Sports Biblio Digest, 12.15.19: The Legacy of Marvin Miller
News, Views and Reviews About Sports Books, History and Culture
Also In This Issue: Sports Book Holiday Shopping Help; Ted Simmons; Rashaan Salaam; Kevin Ellison; Bobby Jenks; Lou Gehrig’s Lost Memoir; Mark Pavelich; John Steuart Curry’s Gridiron Art; Joe Pepitone on Smoking Weed and Screwing Sinatra; Nick Cafardo
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Shortly after Marvin Miller’s election to the Baseball Hall of Fame this week—an event many thought would never come about—some of the biggest player contracts in the game’s history were announced.
The former executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association will be inducted posthumously in Cooperstown in July, seven years after his death.
But the money and bargaining powers players have accumulated in more than 40 years of free agency is a testament to Miller’s steely, almost ruthless persistence in going toe-to-toe with owners as the game’s riches reached almost unprecedented proportions.
This week’s signings are simply breathtaking. The World Series champion Washington Nationals kept one of their aces, Stephen Strasburg, for seven years, paying $245 million.
They lost their third baseman, Anthony Rendon, to the Los Angeles Angels, for the same terms: 7 and 245, and he’ll get to team up with Mike Trout.
The long-suffering Angels were making a play for Houston Astros’ ace Gerrit Cole, whom the Yankees signed for nine years and $324 million.
A number of other big moves are likely following this week’s Winter Meetings in San Diego, where the free agent market may prompt a whole new definition to the phrase Hot Stove League.
There’s little question Miller is, as The Athletic’s Mitch Melnick wrote this week, “one of the most important individuals in the history of baseball.” In that respect, his election has been long overdue.
Players had virtually no rights to control their own destinies, much less income, while the reserve clause was in effect, for almost a century. Miller came to the job in 1966, after years as a labor economist with the steelworkers and machinists unions.
Those were the big leagues of labor, at the height of the industrial age. By contrast, baseball players, as an organized band, were barely at the A-ball level, floundering as North America's sports entertainment industry was on the cusp of greater riches thanks to television.
The players' union treasury was paltry, many players didn’t know about the few rights they did have, and some didn’t trust Miller at all.
Miller stepped in as player dissension was starting to boil in other corners. Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale conducted a salary holdout at the end of the 1965 season. While it failed, it also turned heads as it made Walter O’Malley fume.
In 1969, St.Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood balked at being traded to Philadelphia, where he had been subjected to racial taunts from fans. He refused to play for his new employer, but because of the reserve clause and baseball’s antitrust exemption, it was the Phillies or no team at all.
Miller warned Flood his challenge was premature, but the outfielder filed suit anyway, and lost. He never played baseball again, but as the 1970s dawned, a new era for baseball and money had emerged.
The Major Leagues had gone to divisions, television contracts were finally becoming substantial, and satellite and cable outlets would increase media revenues even further, despite owners’ growling as free agency came about.
While timing isn’t everything—Miller worked very hard at taking a gradual, calculating approach to breaking down the old walls that favored owners—the labor boss was also an expert at knowing how to seize the moment.
By the time he retired in 1982, Miller had succeeded in cajoling owners and persuading players to understand, value and fight for their own worth. No small twin feat.
Plenty of fractious labor dealings were to follow, including the disastrous strike in 1994 that cancelled the World Series for the first time in more than 90 years.
It took years for baseball to recover some of its trust from fans (including myself) who walked away in disgust. Yes, the owners were billionaires, but the players were millionaires, and had long since left the same neighborly precincts as fans making the same working-class money and working odd jobs in the winters.
The excesses of the players’ revolution were revealed in ugly fashion, and for a while it seemed they didn’t care what fans thought of them. The money they make now puts them well into the upper half of the one percent.
While Miller was never enamored with being in the Hall of Fame, one of the more inadvertent results of his advocacy was to make some figures even richer than the players—their agents.
One agent in particular is really cleaning up this winter. Scott Boras could be on track to pull in about $27 million in 2020, assuming the standard five percent commission for agents.
Strasburg, Rendon and Cole are on his client list, plus Mike Moustakas (four years, $64 million with the Reds) and pitchers Dallas Keuchel and Hyun-Jin Ryu are still testing the market.
The baseball business world that exists now has been transformed in large part by what Miller was able to accomplish for players, and in some ways his times seem rather quaint, given the money that’s piling up these days.
But the revolution he unleashed can never be turned back, as owners had successfully spurned players for the better part of the century, without fail.
