Union Jacked

Marvin Miller, a primary reason baseball tickets cost $60 a pop, baseball players don’t spend an entire career with a single team and the Phillies didn’t repeat their 1980 World Series championship, has died of cancer at the age of 95. Taking lessons learned from his time with a steelworkers union, he was named the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association in 1966 and within a decade had broken baseball’s reserve clause, setting players free to sign anywhere while idiot owners threw millions of dollars at no-hit shortstops, starting pitchers with arms held together by bubble gum and spit, guys who strike out more than Eddie Deezen at the Playboy Mansion and middle relievers as effective at putting out fires as Ted Kaczynski. When he retired in 1982, the average salary had skyrocketed from $19,000 to $241,000 – as a frame of reference, in the 16 years before his installation at the MLBPA, the average major league salary had inched up from $13,300 to $19,000. In addition, the improved pension plan meant players didn’t need to eat cat food after they retired – although the greedy bastards still didn’t do a damn thing for their predecessors, and instead of the commissioner hearing grievances and upholding the integrity of the game, arbitrators could let Steve Howe come back 6 different times after being suspended for drugs so that he never got the help he needed and die in a methamphetamine-fueled car accident. He led the union through a 13-game strike in 1972, 8 days in spring training in 1980 then 50 days in the middle of the 1981 season. Atlanta Braves executive Paul Richards noted that “Tojo and Hirohito couldn’t stop baseball, but Marvin Miller could.” His role in shaping modern-day baseball, and really all sports as his tactics were copied in all the major sports leagues, cannot be overstated, and Red Barber called him one of the 2 or 3 most important men in the history of baseball, alongside Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson. The ungrateful curs whose fur-lined pockets he helped line and the former baseball executives that Miller had bested at every turn concurred so strongly that the same Hall of Fame Veterans Committee that deemed the phenomenally mediocre (save the two years he spent clobbering 4-Fs during World War II) Hal Newhouser a Hall of Famer and will probably induct idiotic rat bastard Bud Selig if he ever stops commissioning routinely passed him over for inclusion. 

 

 

No Es Mas Macho

Hector “Macho” Camacho, who unlike Disco Stu *did* need to advertise, has died at the age of 50 after getting shot in the head while sitting in a parked car, I’m sure thwarting many Pooligans hoping for a cherry picked hit to start the new campaign. The former juvenile delinquent used his street smarts and lightning quick hands to win world championships in the super featherweight, lightweight and junior welterweight divisions. Well known for his flamboyance, at varying times Camacho entered the ring in a diaper, a gladiator’s uniform, a dress, an Indian headdress, and, because none of those outfits exactly screamed it, a fur robe with “Macho” stitched across the back. He never really left the streets, with a post-career string of arrests, often for drugs, and 10 bags of cocaine were found in the car he was shot in. He also once tried to take an M-16 rifle through customs.

Absence of Dallas

Or

I Dream of Breathing

Larry Hagman, best remembered as the translator in the 1964 political thriller Fail Safe, has died of complications from throat cancer at the age of 81. Other highlighted roles include a rapey, crazed ambulance driver in Mother, Jugs and Speed; New Orleans Judge Luther Charbonnet on the short-lived series Orleans; Jack Jones, symbolic stand-in for big business in Nixon; and astronaut/Master/white slave trader Tony Nelson on I Dream of Jeannie. Astute observers may recognize him from all 357 episodes of the original Dallas series, 5 cross-over episodes of Knots Landing, 3 TV movies and then all 10 episodes of the revisitation series Dallas as John Ross “JR” Ewing, Jr., one of the greatest villains in the history of the small screen, and one of its most iconic characters. Referred to as a human oil slick by TV Guide, JR screwed Vaughn Leland, Sue Ellen Ewing, Bobby Ewing, Gary Ewing, Pamela Barnes Ewing, April Stevens Ewing, Cliff Barnes, Digger Barnes, Merilee Stone, Clayton Farlow, Peter Richards, Alan Beam, Cally Harper, Carter McKay, Afton Cooper, Jordan Lee, Wade Luce, Andy Bradley, Jeremy Wendell and many others (figuratively) and Sue Ellen, April, Merilee, Cally, Afton, Serena Wald, Julie Grey, Leslie Stewart, Holly Harwood, Kristin Shepherd, Mandy Winger, Angelica Nero, Kimberly Cryder and LeeAnn De La Vega and many others (literally). The unrepentant schemer and womanizer emerged as the man America loved to hate and Dallas became one of the longest running evening drama series of all time. So iconic was Hagman’s portrayal that after several abortive attempts to reboot the series, producers finally determined that only one man could wear the 10-gallon Stetson, and built the new Dallas series around him, with Patrick Duffy returning as long-suffering nice guy brother Bobby. As with the original series, Hagman was still the best thing about the show, and before his death, he had already filmed 6 episodes of the second season. The son of Broadway legend and Peter Pan originator Mary Martin, Hagman also dabbled as a director, mostly episodes of Dallas, with one feature film to his credit: Beware! The Blob, which was re-released in 1982 as “The Film That J.R. Shot.”

Heart Phailure

Lee MacPhail, who slaked the nation’s appetite for more Ron Blomberg, has died at the age of 95. Other wizened decisions was helping add expansion teams in a city that had held a major league team for but a single season before it was scooped up to that mecca Milwaukee by a used car salesman in a bankruptcy sale and, in a betrayal of his nation and its national pastime, in a city north of the border – a team that would break a young boy’s heart, and on the day before his birthday, no less. And for these abominations, he was given a place in the Hall of Fame. After serving as farm director and assistant GM of the Yankees when their farm system was producing stars like Mickey Mantle and Whitey Ford, and then building the Baltimore Orioles team that won the 1966 World Series, MacPhail helped the daft William Eckert, a retired Air Force colonel who had been named commissioner despite knowing less about baseball than its current idiot commissioner. He then rejoined the New York Yankees front office to ride herd over the end of the empire, but when the team was bought by the meddling George Steinbrenner, MacPhail left. He got his revenge as AL president in 1983, citing “the spirit of the rules” in overruling Tim McClelland’s decision to call George Brett out for having too much pine tar on his bat when he hit a 2-out, 9^th-inning game-winning HR in Yankee Stadium in what may have been the last educated decision by an official in MLB’s front office. A member of the only four-generation front office family, MacPhail’s father Larry introduced night baseball in Cincinnati before moving on to serve as GM of the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Yankees, his son Andy served as the president of both the Orioles and the Chicago Cubs to no appreciable benefit, but GMed the Minnesota Twins to World Series titles in 1987 and 1991, while his grandson Lee IV is the Orioles’ director of professional scouting. Another son, Lee III, was GM of the Reading Phillies when he was killed in a car accident in 1969. Lee and Larry are the only father-son duo in the Baseball Hall of Fame, and at the time of his death, Lee was the oldest living Hall of Famer.