You’ll forgive me for not jumping up and down this morning with news that Marvin Miller has been elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame seven years after his death and 51 years after he negotiated Major League Baseball’s first Collective Bargaining Agreement.
It is the righting of a historical wrong that makes even Pete Rose’s controversial exclusion pale, and there is no doubt that his election makes Cooperstown more whole than it has ever been, because in my mind there are four truly transformational figures in the game’s history.
Babe Ruth invented the larger than life sports figure. Jackie Robinson and Roberto Clemente slapped common sense and decency into the game and were agents of social change… and Marvin Miller changed the economics of every sport, sparking a revolution in player salaries and rights. He changed the way a lot of us think and talk sports, and probably only Wall Street has made more millionaires. Since I believe active and engaged players make a sport run smoother, I think Miller made sports better for all of us.
We are of course in the middle of Hall of Fame voting, which means all manner of debate, name-calling and Twitter tirades. It is, frankly, the only election where votes are deemed to be indefensible, where everybody categorically does not have the right to his or her own opinion because his or her own opinion sucks if it doesn’t match yours.
My ballot? Barry Bonds, Roger Clemens, Derek Jeter, Larry Walker and Manny Ramirez — for the hours of entertainment Man-Ram provided, because all of us need to be reminded we were in differing degrees complicit in the use of steroids and the fact it will piss many people off. I mean, I know it isn’t ‘fight the power,’ but whatever.
At any rate, at least there is some transparency in the process. Not so the committee process, which is a kind of safety net and more and more it appears a pathway to an eventual overhaul of the voting process since — well, how to put this nicely? — we are in an advanced period of global warming when it comes to finding a pool of writers to keep the damned thing going.
The internet and all these websites might be the baseball journalism version of wind farms and renewable energy… but I’d bet right now that Hall of Fame voting is going to look a great deal different in the next 10 years. Gone — pffft! Just like that; the easiest column of the year disappears into the ether.
Miller and Ted Simmons were elected by the ‘Modern Era’ committee, one of four revolving committees that meet every few years to vote on candidates from specific eras. The 16-person committee includes Hall of Fame players George Brett, Rod Carew, Dennis Eckersley, Eddie Murry, Ozzie Smith and Robin Yount as well as executives, baseball writers and historians. The only owner on the committee was out-going Kansas City Royals owner David Glass. A 75 per cent threshold is needed for admission to the Hall and Miller was named on 12 of 16 ballots. Simmons received 13 votes and I love that he is going in: his is the kind of career that is able to be viewed differently through advances in sabermetrics. You‘ll have to look elsewhere for that quarrel.
Truth is, I long ago gave up getting lathered about Hall of Fame voting. Guy wants to make a point and list Jeter as his only inductee? Fine. Want to turn in a blank ballot? Fine, too. But what has caused me all manner of outrage was that Miller never seemed to get enough votes on committees that were peopled by players who, frankly, owed their bank balances to him. I mean, I could see where baseball executives or owners might hold a grudge against him. I could see them believing that he wasn’t as much a part of the ‘baseball family’ as some player or executive or Bud Selig.
And it’s true that we will never know which players voted or didn’t vote for Miller over the years but let’s be clear: Miller was snubbed seven times previously, so fewer people pounded the table for him than ought to have been the case.
Perhaps his bitterness at the process, which he once called "rigged" and led him to offer the opinion before his death that he really didn’t give a rat’s ass about Cooperstown and that he didn’t want his family involved — his daughter told the Associated Press on Sunday night that "it would have been a great honour 20 years ago," — became a card that was played in the negotiating that goes into this thing. Hell, I don’t know: maybe the majority of ballplayers who got theirs have become conservative in their old age and view the former Steelworkers lawyer as some kind of Commie leftie.
I am lucky enough to have interviewed Miller on a few occasions, and he was everything I loved in an interview: he called B.S. on any pandering, would ask you to rephrase a question, answered thoughtfully and when need be could raise his voice to correct a misperception. I still have notes and micro-cassette tapes from his interviews some place (ask your parents).
As someone who was thrust into covering baseball for The Gazette having seen maybe a half-dozen or so Major League games live – ah, life on the Prairies – I needed to find people who could educate me. Managers and players took care of the on-field stuff, but it was the agents — good people like Ron Shapiro, Tom Reich and Adam Katz — and players association guys such as Gene Orza and Donald Fehr who broadened my understanding and were fonts of knowledge both on and off the record.
You had owners guys and players guys when you were covering labour back in those days. I was very much in the latter camp. Still am. But here’s the thing… as you get older and accumulate a wider understanding of things you become a little less idealistic and more realistic.
Sometimes that bothers me. Sometimes I think I’m too comfortable with the current status of the games I watch, write and talk about, that in my opinions I’ve sacrificed economic idealism and maybe a little romance for — I don’t know — economic realism or some such thing. One thing I do know, however: all of us in this game were robbed of the opportunity to hear an induction speech by Marvin Miller. That will remain the hall’s greatest shame.
QUIBBLES AND BITS
• Baseball’s winter meetings get underway in San Diego today and so far this off-season the only read I can get on the Toronto Blue Jays is that every free-agent pitcher that would seem to be a realistic fit is signing someplace else.
