BEFORE THE START OF THE AMERICAN LABOR MOVEMENT, there were no laws protecting workers, no labor boards to watch after their interests. They were at the mercy of the rich and powerful factory and company owners, who in many cases treated them with utter contempt. Low pay, long hours, horrible work conditions, and inhumane treatment were common. Workers who dared complain about conditions were fired.
When asked about the apparent unfairness of their policies, companies ignored the plight of the human beings toiling for them and focused instead on the benefits to their bottom lines. Hiring people for the lowest possible wage and charging high prices at their company store, they said, was “good business.” Without government intervention, these owners would have been content to keep wages low perpetually.
In the 1880s, conditions in some factories were so onerous that the workers were willing to face the consequences of going on strike, which for them was the action of last resort. Only when the workers felt hopeless did they do something as desperate as risk their paycheck. At one carriage manufacturer in Rochester, New York, for instance, management locked up the water faucets in the sinks. When an employee wanted a drink of water, he had to go to the foreman, who unlocked the faucet, gave him a single cupful of water, and then locked the faucet again. Another rule dictated that if a worker was a minute late, he would not be allowed to work that day. These workers struck.
At one quarry in Massachusetts in 1879 the workers had to buy their goods at the company store, which charged outrageously high prices for necessities. No matter how frugal these workers were, they never got ahead. The workers had become peons to the quarry owner. Despairing that conditions would ever get better, these workers also went on strike. To strike literally could mean taking one’s life in one’s hands, as these companies hired thugs and goons to beat them and scabs to replace them. In addition to violence against the strikers, companies also used more subtle means to impede unions, such as blacklisting, company unions, legal tactics, and yellow-dog contracts, in which employees, if they wanted to be hired, had to sign a pledge not to join a union.
Among the best-known early strikes was the Great Railroad Strike of 1877, a strike over working conditions, low wages, and an antiunion stance that resulted in the deaths of twenty-two men. President Rutherford B. Hayes had to call out federal troops to quell the violence of the angry strikers and the resulting property damage. The strike failed, but it set a precedent: during the Pullman Palace Car Company strike of 1895, President Grover Cleveland called out federal troops. This strike also was broken, as was the strike by mine workers of John D. Rockefeller Jr.’s Colorado Fuel and Iron Company in 1903–04 and again in 1913. (It’s interesting to note that as far back as 1877 strikers were being called communists by those opposing them.)
World War I brought something of a moratorium on strikes, but in 1919 two major strikes shook the country. Hundreds of unions struck in Seattle, and there was a police strike in Boston. The unrest made everyone nervous.
Conservatives and the Big Business interests they served blasted the unions for being un-American. Said the Chicago Tribune, “It is only a middling step from Petrograd to Seattle.” The Salt Lake City Tribune commented, “Free speech has been carried to the point where it is an absolute menace.” Added the Washington Post, “Silence the incendiary advocates of force…bring the law’s hand down…DO IT NOW!” There was so much fear that the press announced its willingness to suspend the basic constitutional freedom of speech.
In New York, four hundred servicemen ransacked the socialist paper The Call, and beat up everyone inside. Six days later, Governor Al Smith signed a bill forbidding the display of red flags.
Most strikes didn’t succeed because the workers did not have federal protection until 1932, when Franklin D. Roosevelt signed legislation to better their bargaining power against the biggest, toughest company-owners in the United States. His support of this legislation is still one of the reasons FDR’s picture hangs on the walls of homes of many union members and a big reason why conservatives and wealthy business owners demonized him.
The first federal legislation to help workers unionize was the Norris–La Guardia Act of 1932. The act legalized union organizing and outlawed yellow-dog contracts. The National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933 gave employees the right to organize and bargain through their representatives. It outlawed forcing workers to join a company union. The third important piece of legislation was the National Labor Relations Act of 1935, which was passed to stop companies from bargaining unfairly. It created a National Labor Relations Board to oversee companies to make sure they complied.
Between May of 1933 and July of 1937 there were ten thousand strikes involving 5,600,000 workers.
By the start of World War II, the efforts of the American Federation of Labor (AFL) and the Congress of Industrial Organizations (CIO) substantially reduced the number of unorganized workers.
Only after the legitimacy of trade unions was accepted was there any chance for peaceful bargaining.
