The American Baseball Coalition

PlayTheKids · 01-22-2008, 02:12 AM

The man with the cane sat in a chestnut leather chair, thousands of books surrounding him while he looked out the window. There, from high above Park Avenue in Manhattan, he glimpsed forever down the streets, between 40-story complexes ensconsced in bustle.

Well-read, the books ranged from law to history, science to showbiz. He'd lived quite the life, one that culled his broad interests.

He was an all-star athlete growing up, excelling in track and football. A fateful fall in college shattered his spine and that was that. Sports, at least the way he had planned to get there, were no longer an option.

No regrets.

Chubby-faced and balding, he certainly never figured entertainment would be in his future. He couldn't make it on screen, so he rose to the top behind it, chairing Columbia Pictures for several years. It was good work, it made him more wealthy than he ever imagined he'd be. Yet he never loved it and when the chance came to move on to Coca-Cola as Vice Chairman, he took it.

No regrets.

More responsibility and more money. Executive Vice President of the ubiquitous Coca-Cola, he led all of the company's entertainment efforts, right when such a thing became major business for the beverage industry (though, thankfully, a few years after the Michael Jackson/Pepsi fiasco). He laughs when he thinks back on the all the business experience, the huge deals, the top positions at billion-dollar corporations. But when people want to talk to him, those things are never brought up. Nobody cares.

And yet, no regrets.

Except one. Sept. 7, 1992.

He said stepping down rather than suing to keep his spot, and embroiling baseball in litigious wrangling at the top of the game, was "in the best interests of baseball." And he believed it in his heart.

But today, and for many years now, Fay Vincent has known that his resignation - forced as it was - was in no way in the best interests of baseball.

He speaks glowingly about the game, yet catastrophically about the business. Bud Selig - a glorified used car salesman - and Jerry Reinsdorf at the behest of Tribune Co., which didn't want anybody else cutting in on its revenue stream, had forced him out. That was bad enough.

But now the league had implemented so much of what he proposed: realignment, stiffer drug testing, general peace between the owners and union. Sure, the American League still had the DH, but Vincent had learned to live with it.

"A fight based solely on principle does not justify the disruption," he said in his resignation speech. And principled he was. And that is why his decision hurts to this day. For he abandoned principle to keep the peace when his fight was required.

Regret. One simple regret. I should have stayed. I should have led.

He gingerly pushed himself up from his seat, prepared to head to lunch.

"Time for an old friend?" the gravelly voice asked.

"Marvin?" Vincent asked rhetorically. "Of course."

"Good," the man said with a crooked smile. "Because I'm 90, and time is short..."

Vincent looked at Marvin Miller with confused glaze.

"...And I need you."

PlayTheKids · 01-24-2008, 12:58 AM

Vincent's secretary, Ann, had ordered in for the old friends per his request. When a man in his 10th decade alive comes to visit, you alter your plans. When that man was one of the largest contributors to the modern era of the game you cherish, you listen, no matter how wild the idea.

But with Marvin Miller, there was never a wild idea. Everything was thought out, and thought out completely. He was meticulous, he was thorough, and was incredibly bright. And he'd lost none of these despite his age.

He had worked at National War Labor Relations Board, the Machinist Union and the United Auto Workers before becoming lead economist and negotiator for the United Steelworkers union.

But in 1966, Miller eyed the joint holdouts of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale with the Los Angelese Dodgers. Miller would ultimately become head of the MLB Players Association in 1966.

Two years later, he had an agreement in place with owners that raised the minimum player salary to $10,000 from $6,000, the first such increase in more than 20 years. Two years after that, Miller maneuvered arbitration - the taking of disputes to an independent party rather than the owner-friendly commissioner - into the agreement.

But it was his obliteration of the reserve clause, and thus the beginning of free agency, that was Miller's greatest achievement. Players had gone from nonexistent negotiating power to full negotiating power in a decade, all orchestrated by Miller. And the owners, having lost ground in every one of these agreements, viewed Miller as the devil incarnate.

Vincent, on the other hand, was the Miller of baseball's social compass. Concern for the fans, the integrity of the game, "the best interests of baseball." Those were Vincent's concerns.

There was some common financial ground, though. Though a few years after Miller's departure as head of the MLBPA, the collusion scandal of the 1980s - in which MLB owners were found to have conspired to keep salaries from escalating further thanks to Miller's free agency manuevering - was a direct result of his earlier work. Koufax and Drysdale had negotiated in tandem with the Dodgers in '66. Needing their star pitchers to return, the Dodgers handed out the two largest contracts in baseball history at once. So when the CBA came up again, the following clause was entered: ""Players shall not act in concert with other Players and Clubs shall not act in concert with other Clubs."

The players abided by this, but the owners, evidence showed, had not. Three separate cases were ruled on between 1985 and 1989, with the owners losing all three. Near the end of that, Vincent boldly told the owners "The single biggest reality you guys have to face up to is collusion. You stole $280 million from the players, and the players are unified to a man around that issue, because you got caught and many of you are still involved."

The owners paid $280 million to the MLBPA. Vincent had struck a vital blow for the players Miller had so long represented. And their common ground was born.

"Selig's going to be extended, Fay," Miller said with a knowing tone supposing, rightly, Vincent's disgust at this fact. Selig had led the charge to run Vincent out when he had the temerity to push strongly for revenue sharing that, like so much else Vincent stressed would be good - be NECESSARY - for the game's survival, the owners would eventually yield to. They tapped it "competitive balance," and Selig spoke of it as though he'd championed it all along.

Vincent knew better. Miller knew Vincent knew better. He knew that, despite 15 years outside of the game his best friend, Bart Giamatti, had drawn him into officially, Vincent wanted to shout "I told you so," from the mound of each packed stadium.

