Deadspin: The FBI vs. Marvin Miller: How America Commie-Baited A Baseball Hero

We’ve obtained Miller’s FBI file through a Freedom of Information Act request. You can read the entire thing below, 82 pages of information gleaned from Miller’s co-workers and friends, from FBI informants, from the trash of someone Miller may or may not have even known. All of this was done with the goal of determining if Marvin Miller was working toward the overthrow of the American government. Spoiler alert: He was not.

Maybe they confused him with Arthur Miller?

Davidi on Jays: Playing the waivers game

Maybe Frenchy can hook up Burnett with some Delta miles.

Go back to last October and the number reaches 20, making general manager Alex Anthopoulos the undisputed heavyweight champion of the baseball world in bottom-feeding.

“Alex claims everybody,” Baltimore Orioles general manager Dan Duquette said with a hearty laugh…..

While clever from a management perspective, it can be trying for players caught in the cycle, like right-hander Alex Burnett.

Claimed by the Blue Jays from the Minnesota Twins on March 29 and immediately optioned to triple-A Buffalo, he was designated for assignment April 10 when Anthopoulos claimed Casper Wells from Seattle, was claimed by the Orioles on April 12 and immediately optioned to triple-A Norfolk, and recalled Monday by Baltimore.

Forget about things from a career perspective for a minute, and imagine all that personal upheaval in the span of three weeks.

“That’s the biggest part of the whole thing, I had my wife with me in spring training, she’s pregnant, so that made it even worse otherwise she’d be with me right now,” said Burnett. “We had to go to Dunedin and I said, ‘You know what, honey? Everything is crazy right now, go home.’ I didn’t want her flying all over the place with me and moving.

“I had to break a lease in Minnesota because I figured I was going to be there, I had to get out of a lease in Buffalo, I had to get my car shipped from Minnesota to Buffalo, now I have to get it from Buffalo to God knows where right now. Yeah, it’s been a very crazy few weeks.”....

“I think it’s something that should maybe be brought up in the next players’ association meeting. It is a bad situation when it carries on as long as it has for some people.”

Ravens want O’s to move game to accomidate Home opener.

Baltimore Ravens owner Steve Biscotti said his team and the NFL are willing to do whatever it takes to ensure the season opens at M&T Bank Stadium on Thursday, Sept. 5, so it’s up to the Baltimore Orioles to give a little themselves.

“In fairness to Major League Baseball and the Angeloses, we’re trying to dump a pretty big problem on them and we’re asking them to make a lot of concessions that will benefit us and potentially harm them though it doesn’t necessarily harm them,” Bisciotti said, according to the newspaper. “The bottom line is if they wanted to do it, they would find a way to do it. From the Ravens and the NFL standpoint, we’ll do whatever we have to do in order to keep that tradition.”

IATMS: Is Distribution of Wealth a Problem for MLBPA?

Interesting research on the distribution of income in baseball.  67% goes to the top 5% of players.

When disparities such as these exist, it is not evidence of a rational or efficient marketplace, and in the long run it portends volatility.

Murray Chass: FORGET HOF, GO FOR MM

[Marvin] Miller’s lifetime, which lasted 95 years and eight months, ended last Tuesday. If he is elected next year, when he will next be eligible, the election would be a meaningless gesture. There is, however, an idea to honor Miller that would not be meaningless. It comes from a former colleague at The New York Times.

“All teams should wear a black ‘MM’ on uniform sleeves next season,” Ray Corio wrote in an e-mail “in memory of and appreciation for the guy whose impact on the game was as great as Babe or Jackie.” ...

If election had come in a timely manner, I think Miller would have felt honored. I also think he stopped caring about it after his wife, Terry, died three years ago.

Who was this man who arrived at the union in 1966 from the United Steelworkers Union, where he was the chief economist under the noted labor leader David McDonald, and turned the M.L.B.P.A. into a formidable example for all other sports unions to follow and make non-sports unions envious?

This was Marvin Miller: “In the beginning,” said Richard Moss, the union’s general counsel, “Marvin thought it was important to gain credibility, and that’s why we ended up on the top of the Seagram Building.”

This was Marvin Miller: “My first week there, in August 1977,” recalled Donald Fehr, Moss’s successor, “we went to lunch and Marvin said, ‘You know, you have a nice title, general counsel. I have a nice title, executive director. None of that means anything. We’re just staff. The owners care only about the players.”

As the union’s lawyers, Moss and Fehr were Miller’s closest colleagues during his 17 years as executive director. Moss, who worked with Miller in Pittsburgh as a USW lawyer, joined him in New York after Miller rejected the idea of Richard Nixon, then the former vice president, as his general counsel.

While Miller provided the labor expertise, Moss contributed the legal strategy that produced union victories in the Catfish Hunter breach-of-contract and the Messersmith-McNally free-agency grievances.

Fehr, a Kansas City lawyer, met Miller and Moss when they hired him to serve as local counsel in the owners’ futile appeal in Federal District Court of the Peter Seitz decision in Messersmith-McNally. When Moss decided in 1977 to leave the union and become a player agent, Miller hired Fehr to replace him. ...

Moss Klein, a retired baseball writer with the Newark Star-Ledger, commented on Miller’s speaking ability in an e-mail, writing, “I admired the way he could explain the most complicated things so simply, making them so understandable, while Ray Grebey (and others) made the simplest things so complicated and incomprehensible”

As true as these views are, I have to admit that the first time I encountered Miller I had no idea what he was saying.

I was a young reporter with the Associated Press in Pittsburgh in 1962, and I was assigned to cover a news conference at which the steelworkers union would explain terms of the deal that settled its strike against United States Steel.

The chief explainer was a union economist named Miller. After too many questions whose answers from Miller I didn’t really understand and I had no idea how I was going to write my story, I asked a question. I don’t remember what the question was, but Miller answered it in English, not economics-eze, and I and, as it turned out, other reporters were saved.

Time and experience obviously made a difference in Miller’s delivery.

The trait I probably admired most in Miller was his honesty. “Marvin never lied to anyone, especially reporters,” Moss said.

Added Fehr: “It was the way you conducted yourself.  There was never a suggestion that you shouldn’t be honest.”

To this day, I am not aware of ever having been lied to by a union official. I can’t say the same for all of management representatives of the past 50 years or so.

Marvin Miller Dies

Marvin Miller, the first executive director of the MLB Players Association, died this morning at the age of 95, Yahoo’s Jeff Passan reports (on Twitter). Condolences to Miller’s family and the MLBPA.

Crasnick: A triumph of spirit in the face of inoperable brain cancer for MLBPA leader

A clothes rack in Weiner’s office on East 49th Street is testament to his altered stature and the admiration he elicits in baseball circles. In August, Jeff Francoeur and Jeremy Guthrie of the Kansas City Royals thought it might be a nice gesture for the entire team to sign a jersey and send it to the Players Association in support of Weiner. Before long, uniform tops from all the teams began to arrive, and the New York Yankees and Chicago Cubs sent along autographed bats as well. It was reminiscent of the scene from “Rudy” when Notre Dame football players march into coach Dan Devine’s office and drop their game jerseys on his desk, one by one, in support of the never-say-die practice squadder.