Tag Archives: Major League Baseball Players Association

This commissioner’s time should be done

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2020-06-16 RobManfredBaseballsThat was last week: Baseball commissioner Rob Manfred saying there would absitively, posolutely be major league baseball in 2020. This was Monday, to ESPN: Manfred saying, “Not so fast.” Never mind that the March agreement the owners are trying to walk back gives Manfred absolute authority to order the season to go.

“I’m not confident,” he told ESPN’s Mike Greenberg for a special called The Return of Sports.  “I think there’s real risk; and as long as there’s no dialogue, that real risk is gonna continue.”

Not long from there, Manfred said . . . of course! It’s the players’ fault, for ending “good faith negotiations” that anyone with two brain cells to rub together knows really means “on the owners’ terms” coming from his lips. Anyone with the same two brain cells also knows that the owners crying “good faith” equals Donald Trump closing his Twitter account.

Want to know what the players really turned down over the weekend, with an emphatic harrumph of, “Seriously?”

The owners wanted a 72-game season at 70 percent pay per game played, 80 percent if the one-time-only (we think) expanded postseason (the owners wanted the players to say yes to 22 more such games) was played to the end. The players would get a 64.5 percent pay cut taking 100 percent of the safety risks—there’s still the coronavirus on its grand tour, you know.

Ken Rosenthal, writer for The Athletic, half the team (with Evan Drellich) who blew open the Astrogate/Soxgate illegal sign-stealing scandals, thinks plausibly that Manfred—whose powers include acting in the game’s best interest but who’s employed purely by the owners to whom the game’s best interest involves making money for them first—would rather incinerate the forest than see it for the trees.

Rosenthal also thinks Manfred is beginning to get one thing: strike a deal with the players who aren’t buying the owners’ Kickapoo Joy Juice or see his legacy as a baseball commissioner go into the tank.

The threat of a billion-dollar grievance from the [Major League Baseball] Players Association has forced Manfred to reconsider exercising his right to set a schedule for the 2020 season and return to his original mission of reaching a deal that is acceptable to both sides. What he wants now, according to sources, is to stop bickering with the union, start negotiating and reach an agreement that will bring the sport at least temporary order.

Yet for a guy who suddenly is looking for peace, Manfred sure has a funny way of showing it.

He and the owners, supposed stewards of the game, are turning the national pastime into a national punch line, effectively threatening to take their ball and go home while the country struggles with medical, economic and societal concerns.

Baseball’s better commissioners have been remembered among other things for appearing the next best thing to statesmen. Find me someone with skin in baseball’s game—a fan, a player, an owner (even), an analyst, a broadcaster, an historian—who’d call Manfred a statesman, and I’ll find you the last sworn-in government of the lost continent of Atlantis.

It’s been hard enough to think of Manfred as someone who genuinely loves the game after he made such remarks as the World Series trophy being just a piece of metal, trying to explain why it was one thing to discipline three 2017 Houston Astros while taking owner Jim Crane off the Astrogate hook but something else to strip their World Series championship.

Now Manfred has little choice other than that between finding and striking a deal with the players to get a 2020 season at all, or let it go and watch as nobody but the most stubborn among the tunnel-visioned takes Manfred or the owners seriously as stewards of the game any longer.

Remember: The owners are talking through their domes if they think anyone with an IQ higher than half (.064) the collective batting average (.128) of MLB’s pitchers last year buys their poverty cries. As Thomas Boswell pointed out early Monday, the average major league team value jumped by over $1 billion in the past six years—from $811 million to $1.9 billion.

Manfred’s contract as baseball commissioner is extended through the end of 2024. Assuming he doesn’t do anything else to implode the game between now and then—even assuming he finds a way, somehow, to be as Rosenthal describes, “the adult in the room, a leader with a sense of the game’s place in our society, the caretaker of the sport”—maybe it’s time at last to think of a better way to choose his successor.

There’s no reason on earth that the commissioner should be hired by and beholden to the owners alone. There’s no reason on earth a plausible candidate shouldn’t stand for election by the owners and by the Players Association through the thirty team player representatives. The commissioner should be beholden to neither faction but the consensus choice of both.

