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Marvin Miller Made Baseball Players Millionaires

By Joe Guzzardi

Journalist Studs Terkel, who wrote “Working,” the classic oral history of Americans’ on-the-job lives, called Marvin Miller “the most effective union organizer since John L. Lewis,” the United Mine Workers president for forty years and Congress of Industrial Organizations’ founder. Miller took over a failing group that represented the nation’s most exploited but irreplaceable workers —the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA)—- and converted it into the country’s most powerful union.

Miller’s introduction to labor negotiations came when he worked for the United States Steel Workers Association (USWA). In the early 1950s, the USWA, along with the United Auto Workers (UAW), for whom Miller also worked, represented America’s union strength. USWA, with 2,300 North American locals, had more than one million members. But an internal USWA shake-up prompted Miller to seek new employment. He turned down a faculty position at Harvard University when Hall of Fame pitcher Robin Roberts asked him to consider becoming the MLBPA’s executive director. Miller, a baseball fan who admired Roberts’ sterling career—286 wins and 305 complete games over a 20-year career—agreed. After the owners tried to persuade the unconvinced players that Miller would lead them into a strike that few of them could afford —a scare tactic— in 1966, the tenacious labor leader eventually got the job.

Miller had to overcome numerous efforts made by the owners to block his ascendancy. The owners hoped that by repeatedly stalling they would force Miller, who still had no fixed plan to fund the union, to give up. Instead, the owner’s heavy-handedness infuriated the players, and they unified their support behind Miller, who in 1966 they unanimously elected their executive director. By 1968, Miller had negotiated MLBPA’s first collective bargaining agreement (CBA) with the team owners that won the players a whopping increase in their minimum salary from $7,000 to $10,000 plus larger expense allowances that covered the 1968 and 1969 seasons. Miller advised superstar outfielder Curt Flood in the historic 1972 Flood versus Kuhn case which reached the Supreme Court. At stake was coveted free agency. The court ruled against Flood 5-3-1; nevertheless, Flood’s lawsuit opened the door for other MLB players to challenge the reserve clause.

On December 23rd, 1975, Peter Seitz, the neutral arbitrator, awarded Major League Baseball players, both present and future, the greatest Christmas present they would ever receive. He ruled that clause 10(a) of a player’s contract, reserving an unsigned player to his current team, was only valid for one year. After that, a ballplayer could become a free agent if the contract remained unsigned. Free agency, resulting from the 1974 case of the Los Angeles Dodgers’ Andy Messersmith and the Baltimore Orioles’ Dave McNally who Miller encouraged to sit out a year, was on the horizon. After filing a grievance, Messersmith and McNally won free agency and signed new contracts with the Atlanta Braves and the Montreal Expos.

During Miller’s MLBPA executive director tenure, baseball suffered through strikes and lockouts that angered fans. But the average player’s annual salary rose from $19,000 in 1966 to $326,000 in 1982, the year Miller left the MLBPA. Miller died in 2012 and didn’t live long enough to see the explosion in player salaries. Too bad; he would have been proud of the groundbreaking work he did decades ago. In 2024, Los Angeles Dodgers’ two-way player, Shohei Otani will earn $70 million, the average player salary is $5 million, and the minimum player income, $750,000.

After being rejected six times in Hall of Fame voting, four times by the Veterans Committee, and twice by the Expansion Era Committee, both dominated by owners and baseball executives, in 2020, the Modern Baseball Era Committee inducted Miller. In 2008, four years before his death at age 95, Miller told the Boston Globe that he held the HOF in contempt and was indifferent to his induction. Calling the vote “rigged” and the members “handpicked to reach a particular outcome,” Miller said, “At age 91, I can do without the farce.”

Miller was among baseball’s three most impactful figures, sharing the honor with Babe Ruth, who changed the way the game is played and Jackie Robinson who paved the way for black players to enter the Major Leagues.

Joe Guzzardi is a Society for American Baseball Research member. Contact him at guzzjoe.com@yahoo.com

Marvin Miller Made Baseball Players Millionaires