Marvin Miller's last chance

Can't believe he isn't in. Maybe some veterans and old time ballplayers should speak out more but it seems a lot are just bitter that guys today get paid so much. that's a generalization but i can't remember too many guys saying how important Miller was but can think of guys saying 'If I played today I'd be getting xxx million.'

 

When son goes through the Hall of Fame with dad, he isn't looking at the plaques of guys wearing suits and hoping to join the Li'l Litigator club.

 

I'm going to bet that for every Tom Glavine, there are 10 American-born lunkheads who have no idea who Marvin Miller is.

 

I thought this was interesting:

http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/2010/writers/tom_verducci/12/07/marvin.miller.hof/index.html

It seemed kind of weird to me that Verducci kept referring to Chass as "a blogger" or "the blogger". Is there some history between them?

 

I was just going to post this. I'm not normally a fan at all of Verducci b/c of his dueling agendas and hypocrisy, but man, that was some fantastic passive-aggressive evisceration. He fucking SHREDDED Chass.

And I think the "blogger" reference was a tweak b/c Chass is always ranting about bloggers and how they have no standards and just write from their basement, when he in fact is now a blogger who doesn't follow journalistic standards and writes from his basement.

 

Chass accuses Verducci of voting against Miller:

<i>The Hall does not disclose individual votes so unless committee members say whom they voted for, their ballots remain secret. That practice, however, leaves room for speculation, and Miller said some people told him they heard or believed the other two no votes, besides the three owners, were Frank Robinson, the Hall of Fame player, and Tom Verducci, the sports writer.

I’m not sure what Verducci, the Sports Illustrated writer, thought of Miller, but I know he didn’t think much of the job Miller had. When Verducci covered baseball for Newsday, the Long Island daily, he hated covering baseball labor. And when he did cover it, he wasn’t very good at it.

During the 1990 lockout, there was a Saturday afternoon bargaining session, before which the retired Miller met with members of the union’s negotiating committee and, in effect, gave them a pep talk. The bargaining session turned out to be critical and led to the settlement of the dispute, but Verducci missed the development, writing instead that the situation was growing worse.

Could Verducci’s view of labor negotiations translate into a no vote 20 years later? Only he knows, but that’s what the belief is, and Miller missed by that margin of one vote.</i>

 

I don't disagree. I take issue with your belief that a kid is going to pay any attention to or care about those things.

The executive/pioneer plaques are the ones kids run past on their way to see the Cal Ripken display. They care as much about Ford Frick as they do about James A. Garfield.

 

Got an e-mail yesterday from a well-known former pitcher:

The reason for secrecy in the Hall of Fame voting is not to guarantee a fair election, but to enable an unfair one. The HoF is a political organization invented and supported by the Major League Baseball owners. Otherwise how could Bowie Kuhn get in and not Marvin Miller? Secrecy is the only way they can perpetrate such an outrage. The media should not let them get away with it. The H of F voters must be held accountable. Where is WikiLeaks when you really need it?

Regardless, where the heck is the transparency in this? The idea of writers withholding their selections from the media is absurd. Having owners on the panel who were heavily involved in collusion is absurd.

But who knows? The idea of writers taking pay checks from the Major League Baseball always seemed a little odd to me, too, but it seems pretty common in practice.