“Players come and go, but the owners stay on forever,” then-American League president Joe Cronin once told the late Marvin Miller, early in Miller’s tenure as the union’s executive director. Let’s just see about that. The owners stay only until they designate successors (think of the New York Yankees’ Hal Steinbrenner or the Detroit Tigers’ Chris Illitch) or sell. Fans don’t wear team jerseys with the names of owners on their backs.

The game stays on forever. And with very few exceptions the first thing you think about when you think about the game is the men who’ve played it. You don’t think of Joe Cronin as a meaner-than-a-junkyard-dog league president before you think of him as a Hall of Fame shortstop and even a manager. You don’t think of Joe Torre as baseball’s top cop before you think of him as an outstanding catcher/third baseman and a Hall of Fame manager.

You don’t always think of Bill White as the first African-American (and next-to-last) president of the National League before you remember him as an outstanding first baseman who also helped shepherd the St. Louis Cardinals through their racial growing pains. You don’t think of Nolan Ryan as a baseball executive (including a term as the president of the Texas Rangers) before you remember him as a Hall of Fame pitcher with seven no-hitters on his resume.

You don’t think of the late, ill-fated Mike Flanagan as a Baltimore Orioles executive before you remember him as a Cy Young Award-winning pitcher. You don’t think of Eddie Lopat as a snake-in-the-grass baseball executive (when a Kansas City Athletics player reminded him about a promised salary raise, Lopat the general manager shot back, “Prove it!”) before you think of him as a pitching star on five straight Yankee World Series winners.

You don’t even think of Al Rosen as the baseball executive who put a shot of rocket fuel into player salary inflation when he was the San Francisco Giants’ general manager (the once-notorious Bud Black deal), before you think of him as a powerful third baseman who swept the first-place votes as the American League’s Most Valuable Player in 1953, but whose career was torpedoed by back and leg injuries.

But you probably think Manfred wouldn’t be able to tell you any of that. You’d probably be right. He has to go. And, among numerous other lackings, the owners need to own up and agree—whether or not they’d accept that their duplicities brought us here in the first place—that baseball needs a better way to choose a better steward. A steward to whom the good of the game isn’t always the same thing as making money for it.

The owners, running out of feet

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2020-06-14 CamdenYards

Oriole Park at Camden Yards. Other than frustrated Oriole fans who’d like to throw things at Peter Angelos, baseball fans don’t spend money to see their teams’ owners. The owners still don’t get the message.

But . . . but . . . not. profitable. That’s what enough of Major League Baseball’s owners kept trying to tell us while they tried to strong-arm their product (the players, in case you keep forgetting) into playing a short 2020 season and accepting less than their agreed-in-March pro-rated 2020 salaries. Right?

But . . . but . . . not. profitable. Never mind that the redoubtable Thomas Boswell once actually figured out that, over the past century’s time, baseball owners have hauled down a twelve percent compound annual rate of return: “That kind of tax-free compounding . . . is like striking an oil well that never runs dry.”

But . . . but . . . not. profitable. Baseball’s such a money loser that MLB just nailed a billion-dollar deal with Turner Sports—you may recall that its founding father once owned the Atlanta Braves—to “keep a playoff package that includes one of the league championship series on the network,” according to the New York Post. Earning MLB at least $150 million a year more than under the current deal set to expire after next season.

Philadelphia Phillies outfielder Andrew McCutchen couldn’t resist. “But baseball is dying!” he snarked. And who could blame him?

When you’re a group that pulls down the aforesaid compound annual rate of return, Boswell said three days ago, and you happen to be baseball’s stewards, “holding the sport in multicentury trust for fans who love it and support it,” you “have a duty to take the brunt of the financial hit from the coronavirus. In the long run, the owners, as a group, are always the huge winners. The players just pass through and get what they can grab — some of them a fortune but most far less.”

