Marvin Miller > You | It's About The Money

Marvin Miller was at an NYU Law event along with some other very big names you might be familiar with from the MLBPA and, man, does the man still have it or what? Here’s a sampling of the bombs he was throwing:

“Let’s take chief executive officers of important corporations, or the stock exchange or Wall Street firms,” he said. “The typical way that compensation is set is for the board of directors, most of whom if not all of whom have been appointed directly by the CEO, decide what the CEO’s salary should be, or they have a committee, a compensation committee composed of board members.

“The first thing about that is that here you have a direct conflict of interest, because sitting on a board are executives of other corporations, and what they are doing is adding ammunition to their own quest for higher salaries. And it’s such an obvious conflict of interest that it’s awful. Of course they’re going to vote for higher salaries.”

[...]

He then compared the system to baseball, where the average salary on opening day this year was $3.4 million and the Yankees’ Alex Rodriguez topped players at $30 million.

“There always has been and is a rule that no contract of a player is valid unless it is signed by the franchise owner or somebody designated by the franchise owner in his place,” Miller said. “In other words, no salary is put on paper and becomes valid until the man who is going to pay for it, the owner of the franchise, has signed the contract. A better check and balance you can’t find anywhere.”

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Miller, who turned 95 on April 14, needed a cane to walk to the front of the room. He was especially feisty in discussing the first baseball strike, over pension benefits. It led to the cancellation of 86 games and was the first of eight work stoppages through 1995, including a 7½-month strike that wiped out the 1994 World Series.

He said not enough attention has been focused on three decisions by arbitrators that found owners conspired against signing free agents following the 1985, 1986 and 1987 seasons. Management settled the cases in 1990 for $280 million.

“They put the Black Sox scandal into infancy,” Miller said. “This was really a scandal of major proportion and to this day it hasn’t been treated as such or written about or really researched at any time. It’s kind of shocking when you think about it.”

[...]

Of Landis, he said “later it was felt (he) was clearly a member of the Ku Klux Klan.” Jackie Robinson didn’t break baseball’s color barrier until 1947, 2½ years after Landis left baseball.

There isn’t any evidence that Landis was actually a member of the Klan, but he was a pretty staunch racist and one the main movers behind making sure baseball remained segregated, so I’m not going to get too bent out of shape over whether or not Landis technically associated with the KKK. Either way, if I live to be 95 years old, I can only hope that I’m half as awesome as Marvin Miller still is.