2020 Baseball Hall of Fame Class

You don’t have to love him to respect and understand his importance, unless you are a Republican.

but it does seem love has a lot to do with admittance in the HOF rather than serious credentials. Otherwise Bud Selig and Harold Baines would have watched Miller go to Cooperstown

 

Miller was always quick to point out that the advances in contract conditions for players were due not only to any legal or strategic brilliance on his own part (although there certainly was some of that), but to utter stupidity and arrogance on the part of the owners.
The owners wanted to perpetuate the reserve clause system which was truly comparable to indentured servitude, and rather that negotiate some kind of middle ground solution (which the union had proposed) they rolled the dice that the courts would uphold the reserve clause, and were caught by complete surprise when it was chucked out.

In fact the arbitration system which
is now the great bane of baseball owners was instituted at their own insistence. They were so sure they had the arbitrators completely in their pockets it blew up in their faces like exploding cigars when they started losing the cases -- after the fact, the arbitrators said the owners' arbitration proposals were usually so ridiculous the decisions were laughers.

Then each round of successive decisions set the baseline for the next round, and the rocket powered escalation of salaries was off.

And of course the later collusion episodes only compounded the problem.

 

It’s a great day for workers now that Miller is in HOF.

The Owners hate him but that only makes sense, he took from them.

 

It was mentioned earlier in this thread, but in terms of oddest trades in history, does anything come close to Simmons, Fingers and Vuckovich for Green,Lapoint, Lezcano and Sorensen? Two Hall of Famers, and a Cy Young winner for a bunch of middling players yet the team with the middling players beat the team with the stars in the World Series two years later? To be fair lezcano and Sorensen were used in trades to get ozzie smith and Lonnie Smith, a Hall of Famer and a guy who would finish second in the MVP race in 1982, but...

 

The stupidest thing about arbitration is that it had to be one side or the other and the arbitrator could not choose a compromise

 

But that was the point - to get the player and team to agree to a compromise to avoid arbitration.

 

The Garry Templeton-Ozzie Smith trade is mindblowing in how it worked out.

1982: Garry Templeton for Ozzie Smith

EDIT: BTW, how about that 1979 Cards lineup: Simmons, Hernandez, Templeton, Lou Brock, George Hendricks, with nice contributions from Oberkfell and Jerry Mumphrey and, uh, Mike Tyson. Could only manage third behind Bucs and Expos.

1979 St. Louis Cardinals Statistics | Baseball-Reference.com

 

Could have picked anyone else and been a better choice

 

"And at the end of two, White Sox 3, Bad Guys nothing."

 

A power-short team, among other flaws, where Simmons led with 26 HR. Also, the staff lacked a true ace.