. . . The owners’ position appears to be: We don’t want to lose money. The whole world is. But us, no. We want players to accept additional pay cuts below a prorated level (but we won’t show you our books). In contrast, we will take a $0.00 year but not a share-the-pain loss . . .

. . . The owners are so self-protective, so oblivious to the good of the game, they even want to maximize their defenses against a second wave of the virus. Oh, we will play until the normal Oct. 31. But don’t talk to us about playing games in November because that would increase the chance of an erased World Series, lost TV money and losses for us.

That was three days before the Turner Sports deal. Now, remember, as Boswell does: The owners want the absolute maximum safety margin if the Show comes back, but if you assume the coronavirus isn’t quite finished with its grand tour guess who takes the maximum safety risk?

Hint: They’re the ones you pay your hard-earned money to see in uniform on the field, at the plate, on the mound. Accuse me as you must of flogging a dead horse, but nobody hands over anywhere from $15 to $150 or more per ticket to take themselves and their families or friends out to the ballpark to see Peter Angelos (not counting frustrated Oriole fans wanting to throw things at him), Mark Attanasio, Jim Crane, Bill deWitt, John Henry, Mark Lerner, Arte Moreno, Tom Ricketts, Hal Steinbrenner, and company.

Again assuming the coronavirus tour isn’t finished, the maximum risk takers are also the ones who guide you to your parking spot; sell you the food, drinks, souvenir hats and jerseys and other chatzkahs of rooting; post around the parks to keep the lunatics from spoiling your fun; and, run the park facilities from the gates to the scoreboards to the concession stands and back.

Show me a baseball owner and I’ll show you someone who shoots himself in the foot so often it’s a wonder he has a foot left to shoot. Of all the cliches you can attach to the so-called Lords of Baseball, and it’s been true for just about the entire life of professional baseball, the truest may be that they never miss the opportunity to miss an opportunity. (Except, perhaps, for the tax write-offs.)

Here’s the sport that could and should have dropped the big one on its competitors and gotten major league baseball back onto the field on the Fourth of July. “You get 15-games-a-day visibility before the NBA and the NHL return,” Boswell wrote, “as well as a two-month jump on the NFL.” So much for that idea.

That kind of image enhancing would have been worth more than the entire difference ($4.6 billion, roughly, if you’re scoring at home) between what Hal Steinbrenner’s late father paid to buy the New York Yankees from CBS in 1973 and what the Yankees are worth today.

The only shock, then, in the players all but walking away from the negotiating table on starting a delayed 2020 season—as The Athletic‘s Ken Rosenthal and Evan Drellich put it Saturday, “The March agreement between the parties empowers commissioner Rob Manfred to set the number of games as long as the league awards the players their full prorated salaries, with the caveat that the league make its best effort to make the schedule as long as possible”—is that anyone should be shocked.

Except, perhaps, by the owners looking for every possible way to renege on the March agreement, and the players—not always eloquently, not always with their best (unshot) feet forward—looking for every possible way to thwart them.

Remember the wisdom of the late Hall of Fame manager Sparky Anderson, again: We try every way we can think of to kill this game, but for some reason nothing nobody does never hurts it. Come Monday, when the players asked the commissioner to finalise seasonal plans, we may begin learning whether Anderson is still right.

MLB’s own Saturday statement said they were “disappointed” that the players chose not to negotiate “in good faith.” Set aside for the moment how similar that is to the classic Communist tack of claiming the invaded were the invaders. Remind yourself that, from time immemorial, the owners demanding “good faith” is like hearing Attila the Hun sing “All You Need is Love.”

The financial not-so-merry-go-round goes round

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2020-06-04 ManfredBaseballsMaybe Hall of Fame pitcher Tom Glavine was wrong when he said last month that, if major league baseball doesn’t return, the players are going to look bad no matter how right they might be. The deeper goes the impasse between the owners and the players, the more the owners resemble the people to whom the good of the game equals nothing but the bottom line.

The owners and the players agreed in March to play any shortened season with the players paid their signed-for 2020 salaries on a pro-rated basis—until the owners said not so fast. The owners tried for a 50-50 revenue split knowing it would cost a lot of players a lot more money than just playing under their pro-rated 2020 salaries—and the players said not so fast.

