Marvin Miller knew he belonged in the Baseball Hall of Fame, but he died on Tuesday excluded from it. He had turned a weak players union into a ferocious and wealthy labor force that transformed the sport's economics, yet the Hall is stocked with lesser-regarded executives who did not rattle baseball's hidebound establishment the way Miller did.
While leading the players to great gains, Miller became a revolutionary and almost certainly the most powerful man in baseball — not Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, whose tenure closely paralleled Miller's. They were opposites: Miller the urbane economist bent on breaking an industry's antilabor policy, Kuhn the starchy lawyer guarding the status quo and arguing that baseball would be doomed if the reserve system were toppled for free agency.
Five times from 2003 to 2010, voters failed to elect Miller to the Hall of Fame. He was rejected by veterans committees as small as 12 and as large as 84. In 2007, he suffered a double indignity: he was spurned twice.
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