A Travesty in Cooperstown

Let's do a mind experiment together. You and I are boxers. I'm a heavyweight and you're a welterweight. We fight only each other. We fight 37 times. You win all 37, by knockout. Which one of us should go to the Hall of Fame?

Sorry to tax your brain. That was a tough one -- at least if you're a Baseball Hall of Fame voter.

Next week, Cooperstown will induct an ineffectual, counter-productive, retrograde Commissioner into its hallowed Hall. Bowie Kuhn spent his time as Commish sticking his finger in the dyke of baseball history while change flowed all around him. As the owners' mouthpiece, he presided over an antiquated and indefensible labor-management model that was roughly akin to serfdom. His attempts to thwart progress at every turn got him steamrolled repeatedly.

Red Smith once wrote "an empty car pulled up and Bowie Kuhn got out." But Kuhn, a Princeton-educated lawyer, was not quite the dolt that Smith made him out to be. He was simply over-matched by his chief tormentor, players union chief Marvin Miller.

Miller and Kuhn went toe-to-toe numerous times from 1969-84, from the strikes of '72 and '81, and the lockout of '76 to the McNally-Messersmith arbitration case, and Miller won every battle. (Smith wrote, of the disastrous [for the owners] 1981 contretemps, "this strike wouldn't have happened if Bowie Kuhn were alive today.") Even when Kuhn's side claimed a rare victory in Curt Flood's reserve clause challenge, Miller out-maneuvered him and defeated the reserve clause anyway.

Over Kuhn's dead body, Miller won for the players an end to the reserve clause, free agency, a hundredfold increase in the highest salaries, arbitration in labor disputes, the right for veteran players to veto trades, a vastly improved pension plan funded largely through television revenue and the use of agents to negotiate individual contracts.

Here's a list of Bowie Kuhn's great innovations: six new franchises, including the Seattle Pilots.

You may not like the gargantuan salaries now commanded by prima donna players, but they are the product, after all, and they have no more rights than any other worker in America.

Nonetheless, next week, the Hall of Fame will once again pass over Miller and instead present a bust of the now-confirmed-dead Kuhn. It is an act of futility, like ignoring Road Runner and electing Wiley Coyote into the Acme Hall of Fame. Cooperstown is poorer for it on both ends of the equation.