Now the players, as if they needed further evidence for the defense that yes, they’d rather be playing baseball, proposed a 114-game season. The owners, who first thought of an 82-game season, said, essentially . . . not so fast. They rejected that proposal almost out of hand, then decided that negotiating further meant nothing when they could find a way to impose a 50-game season and, by the way, the players were perfectly free to negotiate against themselves.

That’s the way Yahoo! Sports columnist Hannah Keyser phrased it, more or less. MLB “believes that language in that agreement around ‘economic feasibility’ of restarting a season allows them to negotiate a further pay cut for the players now it’s become clear that games will be played without fans, at least at first,” she writes. “The union disagrees with that interpretation, as well as the league’s assertion that owners will lose money on every regular season game.”

By comparison it’s been simpler for the owners and the players to agree on such details as playing this season with a universal designated hitter (and it should be kept when things become normal again in 2021), a one-time-only postseason expansion, and wringing out the fine details of proper health protocols.

Where they demur mostly is about money. The owners, who’ve rarely passed on a chance to try suppressing player pay in the past, are using the coronavirus-triggered season delay to try it now. The players, who know they have a March deal to play pro-rated, have the unmitigated gall to insist the owners live up to the deal to which they themselves agreed.

Oh, sure, the owners harrumph that they’ll still pay pro-rated 2020 salaries under a 50-game season. Don’t fool yourselves: it means the players earning less thanks to drastically slashed time on the job. Talk about a de facto salary cap.

It means, as Keyser writes, that commissioner Rob Manfred and the owners “would declare the negotiations a failure and effectively cut the hours of their employees who refused to agree to lower wages. All of which they seemingly can do, and it would be a success . . . ”

That is an almost embarrassingly trite and self-evident thing to say based on the behavior of Major League Baseball owners over the past few years. Of course they’re more concerned with minimizing costs than retaining top talent or paying minor league players a living wage. But it’s worth emphasizing that they just announced they’re also more concerned with savings than even hosting baseball games. They’re betraying more than the spirit of competitive balance with their cheapness now, they’re also depriving fans of the very product they’re trying to sell.

Speaking of paying minor league players living wages, it’s worth noting that major league players have embarrassed a few teams out of trying to cut their minor leaguers off. Without even throwing a single regular season pitch in the uniform, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher David Price elected to hand each minor leaguer in the Dodger system $1,000 out of his own pocket.

When the world champion Washington Nationals thought about cutting their minor league players off at the pass, their players—as announced by relief pitcher Sean Doolittle last weekend—said not so fast, and prepared to pool their own monies to take care of those minor leaguers, prompting the organisation to keep their farm players on the payroll after all. Doolittle subsequently announced the Nats’ major leaguers would continue offering the team’s farm players financial help.

Remember: The major league players may not be impoverished, exactly, but the owners are impoverished far, far, less. When Chicago Cubs owner Tom Ricketts says it’s not like they can just move money around at will—given that the virus shutdown has wreaked losses at a “biblical” scale and MLB doesn’t exactly “make a lot of cash”— even his fellow owners know he’s talking through his chapeau.

For the seventeenth year in a row, 2019 saw MLB set a new revenue record. Forbes recorded it as $10.7 billion. “In accounting, revenues are calculated before factoring in expenses,” writes NBC Sports’s Bill Baer, “but unless the league has $10 billion in expenses, I cannot think of a way in which Ricketts’ statement can be true.”

Something else to ponder as well, if the owners aren’t going to the poorhouse and are trying to game the players yet again, and if the players are willing to extend financial helping hands to their teams’ minor leaguers: What about going the extra few miles and extending helping hands to 600+ short-career pre-1980 major leaguers who were frozen out when baseball’s pension plan was realigned that year to shorten up the time in MLB service required for a full MLB pension to vest?

