TAMPA — There were no announcements, nothing in the programs sold at any of the Grapefruit League or Cactus League games. Baseball is a sport that thrives because of its history, whose various anniversaries are sacrosanct. You didn’t really think 2016 would slip by without the Yankees marking 20 years since the ’96 champs, or without the Mets commemorating 30 years since 1986, did you?
But Saturday was March 5, 2016, and that meant one of the most important dates in the sport’s history had occurred exactly 50 years old.
On March 5, 1966, 20 baseball players representing MLB’s 20 franchises gathered in Washington, D.C., along with three of their senior union reps — notably Robin Roberts and Harvey Kuenn — and, remarkably, a coterie of baseball executives including commissioner William Eckert and his assistant, Lee MacPhail.
They were there to select a new executive director of the players’ union.
It was Roberts, about to enter the 19th and final season of a Hall of Fame career who entered into nomination the name of a man little known to his ballplaying brethren but very well known to the suits who would soon have to deal with him. They knew all about his battles with the steel unions.
“I’m very anxious to get the views of the players and find out what they would like this association to become,” that nominee would say a few hours later, when he was voted in. “I’ll have to feel my way and I’ll be dependent on what they think.”
That was the first time many baseball fans had ever heard of the name Marvin Miller. It would not be the last. You could say the first half of baseball history occurred from the moment the idea of the sport flashed into the imagination of Abner Doubleday (or whomever) and ended on March 4, 1966.
And the second half began that day: March 5, 1966.
Miller always had an image problem, partly because he always hammered the hell out of baseball owners and the owners always had stronger PR machines than the players did. But the truth was — and is — even rank-and-file fans who themselves belong to unions never could quite stomach the notion that rich men who play a game for a living had anything resembling hardship working conditions.
So they always have sided with the billionaires over the millionaires.
It probably has kept Miller out of the Hall of Fame, even as a man like Bowie Kuhn — whom he battered and bloodied so often that my friend Joe Posnanski of NBC sports has likened that duel to what it’s like watching Serena Williams eternally pummel Maria Sharapova on a tennis court — walked in.
It only echoes what much of baseball’s establishment believed in 1966. Bob Feller, for instance, who should have known better, who saw his Cleveland Indians discard him the moment he became an ordinary pitcher, said this about Miller more than a year after his appointment:
“This guy Miller is a phony. He’s a typical labor leader who knows nothing about baseball. The players made one heck of a mistake hiring the guy. It’s a mistake that could haunt them a long time.”
Rapid Robert was a little off on that one, and not only because salaries exploded, the reserve clause vanished, free agency happened — and oh, by the way, business boomed. And look: If you want a taste of just how much owners lorded over their players then, just watch every inch they still take to try and retain authority — when’s the last high-profile rookie allowed to open a season in the majors?
None of that means you have to like what has become of baseball, or any of the men who have run the MLBPA, or any of the changes they have brought. But the game did change forever exactly 50 years ago Saturday. It’s something you ought to know.
Whack Back at Vac
James H. Burns: I normally hate when teams put initials on their uniforms to mark the passing of someone important to the team, or the team’s history. But I wonder if it wouldn’t be fitting, at least for spring training, for the Mets to don a tribute to the great Shannon Forde.
Vac: Not only fitting, in this case, but essential.
Stewart Summers: Any truth to the rumor that Phil Jackson will be offering a 10-day contract to Mahmoud Abdul-Rauf?
Vac: I suspect that even at 46 years old, he would be more useful than Jose Calderon.
vedderkj: I hope @StevePoliti keeps talking up St. Bonaventure coach Mark Schmidt for the Rutgers job. Would love to then read a “Please No!” column by @MikeVacc in response.
@MikeVacc: You’re both dead to me.
Kenneth Sclapp: My first car was a ’73 Duster — forest green, no power brakes or power steering and a three-speed clutch! Drove like a truck and I loved it!
Vac: The Duster in our lives belonged to my pal Hammersley, and if memory serves, he got 4.7 million miles out of ol’ Betsy.
Vac Whacks
Maybe there’s been a more perfect marriage of author and subject than John Feinstein and the troika of coaches he writes about in his new book, “The Legends Club” — Dean Smith, Mike Krzyzewski, Jim Valvano — but I honestly can’t think of it. If college hoops is your thing, then Feinstein is your poet laureate, and this book was written just for you.
Maybe it’s too much to ask for the Johnnies to make a little mini-run at the Garden this week … so I’ll happily pull for the Bonnies to do that at Barclays instead.
You may not believe me, but I’ll have my Slingbox fired up Sunday so I can watch Rangers-Islanders in both the press box in Clearwater, Fla., and the waiting area at Tampa Airport. Haven’t you heard? We’re a hockey town!
Forget Michael Bloomberg: Frank Underwood should just throw his hat in the presidential ring and see what happens.
I’ve had occasion to write some unkind things about the Mets through the years, which means there were more than a few times I would see Shannon Dalton Forde, the team’s senior media relations director, and her first words to me would be, “I’m so mad at you!”
But because she didn’t have an unkind fiber in her, those conversations always ended with a smile, a laugh, and a thoughtful word or three. She was also as tough as any 200 professional athletes put together. It was a privilege simply to have known her.
