New Hall of Famer Marvin Miller changed baseball forever

Marvin Miller, former executive director of the MLBPA, and catcher Ted Simmons are the first two members of the Baseball Hall of Fame Class of 2020

The man who did more to change the game of baseball over the past half-century never picked up a bat or threw a pitch.

Marvin Miller, with his acute legal mind and bargaining ability, skillfully guided the Major League Baseball Player’s Association as executive director for 16 years and ushered in a new era where the players began to take the power they felt they deserved. For his tireless work on behalf of the players, Miller was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Modern Era Committee on Sunday in a vote that was long overdue.

For a century, owners wrote the reserve clause into the contracts of every player, allowing them to extend the contract every year for perpetuity. The only leverage the players had in contract negotiations was to holdout and refuse to report to the team. There was no free agency, no arbitration, no one taking up the players’ cause.

Miller changed all that.

His first test case was Curt Flood, longtime outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. In 1970, Flood protested when the Cardinals traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies. Miller convinced him to take his case all the way to the Supreme Court. The court ruled in the owners’ favor in 1972 and Flood was blacklisted from the league, never to play in the Majors again, but the groundwork had been laid to change the economics of baseball.

Two years later, Oakland Athletics star pitcher Catfish Hunter filed a grievance after owner Charlie Finley refused to pay an annuity into a retirement fund as stipulated in his contract. Miller took up Hunter’s case, and in a 2-1 ruling, with Miller and arbitrator Peter Seitz ruling in Hunter’s favor, he was declared a free agent, the first in baseball history. His salary went from $100,000 with Oakland to $640,000 after signing a deal with the New York Yankees.

Miller saw another opportunity to eliminate the reserve clause once and for all in 1975. He convinced pitchers Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith to play out the season without a contract and then declare themselves free agents. Again the owners protested and again Miller and Seitz ruled in favor of the players. On Dec. 23, 1975, the reserve clause that had governed baseball contracts for 100 years was officially dead.

Legendary broadcaster Red Barber once called Miller one of the three most important figures in baseball history, along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson. Under his stewardship of the MLBPA, average salaries went from $19,000 in 1966 to more than $300,000 when he retired in 1982. When he took over, Sandy Koufax was the highest-paid player in the league with a yearly salary of $130,000; in 1982, Phillies third baseman Mike Schmidt was making more than $1.5 million.

It was Miller who negotiated the first Collective Bargaining Agreement between owners and players, who introduced arbitration to salary disputes, and who came up with the idea that players couldn’t become free agents until after they had been in the league for six years. His thinking was that salaries would be higher if only a select few players became free agents every year, keeping supply low and demand high, instead of all at once.

Every player who signs a contract owes a debt of gratitude to Miller. Ted Simmons is one of them. In 1972, his first All-Star season, Simmons was earning $30,000 as catcher for the Cardinals. By 1985, his final year in Milwaukee, he was making $1 million.

Simmons will join Miller in Cooperstown next July. An eight-time All-Star, Simmons played 21 seasons in the big leagues for the Cardinals, Brewers, and Braves.

Simmons played in an era of superstar catchers like Johnny Bench, Carlton Fisk, and Thurman Munson, but he was just as good as any of them. He drove in at least 90 runs in eight different seasons; only Mike Piazza and Yogi Berra, both Hall of Famers, had more 90-RBI seasons at catcher. He batted above .300 seven times, the seventh most among catchers. Of the six ahead of him, five are in the Hall of Fame.

At the time of his retirement, Simmons led all catchers in career hits (later surpassed by Ivan Rodriguez), career games (passed by Rodriguez and Fisk), and was second to Berra in RBI. In his prime years (1971-1983), he led all catchers in RBI, was behind only Bench in home runs and WAR, and trailed Bench and Fisk in OPS.

But when Simmons first appeared on the Hall of Fame ballot, in 1994, he garnered only 3.7 percent of the vote and fell off after one year. The members of the Modern Era Committee recognized that oversight by giving him 13 of 16 votes on Sunday to send him to Cooperstown.

Miller and Simmons will be joined in the Hall of Fame Class of 2020 by whoever earns 75 percent of the vote from the baseball writers.

The results of that vote will be announced in January.