Remember: The late players union director Marvin Miller said in due course that not revisiting and remodeling that realignment to include those pre-1980 short-career players was his biggest mistake and regret. The players in question do receive some monies from a deal worked out between former commissioner Bud Selig and the late players union director Michael Weiner—but they can’t pass that $625-per-quarter-of-MLB-service to their families when they pass on.

Today’s players union director Tony Clark has been (phrased politely) cool about the matter. The Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association has been likewise, unfortunately. Amplified especially since three of the players who’d been involved actively in the pension redress cause—former pitchers David Clyde and Gary Niebauer, and former first baseman/longtime coach Eddie Robinson—were squeezed off the association’s pension services committee.

Maybe today’s players, if they can be made further aware, might think of pitching in likewise for those short-career men who also supported their union in actions that helped pry open the door to free agency and tackle other pertinent issues involving major league players, and sacrificed considerable income despite earning less than princely salaries for assorted reasons.

Maybe. First, let’s find the right way to get a 2020 season played at all, about which the owners seem less concerned than about preserving whatever they think remains of their bottom lines. You don’t want to know what might emanate if the owners get away with imposing a too-short season for no better reason than to cut the players off at the financial pass.

Marvin Miller’s pension regret

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2020-05-24 MarvinMiller

Marvin Miller lived to regret that short-career players pre-1980 were frozen out of that year’s pension plan re-alignment.

Forty years ago, the Major League Baseball Players association revamped the players’ pension plan dramatically enough. They changed the vesting eligibility from four years’ major league service time to 43 days for pensions and one day for health care benefits. But they excluded players with short careers prior to 1980—approximately 1,100 such players at the time, but just over 600 still living today.

Those players were loyal Players Association members who hit the ramparts and the pickets when called upon to help end the reserve era and usher in the era that has made more than a fair number of players wealthy beyond their childhood imaginations. The late Marvin Miller, elected to the Hall of Fame at last, is known to have told some of those players that not reviewing and revamping the 1980 pension realignment to include those players was his biggest regret.

They are men such as Bill Denehy, once a New York Mets pitcher (he shared a Topps rookie baseball card with Hall of Famer Tom Seaver in 1967) traded to the Washington Senators for manager Gil Hodges despite shoulder damage. Men such as David Clyde, the mishandled Texas Rangers phenom, pushed to start in the Show right out of his staggering high school career, but not sent to the minors for seasoning after that, as manager Whitey Herzog promised, before he was ruined by shoulder issues and gone.

Denehy played parts of three major league seasons in New York, Washington, and Detroit. Clyde’s career ended when he was 37 days short of qualifying for a pension under the old plan, after playing parts of five seasons with the Rangers and the Cleveland Indians. Theirs and their fellows’ battle for pension redress has been enunciated most prominently in Douglas J. Gladstone’s A Bitter Cup of Coffee.

“I don’t think any one of us are at a point where we’re asking for something that we haven’t earned,” Denehy told me in a telephone interview over a year ago. Thanks to multiple cortisone shots (possibly 57 in a 26-month span) to address a 1967 shoulder injury (about which the Mets conveniently failed to inform the Senators), Denehy eventually incurred eye issues that have left him legally blind today.

“You know, I don’t think they owe me because of all the cortisone shots that they gave me, I don’t think that they owe me for the tear that I had in my shoulder,” Denehy continued then. “All I’m asking for is what I earned, and that was the service time that I got in. If they do that, make me just a regular pension, I will continue to stay happy and promote this great game of baseball.”

“I guess what bothers me the most about it is, the Players Association—they loathe being called a union—didn’t hesitate one bit taking my dues when I was a major league player,” Clyde told me in a separate telephone interview last fall. “But as soon as you’re no longer a major league player, they basically don’t want to have anything to do with you.”

Clyde David 6218-89a_act_NBL

David Clyde, warming up on the sidelines for the Rangers.

