Marvin Miller, baseball union head and former Miami University student, dies

Marvin Miller, the former head of the Major League Baseball Players’ Association, died Tuesday at the age of 95. The former student at Miami University during the mid-1930s, had been ill for some time.

Miller spent his freshman and sophomore years from 1935-37 as an undergraduate student studying economics at Miami before returning to his boyhood home of Brooklyn, N.Y. to finish his studies at New York University.

While in Oxford, Miller lived in Ogden Hall and spent his free time playing and excelling in hand ball and ping pong. According to a Miami Student article from 1937, Miller won the 1937 intramural handball championship.

In a 1973 story written by Tom Callahan of the Cincinnati Enquirer, Miller was in Cincinnati for the 1970 Major League Baseball All-Star Game and decided to rent a car to make the 40-minute drive to Miami University simply because “he was in the mood”.

“When he reached the campus,” Callahan wrote, “he marveled at how changed it was, but more than that how beautiful it was. While Marvin Miller is not a man who resists change, he celebrated to see that Ogden Hall existed still. And he strolled about the grounds a little sorry it was summer and the students were gone. When you inquire if he included the athletic department on his Miami tour, where pictures of Walter Alston, Paul Brown and all the school’s other sports dignitaries are prominent, he replied it thrilled and impressed him.”

“I studied economics and statistics at Miami and thought about teaching,” Miller confided to Callahan. “I never thought about this (his job with the Players’ Association).”

Miller served as executive director of the MLBPA for 16 years, fighting the owners on various issues and playing a huge role in the formation of free agency. Miller first tried to tackle baseball’s infamous reserve clause – which bounded a player to one team – when outfielder Curt Flood, traded by the Cardinals to the Phillies, refused to report to Philadelphia in 1969. The U.S. Supreme Court ultimately upheld the reserve clause in a decision three years later, but Miller refused to stop there.

In 1975, Los Angeles Dodgers pitcher Andy Messersmith and Montreal Expos pitcher Dave McNally, under the direction of Miller, chose not to sign contracts and their teams invoked baseball’s renewal clause. The renewal clause gave the club the right to renew a player’s contract without his approval. Following a series of court rulings in the players’ favor and ensuing appeals by the owners, the two sides agreed on negotiations which allowed players with six years of major league service to become free agents. Modern free agency was born.

Miller led the union through three work stoppages. Baseball dealt with eight stoppages total through 1995, but unlike other major U.S. professional leagues which continually deal with labor issues, baseball has not missed any action since the 1995 season was shortened to 144 games.

Throughout Miller’s tenure, the average league salary went from $19,000 to $241,000 a year. Owners and executives despised Miller for his progressive achievements regarding players’ rights and salaries and those same executives comprise a significant chunk of baseball’s Hall of Fame voters. For this reason, Miller controversially never saw his place in the Hall of Fame.

“It is an amusing anomaly that the Hall of Fame has made me famous by keeping me out,” said Miller, after falling one vote short of induction in December 2010.