A Few Good Reads
Also gaining Baseball Hall of Fame induction with Marvin Miller from the Modern Era Committee is former Cardinals, Brewers and Braves catcher Ted Simmons, who was a one-and-done on the writers’ ballot in 1994. That was just as advanced stats were truly beginning to make a difference in induction issues. Said Simmons: “I have to be honest. If it weren’t for the analytics people, my career as a potential Hall of Famer probably would have been shut down and forgotten about a long time ago;”
From Tom Hoffarth, an eclectic batch of last-minute sports book holiday shopping suggestions;
Christina Binkley of The New Yorker caught some cultural appropriation flack on social media for her intriguing piece on a new line of Nike swimwear geared toward Muslim women. Her most serious crime, it seems, was trying on the threads to get a feel for herself;
Rashaan Salaam never wanted to win the Heisman Trophy, but once he did, it followed him until his death;
The frightening story of former major league pitcher Bobby Jenks, who writes in first person about back surgery that nearly killed him, his addiction to pain-killing drugs, and how he’s pieced his life together;
Mark Pavelich’s personal downfall has been steep and severe, and the former 1980 U.S. Olympic hockey gold medalist has been declared mentally ill and dangerous and ordered to a treatment facility by a judge in Minnesota. Pavelich, accused of beating a friend with a metal pole, had a star-crossed and brief NHL career and his wife died several years ago;
The family of Kevin Ellison, a former linebacking star at USC, has donated his brain to the Boston laboratory that has been examining the brains of former football players for chronic traumatic encephalopathy. Ellison, who died at 31 this fall after stepping into traffic, had numerous difficulties since his retirement from the NFL and had been undergoing psychiatric treatment;
Next August, the New York Yankees and Chicago White Sox will play a game in rural Iowa that’s the site for the film “Field of Dreams.” Part of the cornfield that served as a backdrop for the film is getting cleared for the exhibition, including bleacher seating for 8,000;
Nick Cafardo, the longtime Red Sox and baseball writer for The Boston Globe who died in February, was named the winner of the J.G. Taylor Spink Award, given by the Baseball Hall of Fame for contributions to baseball writing. He’ll be honored posthumously next July in Cooperstown during induction weekend.
Sports and Art
While recently reading a collection of non-fiction pieces, “Look Homeward, America,” by the upstate New York localist writer Bill Kauffman, I was introduced to the mid-century American painter and illustrator John Steuart Curry. He grew up in Kansas and was trained at the Art Institute of Chicago. He gained some attention for his football paintings and sketchings at the University of Wisconsin in the 1930s, while serving as the Big Ten university’s first artist-in-residence.
Curry’s “An All-American" painting, of Badgers star David Schreiner shown above in 1942, adorns the facade at Camp Randall Stadium. That was done in 2006 to honor Schreiner, a Marine officer killed in the Battle of Okinawa in 1945, and whose jersey No. 80 was retired.
Hailed with Grant Wood and Thomas Hart Benton as one of the masters of American Regionalism, Curry has had his work displayed in exhibitions around the country, including a 2014 retrospective at the Museum of Wisconsin Art.
Earlier this year, the Beach Museum of Art in his native Kansas displayed some of his local landscape paintings and the show runs through March. His 1937 watercolor “Touchdown” and three other lithographs are at the Arrowhead Art Collection at Arrowhead Stadium, the home of the Kansas City Chiefs.
Sports History Files
Saw this retweeted somewhere this week, and what a gas: Dan Epstein’s 2015 Q & A in Rolling Stone with Joe Pepitone as he published his memoir, a story of one of the true unreconstructed wild childs of baseball.
Sports Book News
Next May, Simon & Schuster will be publishing “Lou Gehrig: The Lost Memoir,” written by the Iron Horse in 1927, the year of the Murderer’s Row season. Alan Gaff, a Civil War scholar, supplements the work with an appraisal of the rest of Gehrig’s life story and his legacy beyond his death in 1941 due to ALS.
2019 Sports Books Honor Roll
Next week is the last Sports Biblio Digest of the year, and I’ll be devoting that issue to notable sports books for 2019. I’ll unveil my personal favorites as well as those of others, and you’re invited to chime in. Send your favorites and explain why you liked them to: sportsbiblio@gmail.com and they’ll be included in the newsletter. Let me know by Friday at the latest.
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The Sports Biblio Digest is an e-mail newsletter delivered on Sunday. You can subscribe here and search the archives.
This is Digest issue No. 188, published Dec. 15, 2019.
I’d love to hear what you think about the Digest, and Sports Biblio. Send feedback, suggestions, book recommendations, review copies, newsletter items and interview requests to Wendy Parker at sportsbiblio@gmail.com.