The Baseball Lifer
A recognition long overdue for
one of the game’s good stewards
Legendary comedian Groucho Marx once famously quipped, “I don’t want to belong to any club that will accept me as a member.”
Perhaps the most reluctant inductee among the National Baseball Hall of Fame’s 333 members, Marvin Miller, former executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association (1966-1983), gained election to the Hall posthumously.
Miller, who died in 2012 at the age of 95, previously expressed his disdain for the process in a letter to the Baseball Writers’ Association of America after being rejected on a Veterans Committee ballot for the third time, in May of 2008:
“Paradoxically, I’m writing to thank you and your associates for your part in nominating me for Hall of Fame consideration, and, at the same time, to ask that you not do this again,” Miller wrote, adding: “The anti-union bias of the powers who control the Hall has consistently prevented recognition of the historic significance of the changes to baseball brought about by collective bargaining.
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