“That Man Miller” & Derek Jeter, Team Owner in the Hall of Fame Together

In Cooperstown, NY last Wednesday afternoon, four new members of the Baseball Hall of Fame’s 2020 class were enshrined in the Hall- a year later than planned due to the Covid pandemic- but since no one was picked for the class of 2021 this “better late, than never” class is what we must cheer.

Two of these new Hall of Famers share a remarkable throughline connecting their lives and careers. The late Marvin Miller, the first leader of baseball’s players union, the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), and regal New York Yankee shortstop Derek Jeter could not have been more dissimilar people. But that Jeter has able to make the transition from player to owner of the Miami Marlins, one of just 30 MLB franchises, now valued in the hundreds of millions of dollars, in the league he used to ply his trade as a player is a testament success and strength of the union Miller founded and the battles he waged on behalf of baseball’s players before Jeter was even born.

Miller, who was born in 1917, was 67 years old, a veteran of decades of labor-management battles with the United Steelworkers Union, where he rose to serve as chief economist, and had already served nearly eight years as the first head of baseball’s fledgling players union when Jeter was born in 1974. Jeter was named after a flashy and popular hockey star of the time named Derek Sanderson. By the time young Derek Sanderson Jeter was ready for Little League baseball, Miller had led his union out on strikes in 1972, 1980 and again in 1981. The strike in 1972 was the first significant labor work stoppage in American sports and the 1981 strike cost two months of that season. Miller and the union had also endured management lockouts in 1973 and 1976.

Baseball, the so-called “National Pastime,” lost its innocence to a degree during Miller’s time as union leader. There was no doubt that during Miller’s tenure on the labor parapet that baseball shifted from pastime to business, and a big one at that. From Curt Flood, who bravely challenged baseball’s reserve clause, to prevent being traded like property to another team and city after his contract had already expired, all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court; to Andy Messersmith whose demand for a no trade clause led to true free agency in baseball achieved through labor arbitration; to strikes and lockouts that gained meaningful changes in governance of the sport and player benefits and culminated in 1994’s players’ strike that successfully opposed the imposition of a salary cap; to billion dollar collusion cases against owners; Miller was at the forefront of creating a new reality for players. Documentarian Ken Burns described this new reality in his landmark PBS series, Baseball, as ending “the Plantation.”

But when one thinks of Miller’s accomplishments it is impossible to not see Jeter, the owner, at the end of that long journey. Ballplayers weren’t supposed to achieve generational wealth, they weren’t supposed to achieve a voice in governance of their game, they were supposed to take their lot and like it, living out a childhood fantasy and that millions would gladly trade places with them to enjoy. Miller changed that and he made baseball’s owners richer, extraordinarily richer in the process. Sure, the owners had to shell out to pay the very high salaries of players like Jeter in the tens of millions annually, but the value of their franchises and enterprises increased exponentially.

I once asked Miller, who died in 2012, if the owners understood that he made them richer than ever before?

“The smart ones did,” was his reply.

For an inkling of how much richer owners got and how much more valuable their franchises became, consider this anecdote. In 1972, the New York Yankees, at the time owned by CBS, facing significant costs for upkeep and renovation to their stadium and essentially gave Yankee Stadium, “the House that Ruth Built,” to the City of New York. CBS sold the Yankees- for a loss, unimaginable today- the following year to an upstart Cleveland shipbuilder with a Germanic surname, George Steinbrenner. Compare that to the new Yankee Stadium, built and owned by the Steinbrenner family, which cost more than a billion dollars to build less than forty years later. The new Yankee Stadium may not precisely be the house that Derek Jeter built, but the multibillion-dollar franchise, recently valued by Sportico at $6.75 billion dollars, and its billion-dollar pleasure dome are surely end points to the revolution Miller began when he started demanding and working to ensure that players mattered, their play had value, and they deserved a fairer share, back in the late 1960s and early 1970s. So too, is Derek Jeter, owner. Miller wasn’t in Cooperstown in the flesh to take his well-deserved bow with Jeter, last week, but he sure was in spirit. “That man, Miller,” as infuriated owners and fans called him, was one for the ages, now he is enshrined for the ages in the Hall of Fame.