Omission of Miller degrades the Hall

I asked a sports columnist I work with whether he thinks that Marvin Miller deserves to be in the Hall of Fame. He summed it up succinctly.

"I ask, would the game be the same without him? The answer, obviously, is no."

And there's no argument to that.

The short-sighted Hall of Fame veterans committee gave every columnist and talking head a lot of ammunition this week when former commissioner Bowie Kuhn was elected to the Hall Fame and former players union head Marvin Miller wasn't.

Miller was integral in striking down the reserve clause. He ushered in the new era of baseball, where players weren't bound to the same team for life and were free to earn their salaries the way everybody else in the country negotiates their salaries: by supply and demand and to the highest bidder. They were essentially indentured servants before Miller.

Among the comments this week:

• The National Baseball Hall of Fame has become a national joke," wrote Murray Chass of the New York Times, himself in the writer's wing of the Hall of Fame. "Few men, if any, however, made as significant an impact as Miller on Major League Baseball. You don’t have to like what he did to recognize that impact."
• Said John Helyar of ESPN.com: "The Hall of Fame veterans committee has done the seemingly impossible. It has made the BCS bowl process seem, by contrast, a wholly rational and transparent undertaking."
• "When you see something like that vote, it proves how necessary Marvin Miller was," says Jim Bouton, author of "Ball Four," to ESPN.com. "When you see the mind-set of these people and the way they are still thinking now, imagine what they were like in the 1960s. You wonder what century they're operating in."
• “I can’t say I was surprised,” Miller told Chass after hearing the results. “It’s demeaning to everyone involved, but especially to the Hall.”

Why was Miller omitted? Because the Hall of Fame changed the way it votes. Instead of the vote by a larger voting pool, it stacked the deck with management types on a 12-person committee. With former players voting, Miller was getting closer to the required 75 percent. He had 63 percent two years ago. On this committee, he received 25 percent.

"They are not a jury of my peers, but a jury of my antagonists," Miller said before the vote, according to Chass.

It's a shame that Miller, now 90, will have to wait longer, and might not survive until his next chance in two years.

Show of hands: Who wants to go take a trip to Cooperstown to see the plaque of Bowie Kuhn or Barney Dreyfuss or Walter O'Malley, who moved the Dodgers from Brooklyn to Los Angeles?

Me neither.