The late Michael Weiner, who succeeded Donald Fehr as the players union’s executive director, managed to join then-commissioner Bud Selig in getting the frozen-out players some redress: in 2011, the pair got the frozen-out pre-1980 players $625 per quarter for every 43 days’ major league service time for up to four years. “It was a nice gesture on the part of Weiner and Selig who, undoubtedly also realized it could hardly make up for all those lost years in which the pre-1980 players got bupkis,” wrote longtime New York Daily News columnist Bill Madden in February.

But they can’t pass even that on to their loved ones upon their deaths. And, as Madden pointed out, they can’t buy into the players’ medical plan, which would help significantly enough for former short-career players now dealing with assorted serious health issues. In these days of the coronavirus pandemic, redressing that lack would have been even more significant.

Exactly why the short-career players pre-1980 were frozen out of the original pension re-alignment has never been made entirely clear. Denehy, Clyde, and other players known to have spoken on record have thought many in the union then believed that many if not most were mere September call-ups.

Denehy made each of his three major league teams directly out of spring training. Clyde, of course, was signed right out of high school with then-Rangers owner Bob Short hoping he’d goose the team’s sagging gate—which he did by winning his first two heavily hyped starts. Jim Qualls, a Chicago Cubs outfielder known best for breaking up Seaver’s perfect game bid with two outs in the ninth in 1969, made the Cubs out of spring training that season as an outfield reserve.

Another Cub, third baseman Carmen Fanzone, was once a July callup and made the Cubs as a reserve out of another spring training, but was blocked mostly by Hall of Fame third baseman Ron Santo before Santo’s departure in a crosstown trade to the White Sox. An Atlanta Braves pitcher, Gary Niebauer, also made the Braves out of spring training 1969 and 1970.

Clyde, Niebauer, and former longtime first baseman and coach Eddie Robinson—long key voices on behalf of short-career players within the Major League Baseball Players Alumni Association—were finally removed from the association’s pension services committee not too long ago.

“The problem is, because they’re not vested, the union has no obligation to do anything for pre-1980 players — and so they don’t — even though it currently has some $3.5 billion in the pension fund,” Madden wrote. The $625 payments come from the competitive balance tax, and Madden cited an unnamed MLB insider who said today’s players union executive director, former first baseman Tony Clark, “isn’t gonna have any appetite for siphoning money from his rank and file. That’s why he won’t even talk to these old players.”

Legally, of course, MLB and the players union aren’t obligated to lift a single finger now. The Denehys, Clydes, Niebauers, Robinsons, Quallses, and others believe it’s a moral and ethical question. They were there, too, surrendering pay and preparation time to fight with their fellow players for the same rights as any American worker at any level had—to negotiate job compensation and conditions on a fair and free job market within their industry.

You would think that Clark himself having been a player might be more inclined to find a way to bring further help and redress to those players who also helped pave the way for, among other things, the reported $22.3 million Clark earned in fifteen seasons as a power hitting but often injury-compromised first baseman.

You would think likewise that numerous former players long established in the sports media—Hall of Fame pitchers Dennis Eckersley and John Smoltz, 1986 World Series champion Mets Ron Darling (pitcher) and Keith Hernandez (first baseman), former outfielder Doug Glanville, former first baseman John Kruk, former shortstop/third baseman Alex Rodriguez, pitchers Mark Gubicza and Rick Sutcliffe, among others—might be more inclined likewise, if only to bring further attention to the issue.

Especially on behalf of disabusing the public’s prospective view that any former baseball player must be a wealthy former baseball player. Joe and Jane Fan today don’t always know or recall the pre-free agency era, when the owners misapplied the reserve clause to bind players for life or until traded or sold, and most players needed to work in the off-seasons to make ends meet or keep the ends within close sight of each other.

If Marvin Miller himself regretted not revisiting the 1980 pension re-alignment to do right by those players, it seems more than reasonable that the players union today, and those former players in strong enough positions to raise the issue, should think and re-think about the men whose playing careers might have been short but whose commitment to their fellow players was no less profound.

Marvin and Ted, a love story

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2019-12-08 TedSimmonsMarvin Miller Press ConferenceWhen all was said and finally done, Marvin Miller got what he no longer wanted. He’d said it expressly and pointedly enough, citing specifically the assorted Veterans Committees he believed with certain merit were often enough stacked for certain results. “At the age of 91,” he said, “I can do without farce.”

