Abstract
Few individuals have so fundamentally changed the business of sports as Marvin J. Miller, who served at the helm of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) during the pivotal period of the mid-1960s through the early 1980s. With Miller’s leadership, the MLBPA transformed from a largely ineffective association into one of the most successful labor unions of the second half of the twentieth century. Miller’s tenacity as a negotiator and brilliance as a strategist were chief ingredients in the MLBPA’s achievement of free agency for veteran players through a landmark arbitration decision in late 1975. His skillful organizing was instrumental in a series of coordinated job actions, including the long strike in the summer of 1981 through which the players succeeded in defending the system of free agency they had worked so hard to secure. By helping Major League baseball players to build a strong and well-functioning union, Miller brought sweeping change to both the financial operation and broader cultural position of baseball, and US professional sports more broadly.
Marvin Miller’s critical place in the history of sport deserved the attention of a top-notch biography, and Robert F. Burk was the ideal scholar for the job. His two volumes on the history of labor relations in baseball—Never Just a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball to 1920 and Much More than a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball since 1921—are definitive works. Burk’s biography of Marvin Miller represents another major scholarly contribution, both to the history of sport and the history of the US labor movement. Anyone interested in modern sports unionism will find Burk’s study among the most detailed and nuanced treatments of the day-to-day work of organization, negotiation, and confrontation. Furthermore, readers interested in the history of the US labor movement will discover a great deal in Burk’s well-researched text.
The book consists of 17 short chapters, which are grouped in three parts. The book’s first part (“The Making of a Professional Unionist”) deals with Miller’s upbringing in working-class Brooklyn, his education, and contributions within the US labor movement. Part II (“Baseball Revolutionary”) concerns Miller’s work as executive director of the MLBPA. Part III (“Defender of the Faith”) is a short treatment of Miller’s life in retirement, centering in particular on two ways in which Miller remained in the public eye: as an outspoken critic of increased drug testing in baseball, and as a repeatedly denied candidate for the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
One of the book’s richest contribution is the way it situates Miller’s coming-of-age in the context of the American left of the 1930s and 1940s. While aspects of this part of the book may strike some readers as disconnected from the world of baseball, Burk includes a number of wonderful anecdotes that connect the diamond and the picket line. For example, Marvin Miller and his wife Terry served as nominating delegates for Henry Wallace at the Progressive Party’s 1948 national convention, held at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. Less than two decades later, Shibe Park (by then re-named Connie Mack Stadium) would of course be one of the workplaces that Miller represented in his capacity as executive director of the MLBPA.
Equally excellent is Burk’s detailed account of Miller’s years with the United Steelworkers of America (USW), where he served as chief economist and assistant to the president (David McDonald) during some of the most tumultuous years in the US steel industry. Through his years with the USW he achieved a level of national prominence as an expert in labor–management relations that made him an exceedingly qualified candidate for the new position of executive director of the MLBPA, which he began in the spring of 1966.
Though existing works of scholarship have examined Miller’s years with the MLBPA in great detail, Burk’s biography breaks new ground, thanks to the depth of his source material. Burk draws skillfully upon a series of personal interviews that he conducted with Miller, as well as a range of rich archival materials, to present the most detailed account ever written of this pivotal period in sports history. The reader comes away with both a nuanced sense for how, exactly, Miller and the players went about “revolutionizing” the business of baseball in the 1960s and 1970s, as well as Miller’s own personal experience of the successes and struggles of that era.
Burk could have done more to situate Miller’s life and work within a broader social and political context, particularly in the book’s later chapters. While the book examines a period in the history of Major League Baseball defined by increasing numbers of international players, Burk’s analysis of Miller’s impact on the industry remains a largely national story. Nonetheless, the book stands as an exemplary scholarly biography—one quite worthy of its subject. Scholars and fans alike will benefit from Robert Burk’s study of Marvin Miller for years to come.