It was not a coincidence that Jews played an important part in the labor movement. Brothers like Phil, Jack, and Henry Foner, communists who hated the inequality between big companies and their workers, spent their whole lives fighting to get workers a fair shake. But you didn’t have to be a communist or a socialist to believe in fairness for labor.
Marvin Miller, who rose to the top of the ranks of the Steelworkers’ Union and then lent his skills to fighting for better wages and benefits for major league baseball players, was neither a communist nor a socialist, but after the crash of Wall Street in 1929, he saw how an economy with no safety net affected his father, and after graduating from college, he went to work for the New York State welfare department. The misery he saw moved him. An economist by trade, Miller spent most of his life working to improve workers’ conditions. He worked for the Machinists’ Union, the United Auto Workers, the Steelworkers—where he became the top economist and negotiator—and then he gained fame as the guiding force behind the Major League Players Association. His was a life spent fighting for the underdog against the powerful guys with the money. Almost never did he lose.
Marvin Miller was born in the Bronx on April 14, 1917. Less than a year after his birth, his father bought a house on East 19th Street between Avenues S and T in the Flatbush section of Brooklyn. His father, who worked in Manhattan on Division Street on the Lower East Side, not far from the Manhattan Bridge, sold expensive ladies’ coats. During the Roaring Twenties, business boomed. His mother, an elementary school teacher in the New York City public school system all her life until she retired, was the disciplinarian of the family who taught young Marvin to read by age three. Three times he skipped grades, so by the time he entered James Madison High School in 1929, he was not yet twelve years old.
MARVIN MILLER “My father came from Russia. He was brought here in 1883 by his father when he was about a year old. My father was one of ten children, all of whom were born a few blocks from where I live in Yorkville. We moved to East 19th Street in 1918, about two miles north of Sheepshead Bay, Manhattan Beach, and Brighton Beach. When I was a small boy, a good part of my block and the blocks around us were empty lots. We never lacked a place to play. There were even small farms on the street, one acre, two acres, sometimes larger fields, what they called truck farms, where vegetables were grown and sold. I remember tomatoes, radishes, pumpkins, cantaloupes, string beans, green peas, and lettuce. On my way to school sometimes I would steal tomatoes and eat them. The fields were open, and it was early, and no one was around. It got so sophisticated that friends and I would bring salt along with us.
“When we moved in, it was a predominantly Jewish neighborhood, but when I was young, a Catholic church was built on the corner, and what had been a series of empty lots soon were filled with new houses. Mostly Italian and Irish Catholic families moved in. But everybody got along. It was just a great, great neighborhood. In my memory, and my younger sister Thelma’s as well, it was a very happy time.
“My father was a salesman of rather expensive ladies’ coats. His bosses were Sheiman and Perler. The shop was on Division Street, which ran four or five blocks, and on both sides of the street were establishments all selling women’s coats. Nothing else. He worked there all his life.
“My mother was a teacher. When my mother and father lived in the Bronx, she taught in Harlem, but after they moved to Flatbush, she transferred to a school in Coney Island. My mother was the strict one in the family. She had important standards, whether it was being a good student in school, never being allowed to cut school, never being allowed to say ‘I don’t feel well today. I don’t want to go to school.’ School was a central part of our lives. She was the one who taught me the rudiments of reading, and I would practice in the subways, reading the advertisements posted above the windows and reading them aloud, to the amusement, or annoyance, of the passengers.
“I entered elementary school when I was five and a half, and I promptly began skipping grades, which was not that unusual in New York City at that time. I skipped three grades, and I entered James Madison High School in 1929, a few months before I turned twelve.
“James Madison was a pretty special place. It just seemed to me that the kids were so bright. They seemed a lot brighter than the children I had gone to elementary school with. So many of them achieved later in life. Maybe that reinforced the whole thing.
“For one, I went to school with Marty Glickman, the sprinter, basketball player, and football player. Glickman was one of those athletes who never got the recognition he deserved. He went to the 1936 Olympics, and at the tryouts in 1935, he finished a tenth of a second behind Jesse Owens—as a high school student. He was kept from competing in the Olympics by Avery Brundage, who was a right-wing Nazi running the American Olympics team, because the Olympics were held in Berlin that year, and Brundage didn’t want to embarrass Hitler, so Marty and another Jewish sprinter by the name of Sam Stoller were kept out.
