This spring, former Blue Jays and Phillies G.M. Pat Gillick will be inducted into the Executive wing of the Baseball Hall of Fame. He was voted in by the Veterans Committee and is certainly a worthy choice.
But once again, Marvin Miller, former head of the Major League Baseball Players Association, fell just short of induction. And it's a shame. Under Miller's leadership, the player's union transformed itself and, in the process, changed baseball as well.
With the lords of the baseball realm kicking and screaming all the way, Miller ushered in the game's first collective bargaining agreement, salary arbitration, free agency and the end of the reserve clause, and the resultant ever-escalating multi-million dollar player contracts. Indirectly, those contracts spurred massive growth in TV and radio revenue. Owners loathed him, players loved him. No other person has done more to shape major league baseball as we know it today. The great broadcaster Red Barber put it this way: "Marvin Miller, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson, is one of the three most important men in baseball history."
For years, the Veterans Committee was dominated by old owners and G.M.'s, and they effectively locked the old labor leader out of the Hall. That's changed now, and yet Miller somehow came up just one vote short. He's now 93 years old and under the Hall rules won't be on the ballot again until 2013.
I hope he makes it then, and I hope he's still around to see it, because he deserves it.
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