Miller’s name turned up on the Modern Era Committee ballot now concluded, and there emerged a bristling debate as to whether Miller’s express wishes did or didn’t supercede the prospect that, at long enough last, he would attain even posthumously the honour many believed too long overdue but his family believed should be set aside according to his very own wishes.

More than most baseball men Miller knew that the Rolling Stones were right about one thing at least, namely that you can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, you just might find you get what you need. What he needed from this year’s Modern Era Committee to go into the Hall of Fame was twelve votes, and he got them, one shy of the thirteen awarded to enshrine former catcher Ted Simmons.

Wherever he reposes in the Elysian Fields now, Miller didn’t get what he wanted but got what he needed, and it’s to lament that previous Veterans Committees or their 21st Century successors-by-category didn’t give it to him while he was still alive and well enough to accept and appreciate it. But there’s a nice synergy in Miller going in however posthumously with Simmons who is very much alive, well, and working as an Atlanta Braves scout today.

Even as Curt Flood’s reserve clause challenge awaited its day before the Supreme Court, Simmons himself came close enough to challenging the clause himself, entering his second year as the St. Louis Cardinals’ regular catcher, who thought establishing himself thus even at age 22 was worthy of just a little bit more than a $6,000 or thereabout pay raise.

Simmons refused to sign for 1972 for a penny less than $30,000. The Cardinals’ general manager, Bing Devine, said not so fast, son, and held in the lowest $20,000s. Simmons opened the season without a contract, the Cardinals renewed him automatically as the rules of the time allowed, and everyone in baseball cast their jeweler’s eyes upon the sophomore catcher who defied the athletic stereotype (among other things, he’d serve time on the board of a St. Louis art museum and a knowledgeable one at that) and the clause that owners abused for generations to bind their players like chattel until they damn well felt like trading, selling, or releasing them.

This wasn’t a veteran who’d seen too much and heard too much more; this was a kid whom you might have thought had everything to lose but who lived as though principle trumped even a three-run homer. He played onward and refused any Cardinals entreaty that didn’t equal a $30,000 salary, then went to Atlanta the selected All-Star choice as the National League’s backup catcher. He’d barely landed and checked in when Devine rang the phone. Would Simmons kindly accept $75,000; or, the $30,000 he asked for for 1972 and $45,000 for 1973?

Miller watched Simmons very nervously, knowing the kid pondered taking it to court if things came that way, never mind that Flood had yet to get his Supreme Court ruling. (And lost, alas.) He understood completely when Simmons accepted Devine’s new proposal, but the Simmons case handed Miller intelligence you couldn’t buy on the black market or otherwise: the owners would rather hand a lad $75,000 than let any arbitrator get to within ten nautical miles of the reserve clause.

A former United Steelworkers of America economist, Miller won skeptical players over in the first place by being just who he was, and he wasn’t the stereotypical union man with a bludgeon instead of a brain, pressing hardest on the point that no concern of theirs was out of bounds and that the doors to the Players Association’s office would remain open whenever they wanted. His mantra was, “It’s your union,” a mantra one wishes was that of numerous other American labour unions to whom the rank and file were and often still are, generally, to be seen and not heard.

Ahead of the Simmons issue still lay Hall of Fame pitcher Catfish Hunter to shine a light on what a fair, open market portended for baseball players, when Oakland Athletics owner Charlie Finley reneged on insurance payments mandated in Hunter’s contract, and an arbitrator hearing Hunter’s grievance ruled in favour of the righthander. At once, Hunter’s Hertford, North Carolina home hamlet became baseball’s hottest address, teams swooping in prepared to offer him the moon, the stars, safe passage through the Klingon Empire, and grazing rights on the planets of his choice.