“Growing up in the ’30s, we were aware of what was going on in Europe. We were aware of the rampant anti-Semitism there, but I never felt it in Brooklyn. I’m sure there was some. But not in and around East 19th Street. That was a neighborhood where people got along, and almost never moved out. The only memory I have of moving trucks was people moving in when the new houses were being built. It was a most stable neighborhood, with all kinds of people eventually.
“There were candy stores on Avenue U, a shopping center, and candy stores on Kings Highway. We hung out mostly in the streets, and in the empty lots, and sometimes in our backyards, and sometimes on the front stoops. We played all kinds of games, from very simple stoopball to smashing a ball against a curb, to stickball in the streets, and after they were paved we roller-skated and played roller hockey. As we got older, when school was out during the summer, we would go to Brighton Beach where we swam and played hand tennis and handball.
“In Brighton Beach, Manhattan Beach, and eventually Oriental Beach—Coney Island generally—one-wall handball was the sport. There were hundreds of courts on those beaches. That was the center of one-wall handball in the United States. The national men’s singles championships were always held at one of the beaches in Coney Island. When I went to college later in Ohio, I took up four-wall handball. I became the men’s singles champion of Miami University.
“We had a radio in the house from the time I was five or six. They were not small portables, but great big RCA Victors. I listened not just to baseball, but to boxing as well. My father was a boxing fan. I remember listening to the two Dempsey-Tunney fights, one in 1926, the other in 1927. The Long Count was a big deal. When Dempsey lost that fight because he wouldn’t go back to his corner, I lost a lot of picture cards in a bet. It was awful.
“The other boxer everyone admired was Joe Louis. We didn’t live in an area where blacks lived, and there were no Negroes in our schools. Maybe one or two at Madison, but not many more. I grew up with parents who had great familiarity with black culture. Both came from the Lower East Side, and my mother had worked in Harlem.
“The story I like to tell: My mother would go off to school early, taking my sister with her. She went to the Coney Island school where my mother taught, and I’d be home with my father. When I started Madison, things were so crowded that they had two sessions. The upper classmen went to school from eight until one, and the freshman session went from one P.M. to six P.M. Brooklyn was becoming a bedroom community to Manhattan, plus the subway system was expanding, making Brooklyn accessible whether you were going to work in Manhattan or other parts of Brooklyn or Queens.
“My father didn’t leave work until about midmorning, so he and I would be home together when the city sanitation truck would come by. The coal ashes from our furnace would have to be hauled up from the basement to the street, and twice a week a crew of three—usually a white driver and two black men who did the hauling—came and hauled the heavy ash cans from the street into the truck, emptying them, and putting them back. And on cold winter days, my father would invite the crew in, and he would serve them coffee and sometimes Four Roses whiskey so they could warm up and get a breather. I remember the comments I would hear from our neighbors who felt that was really not acceptable behavior, to invite black men, garbage men, ash men, in. And my father paid absolutely no attention to the neighbors. He had a kind of easy camaraderie with working people. It’s one of the very nice memories I have.
“My parents were real theater fans, and I went with them to lots of plays. Before a play we would go to Gray’s Drugstore just off Broadway about 43rd Street in Manhattan, where we could buy cut-rate tickets.
“My father would also take me to Dodger games on his day off from work. I was very excited, because by the time I went, I already was a fan. I followed their progress. I knew the names of the players. I already collected cards with their records on them that I bought in candy stores.
“By the time I was nine or ten, I talked my parents into letting me go to Ebbets Field on my own. It took some doing to convince them I could make it. I took the BMT subway at Avenue U, and a few stops later I got off at Prospect Park, and then I’d take the Franklin Avenue shuttle, one stop, and you’d be within three or four blocks of Ebbets Field.”
In September of 1929 the stock market crashed. As it was for so many Americans, the crash and the subsequent depression altered Marvin Miller’s life in unimagined ways.
MARVIN MILLER “I remember the stock market crash mostly because I had an economics teacher at James Madison in my first semester there who predicted it. Starting in January of 1929, he would talk to us every day about it, like an obsession. He never let go of the subject. When it happened, I thought, Wow, this guy knows more than I thought he knew!
“The crash itself had very little impact on our family and the people we knew, but the aftermath, the enduring depression which went years, oh, that had a profound impact on our family and everybody else we knew. It was a terrible impact.
