Marvin Miller was surprised. “I got seven votes?” he responded incredulously when I told him Monday morning that once again he had not been elected to the Hall of Fame. His non-election did not surprise him; he had expected that outcome of the veterans committee vote. In fact, he didn’t want to be elected. He hadn’t even wanted to be on the ballot.
But he was surprised that his vote total had risen to seven from three two years ago.
“You got 58 percent of the vote,” I told him.
“I once got 63,” he responded.
“That’s when they changed the rules,” I said.
“They’ll take one look at this and they’ll change them again,” he said.
In 2007, when the veterans committee included all Hall of Famers, Miller fell 10 votes short of the 75 percent needed for election. Why the players, most of whom Miller made rich, failed to elect him defies explanation and rationalization.
But the Hall’s board of directors changed the makeup of the veterans committee, reducing it from 80 some voters to 12 members, a majority of them management men, owners and executives. The board’s explanation for the change was that the large committee had failed to elect anyone in two tries, and it wanted to increase the chances of new members being elected.
The change, however, certainly didn’t enhance Miller’s election chances. There was no way the management-dominated committee would give him nine votes. On the contrary, the Hall seemed to be making his election impossible. That’s the way Miller saw it. He called it a rigged election. I did not disagree with him.
Jeff Idelson, the Hall president, denied any such motive to the change.
“The previous system was not providing enough of a peer review,” Idelson said in a telephone interview. “The committee was not structured to provide a peer review. We came up with a peer review by people who know the job.”
Management executives have peers; Miller does not, unless the Hall wanted to put Don Fehr, Mike Weiner and Gene Orza on the committee.
“There is no right answer,” Idelson said.
For this election, the Hall changed four members of the committee, two players, one management person and one writer. The Hall does not disclose individual voting, but if the three writers, two players (and there was no guarantee that Robin Roberts would vote for Miller) and Andy MacPhail (he supposedly voted for Miller last time) voted for him, Miller would have to have received a vote from another of the management people.
Two more votes and Miller would be in, but he longer wants to be in. The time to be elected has passed, he firmly believes, and he went so far two years ago to write a letter asking that he not be on the ballot. The Hall ignored his wishes, saying it would decide who deserves recognition.
Miller was preparing another letter recently in which he would have reiterated something he recently told me, that if he were elected he would refuse the honor and shun the induction ceremony in Cooperstown in July. But he was dissuaded from sending the letter.
The results of the election were announced in Indianapolis, site of baseball’s winter meetings, and candidates had apparently been alerted beforehand that if they were elected, the Hall would like them to go to Indianapolis for a news conference.
“I wasn’t going to go to Indianapolis anyway,” Miller said. “No offense to Indianapolis, but Indianapolis in the winter is not for me.”
And if the meetings had been in Florida or Arizona?
“No, I would not.”
Cooperstown in July? “No.”
No one was elected from the 10-man ballot of former executives and pioneers. John Fetzer, former owner of the Detroit Tigers and the man Commissioner Bud Selig considers his mentor in baseball, was the leading vote getter with eight. Miller and Jacob Ruppert, who owned the Yankees long before George Steinbrenner, tied with seven votes each.
Two years ago Bowie Kuhn, Walter O’Malley and Barney Dreyfuss were elected. O’Malley, in my opinion, merited election because in taking the Dodgers west in 1958 he opened up the entire country to major league baseball. Kuhn, who often appeared to be O’Malley’s puppet, did nothing to merit election. He was a negative force who predicted that free agency would kill baseball. Kuhn is no longer with us. Free agency is. So is baseball.
Miller, under whose labor leadership players gained free agency, has had a greater impact on baseball in the last half century than anyone else. Like him or not, he changed the game.
“This is not about your feeling on Marvin Miller,” Tom Seaver told ESPN.com. “This is about the history of the game of baseball. It’s a no-brainer for me.” Seaver added, “He is on a par with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson in terms of his impact on the game of baseball. He is right there.”
That Kuhn is in the Hall of Fame and Miller is not is a true baseball travesty. It lessens the stature of the Hall. Miller is 0-for-4 in less than seven years. No one who made such an impact on baseball should endure such humiliation.
“I think the oh-fer goes further back than you’re suggesting,” he said. “You have to remember that under their rules if an executive is over 65 and retired, you didn’t have to wait five years. You were eligible immediately. Having retired at the end of 1982, you’re talking 0 for 27 years at the moment.”
Miller is more than ready to retire from the game. “I really offered to get them off the hook,” he said. “They could say ‘What do you want; he doesn’t want to be on the ballot.’ They wouldn’t take that either.”
There was a time when Miller would have appreciated the honor, but that time has passed.
“I think of all the people who were close to me,” he said, “childhood friends, adult friends, my mother, my wife. They’re all gone. It might have pleased them. I take that back. It would not have pleased my wife. She was an early one who said you have to be patient; don’t rock the boat. But even she changed from years back. When I finally wrote a letter saying I don’t want to be on the ballot, she said ‘I hope you mean it.’”
Terry Miller died last month. Miller is 92. “You look at the calendar,” he said. “I won’t be around forever.”