Hairs vs. Squares Page 7

  A man who could smile from beneath his slicked-back hair and matinee-idol mustache even while losing an argument, Miller was quiet and urbane. But he loved baseball and loved a good fight. To him baseball players were among the most exploited workers in America.

  In 1966 Miller visited major league spring training camps in a campaign to be elected executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Miller was voted in, but his hiring sent shock waves along the corridors of power. Owners well aware of Miller’s background in labor warned against his getting the job, but the players, by now less naïve and increasingly restless over their small union gains, sensed the owners’ fear and gave Miller the job.

  Being head of the MLBPA seemed a thankless task. There was a war chest of just $5,400 and no staff. Over the next seventeen years Miller would forge one of the most unlikely yet strongest unions in the nation, all the while battling the entrenched power of the owners.

  In 1968 Miller negotiated the MLBPA’s first collective bargaining agreement. Players were given a nearly 43 percent increase in minimum salary, from $7,000 to $10,000. The deal brought structure to relations between players and owners, but that foundation was tested in 1969, when St. Louis Cardinals All-Star outfielder Curt Flood feuded with management over his salary and protested what he viewed as a “get-even” trade to Philadelphia.

  Flood informed Commissioner Bowie Kuhn that he would entertain offers for his playing services from all clubs. Flood sued MLB and Kuhn. The commissioner cited the reserve clause, which stated that a player must sit out a season before he could negotiate with other teams. The celebrated case made its way to the Supreme Court in March 1972 and was settled that June, the court siding with the owners in a 5–3–1 vote.

  Flood’s loss was ultimately his fellow players’ gain. In 1974 A’s 25-game winner and Cy Young recipient Catfish Hunter challenged the reserve clause and was declared a free agent. One year later, the reserve clause was abolished, and the era of free agency began.

  The floodgates had opened, and Miller was at the forefront of MLB’s economic revolution. Kuhn’s initial impression of the union boss, formed at their first meeting in 1966, was favorable. To the commissioner, Miller was all low-key charm. Miller offered no threats or demands; Kuhn saw him as neither “pussycat nor radical.” What he was, in the eyes of Kuhn, was pedantic, a man who fussed over details and was unwilling to deal straightforwardly with the issues.

  Miller, meanwhile, had at first thought the 6-foot-5 Kuhn an imposing figure. Yet Miller later recalled realizing one didn’t have to deal with Kuhn for very long to become unimpressed with his physical stature. In time Miller considered Kuhn the single most important contributor to the success of the MLBPA. The union boss believed the commissioner’s moves constantly backfired and his attempts at leadership created division. Paraphrasing Voltaire on the Almighty, Miller insisted that if Bowie Kuhn had never existed, the MLBPA would have had to invent him.

  Moss was a bright young Harvard Law graduate who was believed by many to be the sharpest arbitration lawyer in the Steelworkers’ legal department. He battled often, and with success, with the likes of American Can and Bethlehem Steel. A devoted baseball fan, he had moved to New York from Beaver Falls, Pennsylvania, to combine his love of the game with his love for law. Though he worked well with Miller, the two men were vastly different. Older by fifteen years, Miller, hardened as he was by the Great Depression, saw labor relations as life-and-death issues. To Moss they were a game. Be it chess or baseball, Moss loved games. And he had to win.

  In his autobiography Kuhn regarded Moss as a counterbalance to Miller. To the commissioner, Moss was a real fan, a man who liked to talk about the game and cared about it. Moss was a dedicated fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Opening Day left him giddy. His Steelworkers boss, Ben Fisher, said once that if there was a conflict between watching a ball game and negotiating a contract, one never knew what Moss would do.

  Kuhn thought Moss neither the philosopher nor the zealot, as he saw Miller. Moss was irreverent to the point of sassy, but practical; he knew the realities of the marketplace. He was also a personality with a human touch. In a 1968 meeting one of Moss’s wisecracks had left Kuhn demonstrably angered. Moss reacted by reaching out. “I don’t know why you got so mad but maybe I was wrong,” he told Kuhn. “Can we forget it?”