“In the case of my father, he had always been a good earner. Even when he was single and very young, he was a supersalesman, and he worked on both salary and commission. As a good salesman in a place with expensive merchandise, he made a lot of money.
A breadline at the base of the Brooklyn Bridge. Library of Congress
“When the recession began and as it hit harder and harder, they began shortening the work year on Division Street. Traditionally he worked all year round with a two-week vacation, but then he got cut to forty weeks, then thirty weeks, and then twenty-six weeks, with no end in sight. It just kept going down and down, and it had all kinds of other effects. He was getting older as it went on, and he was being reminded he was a salesman and was expected to be attractive to women, because they were his customers, and I remember the pressure on him to dye his hair, which had become gray and almost white, so he could look younger. It was so undignified, and the impact on him you can just imagine. And I was aware of all this, even though we didn’t discuss it directly.
“My mother never lost her job as a teacher, and teachers’ salaries were pretty good. I can’t say we had any real economic hardship, because we didn’t. I can’t say the same for our relatives. I had an uncle and an aunt who were close to my mother. My uncle had driven a Sheffield milk truck, got laid off, became a taxi driver, got laid off that, and so on. All through the Depression we had members of the family living with us. Sometimes for a few months, six months, different ones coming and going. It was a tough time. These were my formative years, and I was getting an education in what the economy was and what the problems were. I began to see neighbors—middle-class people with apparently secure jobs, professions, some lawyers, some businessmen—where I used to only see them on weekends, suddenly I would now see them all the time. They were unemployed, and some of them would sit down and talk with me. I remember accidentally running into a next-door neighbor in the subway station when I was going into Manhattan, and I asked him what he was doing so late in the morning. He was a very dignified and reticent man. He began to talk and talk about his problems, and he broke down. He said he did not think he would ever find another job.
“Looking back, even though we always had a car, had whatever was needed, I was becoming more and more aware of the problems of life. In January of 1933, I was not yet sixteen. It was my senior year, and at that tender age, I began to wonder, Will I ever find a job? I had no relatives who owned businesses where there could be employment opportunities. So my senior year, I began to cut classes with friends. My grades fell off. I didn’t really get serious about college for a couple of years.
“I remember when I first got working papers and was looking for a summer job. I was sixteen. I went through the hopelessness of it. You had to maneuver just to get an application at an employment agency. They no longer gave out applications, because they had too few jobs and too many applicants. So you had to trick them into giving you an application. And I remember going through want ads and not seeing anything suitable. Yeah, I had my own profound depression about the future.
“When Franklin Roosevelt took office in March of 1933, my parents were quite enthusiastic. When the banks closed, my family was affected. They had accounts in the Bank of America. There was a bank holiday, but after a while they let you take out a few percentages, 4 percent, at a time. It would take a long time to get it all out. Plus there were the things your eyes told you. When I went to Manhattan, I would see bread lines in front of a church or a synagogue, people just shuffling along waiting for a meal handout, and you would see apple salesmen, selling them for a nickel apiece. If you took a good look, you’d see these people were not accustomed to doing that for a living. You could see it everywhere. And when I would visit my father at his place of work, we would go out for lunch and walk along the Bowery, which was right there, and oh, the people sleeping on the sidewalk, people just hanging out outside, clearly without work, most of them their clothing in tatters, all new sights in New York.
“During the two years after high school I took a few courses at night school at Brooklyn College, but never more than six credits a semester. I found some work in a local drugstore, first delivering pharmaceuticals by bicycle, and filling in as a short-order cook behind the counter of the drugstore. That kind of thing, and loafing. Sometimes in the early part of the day I’d look for a job, answering ads. But I wasn’t really being too productive about anything.
“In the summer of 1934 I met a new friend, Seymour Simon, playing handball at Brighton Beach. His father, Philip Simon, was a prominent lawyer who later became a judge. Seymour said, ‘Since you’re not really involved with anything, what about considering going to St. John’s in the fall?’ I thought about it and decided okay. In September of 1934 I enrolled as a full-time student at St. John’s in Brooklyn [the university didn’t move to its Queens campus until the 1950s], but after a year I decided I didn’t really want a pre-law course. I was disillusioned enough about education. I thought, I’ll be damned if I go through four years of this, and three years of law school afterward. I was not going to do it.
