I saw Neyer’s comments today and I thought it was a disingenuous bit of straw man arguing.  People shouldn’t support Miller because he earned a lot of players (and agents) a lot of money.  People should support Miller because he helped to fundamentally changed the structure of the game.  And it *was* a positive change, no matter how distasteful it might be when free agents leave town for the big money in the big cities.

And don’t tell me that free agent salaries drive ticket prices.  Demand for tickets drives ticket prices.  Revenue drives payrolls.

I certainly think MM deserves the honor, but the final question related to how someone could not support his candidacy.  The answer is that the world outside the 2 leagues has more or less gravitated to a pro-owner, anti-player stance, for reasons that completely escape me.  So long as this is true, the baseball writers, who are the group from which HOF votes come, will toe the line that best keeps their bread well buttered…

I am reasonable?  Dear lord, what has the world come to?

Never mind that apparently I’m being referred to in the same breath as Rob Neyer.  Or at least the same post.

If you want to talk about non-players / non-coaches being inducted into the hall of fame I think Frank Jobe needs to be thrown into the mix.  The guy played a pivotal role in making “Tommy John” surgery a common occurrence in baseball.

The least they could do is re-name the surgery after him, right?

Mostly agree, except on your Toyota analogy. Toyota is credited with inventing Lean Manufacturing and Just In Time Production. Pretty innovative. Heck, those ideas have amazing relevance even in my web startup.

Um, when did Neyer turn into a jerk?  I bet we could actually find the exact day, perhaps four years ago, with research.

  What a f-ckin’ STUPID comparison for anyone who has written about the history of Baseball!

DelMonte just sounds like a run-of-the-mill sportswriter - someone impossible to get annoyed at because there is nothing in that empty little, bitty can.  A maroon. 

  Miller in the HoF this year?  I dunno.  He’s overqualified, so not going in on the first vote seems as much an insult as an honor, especially given the company of the likes of the owners crammed in there.

The comparison of Miller and Boras is problematic thanks to the nature of their roles. Miller’s job was to represent every player in baseball, and by all accounts (except Bowie Kuhn’s) did so with distinction. Scott Boras is an agent to individual players, which means that while positive changes to baseball have been made because of him, they were incidental.

I think Scott Boras has been great for the players in his own right, but I don’t know that I think he should be in the HOF (nor does anyone else, apparently). Miller, on the other hand, is an indelible face in the history of the game.

“I’m all into the free market, but creating a system where anyone gets paid $25 mil to play a game doesn’t have nearly as much impact at the ones listed above.”

What about creating a system where millions of fans pay billions of dollars to just sit around and watch a game?

It’s a simple fact that revenue drives salaries.  Anyone who wants to argue that point should be prepared to demonstrate that ticket prices drop in response to owners cutting payroll.

I’m tired of hearing that players make too much money.  Without free agency, the athletes that we watch play baseball would be playing other sports.  And that’s the fundamental reason why Marvin Miller made baseball a better game.

A better though experiment for Neyer’s point about Boras would be if Boras were actually able to eliminate the draft.  Let’s say that he challenged the draft in court somehow and it was eliminated through judicial action.

Forgetting for a moment the difficulties inherent in this, or the fact that a court could probably not eliminate the draft because it’s part of collective bargaining, would those who support Miller’s candidacy for the Hall (of whom I am one) also support Boras’s?

I don’t know how I’d feel about it.  I’d probably want to see more of the eventual effect over time, but it’s probably a fairly similar case study to what Miller did in the 70s.

There’s no doubt that Miller made everything better for the players. And for the record, I’m not against free agency, and think the Reserve Clause and the anti-trust expemptions were both jokes.

But as I said, Miller made things better for the players. Many of whom don’t care about the game or the fans (you know, the people who make it all possible). What they care about it cashing a paycheck. Some of them were more interested in what thier playoff money was than actually winning.

And for the record, I don’t have anything against anyone cashiing a check for all they can get. I’m poor. I’d like more, myself.

Maybe the players should create their own Hall of Fame and enshrine Miller. I don’t have an issue with that. But someone still has to explain to me how Miller made the “GAME” better. Because in my opinion, he didn’t. And that’s what the Hall should be for.

What’s funny to me, is many of the people advocating Miller go in because some bad commissioners are in are the same names I see commenting that Dawson, Raines, and Blyleven going in would somehow cheapen the Hall. Now that’s funny.

When a union becomes so powerful that they can stop Rodriguez with accepting a trade to the Red Sox for more money (even though he wanted to) or tells Sabatthia that he needs to sign with the Yankees for as much money as he can get (and not necessarily with the team he wanted), then that proves my point.

Miller was good for the players.

How was he good for the game.

And if people want to go with the fame angle, then he should be inducted alongside Rose, the Black Sox, and Ray Chapman.