  Under no circumstances could Kuhn imagine Miller saying anything like that. Miller, Kuhn thought, never admitted he was wrong. Where Miller was seen as ultra serious, Moss was lighthearted, with a ready wit and a sense of fun. Miller’s adversaries mocked what they considered to be his deep, wrenching sighs and funereal visage; Moss, by contrast, once wheeled into San Diego Padres president Buzzie Bavasi’s reserved parking space just for kicks.

  Confronting Miller and Moss was Gaherin, a street-smart New Yorker who was the director of the Player Relations Committee. Hired by the owners in 1967, Gaherin was a veteran negotiator who knew firsthand what life was like in the trenches of a labor war. He had been on the front lines of such battles involving the airline and newspaper industries. Regarding the latter, Gaherin, as president of the Publishers Association of New York, had been through the brutal union battles of the 1960s. His resume included his having been vice president for labor at American Airlines; labor chief for various northeastern railroads, and head of the Eastern Conference of Carriers, a joint bargaining association of railroads.

  Gaherin’s feel for gritty, labor-relation trench warfare went well beyond plush corporate boardrooms. And while his public persona was tight-lipped—Miller thought of him as the “very professional John Gaherin”—the man was a character. His Irish wisdom and jokes had been handed down to him by his father, and Kuhn found that tense moments in backroom meetings were often defused by Gaherin’s snappingly effective comments on the game’s characters and colorful stories of past labor negotiations.

  One such story harkened back to Gaherin’s days as chairman of the New York Harbor Negotiating Committee. In the midst of a strike, Gaherin obtained a back-to-work order that he presented to the union chief. The man was unimpressed. “Well, now, that’s a pretty piece of paper,” the union chief said. “Will that thing steer a tugboat?”

  Kuhn thought Gaherin an excellent student of human nature, as any successful negotiator needs to be, and quickly and accurately figured out the good guys from the bad. Sizing up the two sides as they prepared for battle in the spring of ’72, Kuhn saw a potential problem for owners, and it lay in public relations. Of all Miller’s talents his greatest may have been his ability to cultivate the press. He was a superb communicator, as effective with the press as anyone Kuhn had ever seen in the sports field. And that superiority with the media, Kuhn knew, was going to be a major problem for Gaherin. John’s backroom humor didn’t translate publicly, and while he worked at courting the media, he was never able to do it with the success Miller enjoyed. Still Kuhn held out hope. Gaherin, the commissioner thought, was a “skilled professional.”

  The focus of the disagreements between labor and management was binding arbitration and player pensions. The end result was that MLB owners agreed to an increase of $500,000 in pension fund payments. While players were not paid for the missed games at the start of the 1972 season, they did earn the right to salary arbitration, which remains a big part of the game more than forty years later.

  The ultimate fallout of the 1972 MLB strike was that players gained a realization of how much power they wielded. It would take just four years for them to usher in the era of free agency.

  What should be remembered about the historic strike is that it could have been avoided. In his autobiography Miller contended that the last thing he had expected was a players’ strike, that it caught him unawares. He also thought the issue said to be the cause of the strike was “only a mask” for the real issue: power.

  According to Miller, club owners wanted to bring to an abrupt halt the progress being made by the Players Association. They decided the best way t
o do this was to either provoke a strike, which they were confident they would win, or force the Players Association to back down and accept what Miller felt was an “unreasonable” position.

  By 1972 players’ health care costs had climbed by about $500,000 per year since 1969. The Players Association wanted owners to meet that rise in costs. They also wanted increased payments to the pension plan in order that retirement benefits could be adjusted to match the 17 percent increase in the cost of living since 1969. The increase would bring the owners’ annual cost to $6.5 million. Miller had a proposal that would ease their financial pain: since the pension plan had amassed a surplus of $800,000, that sum could be applied to the benefits increase. The end result would be that the owners’ out-of-pocket costs would be substantially reduced.

