their monopoly, he didn't have a chance in hell of winning. More important than that, I told him even if he won, he'd never get anything out of it—he'd never get a job in baseball again." Flood asked Miller if it would benefit other players. "I told him yes, and those to come."
Flood pressed forward with his suit and, as Miller predicted, became what later generations would figuratively call "radioactive". The case Flood v. Kuhn made its way to the Supreme Court in March 1972. Flood was represented by prominent labor lawyer Arthur Goldberg, a former Secretary of Labor, Permanent Representative to the United Nations, Associate Justice of the Supreme Court of the United States, and General Counsel of the United Steelworkers while Marvin Miller was the union's chief negotiator.
Meanwhile, Miller took his union on a "lightning" strike on April Fools' Day 1972. From April 1 through April 13, the ballplayers simply stayed away from the ballparks while Miller negotiated with the owners. Baseball only resumed when the owners and players agreed on a $500,000 increase in pension fund payments. Owners agreed to add salary arbitration to the CBA. The total 86 exhibition and regular-season games that were missed over the entire 13-day period were never played because the league refused to pay the players for the time they were on strike. Most teams lost anywhere from six to eight games off their 162-game schedule.
The Supreme Court decided against Flood by a 5–3–1 vote in June 1972. Flood sat out the 1970 season because no owner wanted to set a precedent by flagrantly disobeying the reserve clause. In 1971 he was signed by and played just 13 lackluster games for the Washington Senators. After that, a disgusted Flood never played Major League Baseball again. Twenty years later, Miller wrote in his memoir that Flood told the players union, "I think the change in black consciousness in recent years has made me more sensitive to injustice in every area of my life." Miller also said that Flood was primarily challenging the reserve clause as a professional ballplayer.
End of the reserve clause
Although he lost his personal legal battle, Flood had made it possible for other MLB players to challenge the reserve clause. In 1974, Miller used arbitration to resolve a dispute when Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley failed to make an annuity payment as required by Cy Young Award winning pitcher Catfish Hunter's contract. The arbitrator ruled that Finley had not met the terms of the contract so Hunter was free to negotiate a new contract with any team – making Hunter a free agent. Hunter eventually went on to sign a five-year deal with the New York Yankees for $3.5 million and an additional $1 million signing bonus.In 1974, Miller encouraged pitchers Andy Messersmith of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dave McNally of the Baltimore Orioles to play out the succeeding year without signing a contract. After the year had elapsed, both players filed a grievance arbitration. The ensuing Seitz decision declared that both players had fulfilled their contractual obligations and had no further legal ties to their ballclubs. This effectively eradicated the reserve clause and ushered in free agency. As an economist, Miller clearly understood that too many free agents could actually drive down player salaries. Miller agreed to limit free agency to players with more than six years of service, hoping that restricting the supply of labor would drive up salaries as owners bid for an annual, finite pool of free agents. Miller's hopes were frustrated for a time as baseball owners engaged in collusion in which they agreed among themselves not to deal with any player who was a free agent.
Miller led the ballplayer's union in two more actions against the Major League owners, the second during 1980 spring training, and the third during the heart of the 1981 regular season. The 1981 strike, which lasted 50 days, forced the total cancellation of 713 games, and is estimated to have cost both the owners and players $146 million. Under Marvin Miller's 16-year tenure as the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, the owners engaged in two lockouts, one in 1973 spring training and the other in 1976 spring training, both the result of negotiations for collective bargaining agreements.