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.