  Miller and the Players Association felt their requests were modest, particularly since Major League Baseball had just signed a four-year, $70 million deal with NBC-TV for broadcast rights to the Game of the Week, the All-Star Game, and the World Series.

  Negotiations were glacial, in both mood and movement. Yet Miller did not see signs of trouble. On his annual spring training trip in early March, Miller met with seven major league teams to discuss pension negotiations and never mentioned the possibility of a strike.

  Gaherin made an offer of $500,000 per year on health care contributions, but the bosses balked at increasing retirement benefits. Still since surplus income from the pension fund could be used toward retirement benefits without additional cost to the owners, it seemed to Miller a settlement might be within reach.

  Instead the situation quickly spiraled downward. As Miller prepared to meet with the Chicago White Sox in Sarasota, Gaherin issued an announcement: “The owners aren’t going to increase pension benefits at all,” he stated, “and we’re going to reduce our offer on health care.”

  Gaherin pulled the offer of $500,000 and reduced it to $400,000. The perception among the owners was that the union was weak and this was the time to take it on.

  Miller felt the owners had reduced a bargaining position they already knew to be inadequate. As far as the union boss was concerned, this amounted to baiting the Players Association into a strike.

  Where Miller had earlier seen the possibility of a settlement, he now saw something else. His mindset in meeting with the White Sox the next day was much different than it had been in his prior meetings with clubs that spring. “Negotiations will continue and there’s always the possibility we’ll reach a settlement,” he told White Sox players. “But it’s beginning to seem unlikely.”

  Over the next ninety minutes, Miller informed the White Sox of the importance of keeping the players’ retirement benefits on the same level as living costs. If the benefits were not adjusted, he explained, rising inflation over the next 25–30 years, when the players would be eligible for their pensions, would drive down the worth of their benefits to a fraction of their current value.

  The options, Miller said, were to stand or fold. He outlined each option, what was involved in a walkout, and the procedures the union would follow until the expiration of the current benefits plan on March 31. Before leaving the Chisox camp, Miller asked club player representative Jay Johnstone to conduct a strike authorization vote.

  Johnstone had the reputation of being a clubhouse prankster. He nailed teammates’ cleats to the floor, dressed up as a member of the grounds crew and dragged the infield between innings, and climbed on the dugout roof to walk to the concession stands to get a hot dog.

  This was no time to clown, however. A strike vote would be baseball’s first since 1946, when Robert Murphy, formerly a negotiator for the National Labor Relations Board, attempted to get the Pittsburgh Pirates to engage in a walkout in order to gain collective bargaining rights. Murphy disliked the reserve clause in player contracts that allowed team owners to have control of players’ services. Murphy argued that players should have more rights, including the right of salary arbitration and the right of contract.

  Murphy’s plans were thwarted by Commissioner Albert “Happy” Chandler, a fiscal conservative who had served his native Kentucky both in the U.S. Senate and as governor and had hoped to be FDR’s running mate in the 1944 election.

  Passed over in favor of another Midwestern senator, Harry S. Truman of Missouri, Chandler eventually resigned his seat in the U.S. Senate to succeed Kennesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s first commissioner. The Judge—Landis had served as judge of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of Illinois—had died on November 25, 1944, after being hospitalized in October with a severe cold and then suffering a heart attack while in the hospital.

  A multi-sport athlete in his youth, Chandler used his folksy charm to the benefit of baseball during World War II. Major league owners fearful of seeing their players made eligible for the draft during the war wanted a commissioner who had the political skills needed to protect their interests in the nation’s capital. With his down-home Southern drawl, his willingness to serenade acquaintances with his version of “My Old Kentucky Home,” and his reputation as a “preening politician” and “hand-shaking, baby-kissing practitioner of the [political] arts,” Chandler was the perfect man to represent baseball on Capitol Hill.

  Nicknamed “Happy” due to his jovial nature, Chandler was generally a friend of organized labor. His approval of Jackie Robinson’s contract with the Brooklyn Dodgers that integrated major league baseball and his establishing of the first pension fund led him to be called the “player’s commissioner.”