“I had a distant cousin who lived in Yonkers, who was about to graduate from high school, and he had looked into colleges, and he told me about Miami University of Ohio, which he had visited. It was small, with about three thousand students, and he said the town of Oxford was delightful. It was a Land Grant university, which meant tuition and living costs were low. A full year’s tuition for an Ohio resident was $80 a year. For an out-of-stater it was $130. Dormitory rent was $5 a month, and food was another $5 a month. I was turning my interest to teaching, and Miami had a very famous, well-thought-of school of education. My parents encouraged me. So in September of 1935 I enrolled at Miami and enjoyed the next two years there, but for a variety of reasons I decided to transfer back to New York for my senior year.
“One of the things that made me consider leaving Ohio was the lack of awareness of what was going on in the country by both the student body and the faculty. It was as if you were in a cocoon, and the rest of the world wasn’t there. There was no sense of social justice. In places like City College and Brooklyn College, movements were arising—communism, socialism, Trotskyism—but not at Miami University. You have to understand, that was the center of Taft Republicanism. I went to NYU senior year, and NYU was a little more progressive, but wasn’t all that different. You had to go to the public high schools and colleges, to Brooklyn and to City College to get a real contrast. There political ferment, awareness, and interest were great. This was New York. This was not Taft Ohio. You’re talking about a population that consisted of very many who were either first-or second-generation Americans. If they weren’t immigrants themselves, their parents and grandparents had a background in Europe. They had an awareness of discrimination, of anti-Semitism, and they had a working familiarity with socialist thought, communist thought, Trotskyist thought, and socialist-democratic thought, and while there was very little agreement among all these groups, they had one thing in common: they were all left-of-center political people. You just didn’t find that in other places.
“I never did join one of these groups. I was still formulating a viewpoint, though I would certainly fit the description of left-of-center. Though I wasn’t a member of the Communist Party, I did read the Daily Worker. People who weren’t socialists read the socialist Call. I read the Daily Worker in part because of Lester Rodney, its sports editor. It was unlike a sports column you read today. I forget when I first picked up on his column, but I soon realized he was the only one writing about discrimination in baseball, and I was a dyed-in-the-wool baseball fan. It was through Rodney and his column that I began to realize a lot of things about baseball. He wrote part-and-parcel about what kind of industry it was, that this was a monopoly industry working on the edge of illegality.
“In 1940 I was working in Brooklyn for the welfare department when the Rapp-Coudert Committee began investigating professors at City College and Brooklyn College. It was in the news every day. Most of the damage they did to the college professors they descended on was reversed later. Some people got payments. Because the thing was McCarthyism, pure and simple. I didn’t know any of them personally, but they were prominent teachers. I can remember the name of Frederick Ewen. He was an English teacher at Brooklyn [College]. He was subversive all right—he taught English.
“My job at the welfare department, which I began in April of 1940, was social investigator. I was to investigate applicants for what was then called home relief. I then had to service a caseload, which was supposed to be sixty families but was always nearer to eighty. They were on relief rolls and under the law you had to constantly keep in touch with them to make sure they weren’t hiding employment, but also to make sure they were looking for jobs. And also, I had to service them—there were all kinds of illnesses.
“What was remarkable to me was how little the press and the public knew about these people—folks who had finally been reduced to applying for home relief. If you believed the press, they were all a bunch of lazy louts and welfare queens, and nothing could have been further from the truth. These were people who were so beaten down by economic adversity and by illness and by what they were required to do. When the WPA labor program started, all the men were required to accept placement as laborers, regardless of their physical condition. Most of the men on relief in East New York and Brownsville had been garment workers. They had been sedentary workers all their lives. And now, in middle age, they suddenly were supposed to work on road gangs, lifting big boulders and doing physical, manual labor. So they all got sick. It used to be an unfunny joke about how many hernia victims we had to refer to Beth Israel Hospital.
“During the three years I worked there I learned a lot. I can remember once walking toward an area where my clients were, when I saw a crowd of people standing around an entrance to an apartment house. I walked over, and the crowd, both white and black, were quietly standing there. In a minute or two I saw what the situation was: a sheriff and his deputies were evicting a family, and they were carrying furniture and personal belongings out of the apartment house and depositing them in the street. There was a fine rain coming down, so everything was getting soaked, and it was one miserable scene. Finally the family came out, and after the last piece of furniture was placed on the street, the sheriff and the deputies walked to the corner, turned the corner, and left. And like a rehearsed, choreographed scene, as soon as they were gone the people standing there began moving everything back. The solidarity of those people with each other that this represented was to be repeated I don’t know how many times in the almost three years I was there. It was like an act. The sheriff and his deputies did what they had to do, and the neighbors did what they considered their job to be. These and similar incidents were a great education.