As our Shi Davidi wrote in this article last week, J.P. Ricciardi was in a similar place 14 years ago and realized the only way to sign B.J. Ryan and A.J. Burnett was to overpay, offer longer term and, in the case of Burnett, agree at the last minute to an opt-out clause in addition to free, round-trip limousine rides for his wife from their home in Maryland to Toronto.
If we take at face value the assertions made in some quarters of the U.S. national media that the Blue Jays are among the most aggressive teams in pursuit of free-agent pitching, then I’m terrified at what this means about the perception of this team. If the Blue Jays aren’t prepared to overpay and offer longer term, they won’t get much more than Matt Shoemaker 2.0. I’m sorry, that’s not being aggressive enough.
But if they are offering more money and longer term or going the huge money/shorter term route and still can’t sign anybody? Oof.
• Much excitement about that seven-year, $245-million contract that the New York Yankees are tossing around with Gerrit Cole and Scott Boras, but don’t think for a minute that Boras – who also represents free agents Stephen Strasburg and Anthony Rendon – will be in a rush to sign. Boras slow-plays the market, and the guess here is he realizes these three free agents aren’t like Dallas Kuechel, his client who didn’t sign last season until June. He’ll play off the Yankees, Los Angeles Dodgers and Los Angeles Angels against each other. In fact, I wouldn’t be surprised if the Yankees are leverage.
• I’m not sure there’s all that much in the breakdown in negotiations between the City of St. Petersburg and the Tampa Bay Rays over the possibility of the Rays splitting their schedule between Tropicana Field and Montreal. I think there’s a better chance of Major League Baseball in Montreal in five years than any Major League team being in Tampa.
This is all posturing. Rays owner Stuart Sternberg has a clause that allows him to share in revenue from any eventual re-development of Tropicana Field. Someplace there exists a number that makes it worth his while to buy out the lease, move the team and retain part ownership or sell it outright in return for diminishing his stake in future re-development money.
• A bunch of us will hunker down Monday morning to decide who will win the Lou Marsh Award as Canada’s athlete of the year and Bianca Andreescu better be the unanimous choice. The vote will come just a few days after another former winner, Kaillie Humphries, won her first bobsleigh race competing for the U.S., after splitting with the Canadian association and marrying American Travis Armbruster.
Yes, I was one of those who voted for Humphries. No, I don’t regret it.
• This morning’s read comes from friend Tim Brown of Yahoo! Sports, who asks baseball people whether Mike Fiers, the pitcher who went public with the accusations of advanced sign-stealing methods used by the Houston Astros, is a hero or a snitch? Predictably, one of the sentiments expressed is that Fiers should return the World Series ring and share he won while with the Astros during that period. It’s complicated.
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THE ENDGAME
Like Kyle Dubas and Sheldon Keefe, we’re beginning to understand just how much the Toronto Maple Leafs lost their way under Mike Babcock, beyond the shots at his motivational methods.
It will take more than simply finding a competent backup goaltender or settling on line combinations and defence pairings and, if anything, I feel more optimistic now that the Leafs can get this right and secure a playoff berth than I would if Babcock was still running things.
I like that Keefe is unafraid to go nuclear in the other team’s end at times — witness the way he had Auston Matthews, John Tavares, Mitch Marner, Morgan Rielly and Tyson Barrie all on the ice earlier this week for a face-off in the Colorado Avalanche end — but mostly I was heartened to hear him recognize publicly that he needs to do a deeper dive into why his team can’t draw penalties.
It’s something I’ve spoken about on-air several times. I mentioned it to Brian Burke one time and he said he hadn’t thought about it, which was one, a major reason I love Burkie as an analyst and two, enough to make me feel as if I ought to be quiet about the whole thing. See, I wasn’t talking about diving or otherwise faking stuff, although I’ve always thought that overlooking the beauty of a well-executed dive is kind of a loopy machismo thing. What’s wrong with trying to gain an advantage?
Rather, I was trying to figure out why this wasn’t a logical extension of Dubas’s ‘kill ‘em with skill’ philosophy, the notion that an uber-talented team would so overwhelm an opponent that frustration would set in which would lead to all manner of poking, hooking, holding and other random acts of slow-footed desperation.
That it wasn’t happening either meant that everybody else in the NHL is more talented than the Leafs thought they were — which kind of defeats their philosophy — or that officials didn’t give them enough respect because… well, because the Leafs are a soft team not prone to getting into the areas of the rink where quickness draws penalties. Officials are just as capable as opposing teams of simply shrugging their shoulders and saying, ‘Well, OK, if you’re going to dither around with the puck on the outer reaches of the rink, have at it and wake us up when you’re done.’
Saturday against the bigger, heavier, St. Louis Blues we saw some jam in the middle of the other team’s end from both Tavares and Matthews. I think some of us have given Matthews a pass when it comes to physical play because of past shoulder injuries and because of the way the game is now played. But surely it’s not too much to expect him to use his size to create opportunity, at a time when the odds of somebody wrestling you to the ice or engaging in a fight are less than they’ve ever been?
Jeff Blair hosts The Writers Bloc with Stephen Brunt and Richard Deitsch from 2-5 p.m.ET on Sportsnet 590/The Fan.
