The Early Bird at the Winter Meetings
Posted by Sean Forman on December 7, 2009
Gary Gillette of the Baseball Early Bird is covering the Winter Meetings, and has filed his first report. You can get the Early Bird every morning via e-mail. It includes trivia and news and notes from yesterday in baseball. Give it a look.
At 10 a.m. today in Indianapolis, the Hall of Fame announced the results of the two Veterans Committees balloting for the class of 2010. One panel was considering the qualifications of managers and umpires, the other the qualifications of executives and pioneers.
The 16-member committee voting on managers and umpires elected umpire Doug Harvey and manager Whitey Herzog to the Hall of Fame. Only one member failed to cast a vote for the 31-year veteran umpire Harvey. Herzog received 14 of the 16 possible votes. Manager Danny Murtaugh and umpire Hank O'Day each were named on eight ballots. No other candidate received more than three votes.
On the other slate composed of executives and pioneers, a completely indefensible result saw no one get selected for immortality--including Marvin Miller. Former Detroit Tigers owner John Fetzer received eight of the 12 possible votes, falling one short of the 75% needed for election. Miller and former Yankees' owner Jacob Ruppert each received seven votes, falling two short. Former Kansas City Royals owner Ewing Kauffman, who was the holdover candidate with the most support in the last election, received six votes. No other candidate received as many as three votes.
Each committee had 10 names on its ballot. The most interesting and controversial nominee was Miller, pioneering leader of the Major League Baseball Players Association. The election of former commissioner and Miller nemesis Bowie Kuhn two years ago--while Miller failed to get even half of the votes he needed--caused many observers to rightly decry the whole process as biased in favor of owners and executives and biased against labor. Miller himself asked publicly not to be placed on any future ballots.
Nonetheless, Miller's name appeared on the ballot again, giving the Hall of Fame a chance to demonstrate that it is independent of Major League Baseball by making the painfully obvious choice of immortalizing Marvin Miller. The Hall failed again, confirming the opinions of many who feel that the institution has become irrelevant.
The idea that Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, whose muddled and mostly incompetent leadership severely damaged the game, is enshrined in Cooperstown while Miller is not is, frankly, a complete joke. Miller is the pioneer who for more than a decade out-negotiated and out-thought Kuhn, dragging the National Pastime and its recalcitrant commissioner and owners into the 20th century against their lordly will.
Despite the tired complaints of the old-line, hard-line owners that still hate Miller and his legacy, the game is far better off for the changes he and the Players Association he so ably led wrought in the 1970s and 1980s. As with the non-election of Buck O'Neil in 2006, the result of all the Hall's preening and posturing has been another travesty of justice and a grievous insult to the game's history.