“After World War II began, I was classified 4-F. I had a birth injury to my right arm. I remained with the welfare department until November of 1942, when I went to the World Production Board in Washington. I was an economist by training, and I had taken a federal civil service exam, and I had apparently placed highly on what was called the Junior Professional Economics list. I was interviewed in New York by a former Queens College professor who was heading one of the World Production Board’s divisions.”
The World Production Board had a specialized job. It was to determine the needs of domestic industry for the components important for war production. In other words, the job was to allocate steel, aluminum, rubber, and petroleum, and all the things needed in the war effort to the war agencies and the army, navy, and air force.
MARVIN MILLER “And so I was in Washington when Branch Rickey signed Jackie Robinson to the Dodgers in 1946. The most knowledgeable sportswriters assumed Rickey had signed him to play for the Dodgers, and so there was some anticipation while he was playing in Montreal. The New York Times would run a box several times a week showing how Jersey City, the Giants Triple-A team, did and how Robinson did playing in Montreal.
“I had seen blacks playing baseball before. My father used to take me to Negro League games. I don’t remember much. I was pretty small. But I remember blacks playing for the Bushwicks, a semipro team that played in Brooklyn. Through Lester Rodney I was following the progress of bringing up a black player to the big leagues.
“Robinson came up in April of 1947, and I got back to New York around June of that year. My memories of Robinson are that he was an exciting player. When you went to a game specifically to see him, as many people did, he didn’t disappoint. He was so spectacular on the base paths, for example. If he could get on with a hit or a walk or hit by a pitch, an error, you were in for a show. He drove pitchers and catchers crazy. And he was just fun to watch. We were all rooting for the Dodgers, of course, but he added an element of fun.
Marvin Miller today. AP Photo/Bebeto Matthews
“Lots of people appreciated the significance of his integrating baseball, and not necessarily people who went to games. There were some there too, of course. Everywhere you talked to people, whether in the street, or listening to the games on the radio, or a public place, talking to people reading newspaper columns, all these people understood the social significance of what Jackie was doing.
“I must say just from reading about the way Robinson was being treated and the way the other clubs were slow to react to signing black players, my thoughts at the time were these: Anyone who thinks discrimination has now ended is crazy.
“I joined the Steelworkers’ Union on March 1, 1950. I had several influences. My father had been a salesman who had been miserably treated as an employee. One day when I went down to visit him, to my surprise I found him on a picket line. The Retail-Wholesale Department Store employees were trying to organize all of Division Street, and the stores had gotten together and decided to adopt the strategy of refusing to recognize the card check signifying that the employees had picked the union. And that picket line I saw was the result.
“My mother was also a member, of the Teachers’ Union. And when I got my first job with the federal government, with the Treasury Department in Washington, I joined the only union there, the American Federation of Government Employees. And that was at a pretty tender age, so I guess you could say we were a union family.
“I was not affected by Senator McCarthy. He didn’t go after any of my friends that I know of. When Ed Murrow finally took out after him, I was in Pittsburgh, working for the Steelworkers’ Union, and I exulted at Murrow’s integrity and courage.
“I was involved at the time with negotiations with Alcoa, the aluminum company. You may have forgotten, but they were the sponsor for Ed Murrow’s television program. Within a day or two of the Murrow program, I had an occasion to meet with people from Alcoa, and I was curious to see what their reaction was. This was, after all, an antiestablishment position that Murrow took. And to my amazement, there wasn’t a single dissenting voice on the other side of the table. They all were in praise of Murrow.”
Miller would rise in the Steelworkers’ Union until he reached the post of chief economist and head negotiator. On July 1, 1966, he left, to take over as head of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Back then, a baseball player made an average salary of $19,000 a year. By the time this Brooklyn boy retired in 1982, Miller had an undefeated record against the team owners, and the players’ salaries had risen to an average of $240,000 a year. With the advent of free agency, the players today average more than $2,700,000 a year. Miller is not yet in baseball’s Hall of Fame, but he will be in time. Few other figures have had such a powerful impact on the game.