  In the case of the Pirates’ proposed walkout, however, Chandler sided with management. His motives may have stemmed from a situation early in 1946 in which the Mexican baseball league, fronted by Jorge Pasquel and his four brothers, took campaign funds from the impending Mexican presidential election in order to offer signing bonuses and lucrative salaries to American baseball players. Some of the salaries being offered were reportedly three times the major league salaries.

  Angered at seeing the American pastime raided, Chandler announced a five-year ban on any major leaguer who jumped to the Mexican League and did not return the majors by April 1, 1946. Some eighteen players ignored the commissioner’s ban. Future Hall of Famers Ted Williams, Stan Musial, and Phil Rizzuto were among those targeted by the Mexican League, but each declined the lavish contracts. Sal “the Barber” Maglie and Mickey Owen agreed to play in Mexico but then returned prior to Chandler’s deadline.

  Aided by labor spies on the Bucs’ ball club, Chandler moved quickly to squash the Pirates’ walkout. Working with Pirates team officials, the commissioner’s office organized a contingency plan that included a team of replacement players should the regulars walk. The team would have included Pirates Hall of Fame shortstop Honus Wagner, who was seventy-two years old at the time.

  Twenty-six years after the Pirates’ walkout ended before it really began, the White Sox voted 25–0 to support a strike. Miller followed by revisiting over the next eight days the teams with which he had previously met prior to Gaherin’s announcement. Miller said that each team voted unanimously to support the strike.

  The March 31 deadline was fast approaching, and Miller’s hopes for a settlement were fading just as fast. In St. Petersburg, St. Louis Cardinals owner Gussie Busch issued what Miller took as a “war cry” to the press: “We voted unanimously to take a stand,” he stated. “We’re not going to give them another damned cent! If they want to strike, let them strike!”

  While much of the press sided with Busch, the dean of American sportswriters, Walter “Red” Smith, mockingly referred to the petulant beer baron as the “malty proprietor.” Smith and New York Times colleague Leonard Koppett were considered by Miller to be among the few writers providing accurate and balanced reporting of the strike.

  New York Daily News columnist Dick Young was seen by Miller as one who was obsessed with the union chief. Young opined at the time that as far as the owners were concerned, the enemy wasn’t the players, whom the owners regarded as mi
sled ingrates. The real enemy was Miller, “general of the Union,” as Young called him.

  By March 29 player support for the strike swelled to 663–10. Of the ten dissenters, four were on the Red Sox. Owner Tom Yawkey had taken care of his boys.

  Gaherin downplayed the strike vote. To him it was little more than a public rattling of the sabres. It didn’t necessarily mean a strike was really in the works: “Any labor leader who can’t get a strike vote,” Gaherin said, “might as well quit and go home.”

  When the players’ show of solidarity failed to impress management, Miller suggested an impartial arbitrator be brought in to decide the dispute. He proposed the arbitrator be chosen by former U.S. president Lyndon Johnson, President Richard Nixon, or Chief Justice Earl Warren.

  Gaherin declined the proposal. Baseball, he said, was such a unique business that an outsider couldn’t possibly understand the issues involved. Miller thought it convenient that owners could magically transform baseball from a “game” into a “business” when it suited their cause.

  Miller and Moss mulled their options. The union lacked the financial and public relations resources management had at its disposal. If the players went on strike and didn’t sustain it, their capitulation would be disastrous for the Players Association.

  On the morning of March 31, Miller; Oakland A’s player rep Chuck Dobson; and the club’s alternate rep, Reggie Jackson, flew to Dallas. From the A’s spring training camp in Arizona, Dobson and Jackson had been following the negotiations in the newspapers. It was their belief that the owners were confident the players were too fearful to strike.

  Disembarking from the plane, Miller, Dobson, Jackson, and company were swarmed by reporters and photographers. A labor economist, Miller had been involved in five national Steelworkers’ strikes, but the scene at Love Field was unlike anything he had ever seen.