Hunter merely astonished one and all by finally signing the third-richest offer in front of him, at seven figures plus for the next five seasons, and one that came at almost the eleventh minute, because the Yankees—whose representative Clyde Kluttz went back with Hunter his entire career to that point—were willing to divide the dollars according to his wishes, right down to an annuity to guarantee his children’s education. After writing the division on a napkin in a diner nook, Hunter’s first question ahead of the dollars to be done was whether the Yankees could or would do that. They could. They did.

And ahead of that, still, lay Andy Messersmith, one of the game’s best pitchers, pitching for and haggling contract with the Los Angeles Dodgers in spring 1975. When those hagglings turned a little too personal for Messersmith’s taste, thanks to general manager Al Campanis injecting personal and not baseball issues and stinging the pitcher to his soul (and to this day he refuses to discuss it), Messersmith refused to talk to any executive lower than heir apparent Peter O’Malley and demanded a no-trade clause in the contract to come.

Like Simmons, Messersmith refused to sign unless he got the clause, out of refusing now to let the Al Campanises dictate his future if he could help it. Like Simmons, Messersmith played on in 1975, pitching well enough that when fans and artery-hardened sportswriters weren’t needling him about his unsigned contract the Dodgers were trying to fatten his calf in dollar terms. They offered him princely six-figure annual salaries at three years, but they refused to capitulate on the no-trade clause.

“I never went into this for the glory and betterment of the Players Association,” Messersmith, ordinarily what John Helyar (in The Lords of the Realm) described as happy-go-lucky and a little flaky, said much later. “At the start it was all personal. Al Campanis had stirred my anger, and it became a pride issue. When I get stubborn, I get very stubborn.” Indeed not until August 1975 did Miller reach out to the still-unsigned Messersmith, the last man standing among six players who opened 1975 without signed contracts. Only then did Messersmith agree to file a grievance seeking free agency if he finished the season unsigned.

Messersmith followed through. (Retiring pitcher Dave McNally, technically unsigned but intending to stay retired, agreed to join the grievance as insurance in case the Dodgers’ dollars seduced Messersmith, who wouldn’t be seduced.) The owners refused to listen when such representatives of their own as their Player Relations Committee leader (and then-Milwaukee Brewers chairman) Ed Fitzgerald, pleaded with them to consider negotiating a revision of the reserve system. “We need to negotiate while we’re in a power position,” he pleaded. Plea denied with the very pronounced sound of a gunshot’s bullet going through the owners’ feet.

And—abetted among other evidence by a newspaper article, in which no less than Minnesota Twins owner Calvin Griffith acknowledged a proper reserve clause application would make a player a free agent after one signed season and one option season, properly applied—arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled in Messersmith’s favour. “Curt Flood stood up for us,” Simmons would say. (Helyar described him as choked up.) “[Catfish] Hunter showed us what was out there. Andy showed us the way. Andy made it happen for us all.”

Miller was smart enough not to demand immediate free agency for all, recognising as he did that teams did have certain rights in players they developed even as he knew, and insisted, that baseball players should have the same rights as any other American from the greenest labourer to the most seasoned executive to test themselves on a fair, open job market when they were no longer under contract.

It did more for the good of the game than the artery-hardened hysterics of the day would have allowed, especially in their lamentations over the coming death of competitive balance. (Pace Mark Twain, the reports of its death were extremely exaggerated, and still are: among other things, more teams have won World Series since the Messersmith ruling than won the Series before it.) But few things were more astonishing than the owners’ subsequent chicaneries, unless it was seeing the years go passing by with the idea of Miller in the Hall of Fame not as popular with many of his former clients as his work on their behalf.

Simmons, of course, went forward to enjoy a career that should have gotten him elected to Cooperstown; his peak value matches that of the average Hall of Fame catcher. He went one and done in his only year’s eligibility on the Baseball Writers’ Association of America ballot. Exactly why never seemed clear, other than perhaps residual ill will over Simmons’s late-career tangle with Whitey Herzog (who traded him to the Brewers citing defensive shortcomings, after he declined repositioning the field), but the advanced metrics show Simmons the tenth best catcher to strap it on, ever. Maybe they had a problem marrying baseball’s most honorific museum to an art museum board director.