More than that, though, Miller knew that Vincent wanted in.

kenyan_cheena · 01-24-2008, 02:22 AM

Great start, PTK. I'll be following.

PlayTheKids · 01-24-2008, 08:53 AM

Thanks, KC. Hope some don't mind the history lesson. I just figured we have a lot of younger posters here who may not know about Vincent, and most certainly don't know about Miller. So I needed to establish the link.

PlayTheKids · 02-06-2008, 01:03 AM

Vincent twirled his fork aimlessly, his crusted salmon dangling precariously. His jaw was clenched for a moment before he pointed it at Miller.

"He's a sonuvabitch," Vincent said firmly but calmly. "But he's their sonuvabitch, and they're gonna ride him until he shows signs of running out, then they'll groom a new one in his image."

Miller nodded as he sipped his water. "Now don't you wish you had stayed?"

Vincent sat back and looked at his friend. He set his fork down and wiped his mouth with his napkin.

"I don't wish I stayed, Marvin," Vincent replied. "I wish I hadn't been forced to leave."

Miller sensed a degree of upset from his friend, which was not his intention. "I know you didn't leave of your own accord, Fay," Miller said. "But what I mean is, do you wish now, seeing what he and his puppetmasters have done to the game, that you had fought harder to stay?"

"What was I supposed to do?" Vincent replied, almost weakly. "It was an unwinnable battle, and for me to drag the game through a fight like that..."

Vincent's regret was palpable, his anger muted but visible to Miller. "You weren't wrong, my friend," Miller said knowingly.

"I wanted to fight," Vincent replied. "I knew the direction he would take the sport, the direction the owners would steer the game. Myopic crap, short-term benefits without long-term vision..."

Vincent removed his glasses quickly, for no real reason, before putting them right back on. He stabbed another piece of his lunch, swallowing but not tasting as he shook his head.

"Every damn thing I predicted happened. Drugs, the need for revenue sharing...even though they've botched that, too...it's all come to a head."

Miller removed his own glasses, rubbing them with a handkerchief as he eased back, sensing the time to lob his grenade and see if it detonated.

"In business, as you well know," Miller began, "competition breeds improvement. It makes it necessary. And baseball has never had that."

Vincent looked at Miller, who while looking down was peering through his eyelids to see Vincent's reaction.

"The Pacific Coast League had Williams, Dimaggio, Paul Waner...legendary players," Vincent replied. "And look what happened."

Miller waived his hand dismissively. "PCL was a regional league where the best players were cherry-picked from it," he said. "That's not competition. It's a small monopoly that got swallowed up by a bigger one from a different area."

Vincent shook his head. "The Dodgers and Giants going west killed the PCL."

"Exactly," Miller bellowed. "New competition won out."

Vincent smiled. "That wasn't competition, Marvin. That was a superior product expanding its market to run out an inferior product."

His eyes met his friend's somewhere over the untouched dinner rolls.

"And that's why your plan, whatever it is, can never work."

weidner · 02-06-2008, 10:00 AM

I like where you're going with this. Sounds like it will be a lot of fun. I've always wished there were an alternitive league to the MLB. Keep it up. I'll be following closely.

PlayTheKids · 02-06-2008, 06:05 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by weidner

I like where you're going with this. Sounds like it will be a lot of fun. I've always wished there were an alternitive league to the MLB. Keep it up. I'll be following closely.

Thanks for hopping aboard.

PlayTheKids · 02-09-2008, 10:34 PM

"You know your problem, Fay," Marvin Miller said with a smile. "You've tried to convince yourself you're content."

Vincent smiled back in a degree of awe of his friend. Even at 90, Miller's eyes are as bright as his mind is sharp. He speaks through a narrow mouth, shrunken by a weathered face with wrinkles his smile desperately tries to make up for, and often - such as now - does so successfully.

"That I don't harbor bitterness 15 years later doesn't mean I'm content with how things turned out, Marvin," Vincent responded.

Miller pulled a small tin pillbox from his pocket, popped one in his mouth and drank slowly from his water glass.

"I didn't say you were content," he said matter of factly. "I said you've tried to convince yourself you're content. But you're angry about it, and you can't help but be angry about it."

Vincent laughed as he turned on his heel before looking back at Miller. "And why can't I help it?"

"Because you convinced yourself they couldn't fire you, and then they did, as they had done to all of them before you."

Vincent sat back down and, leaning forward, he clasped his hands on the table. "So now that we've established I'm bitter and angry and screwed up 15 years ago, what is it that you, here at my table today, say you 'need' me for?"

"I need a partner," Miller replied flatly.

"A partner?"

"Consider this," Miller began as he rose from his chair. "Our ideals, our views, used to shape an alternative to Major League Baseball."

Vincent laughed a stunned chuckle. "You want to compete with America's pasttime? A multibillion dollar industry, and you - as financially sharp a man as I've ever encountered - want to compete with it?"

Miller smiled himself and raised his hand slowly, haltingly toward Vincent. "I long said the weakness of the modern players union is because its players have no grasp on what it was like before the union. This is no different. You and I have seen the mistakes, seen the misdirection in the way MLB has gone. We are powerless to fix those errors or turn back the clock, but we are not powerless to use that knowledge to shape something better."

It was clear to Vincent that his friend was completely serious. It was also clear to him that he was completely crazy.

"Even if I agreed with the concept, Marvin," he said, "where would we get players, stadiums...what cities would buy into a losing proposition?"

"It's not a losing..."

"BILLIONS, Marvin," Vincent interjected with a tone as though he was trying to talk Miller off a ledge. "You want to lay a groundwork to be bigger than that..."

But Miller shook his head, waving a finger at Vincent. "I didn't say bigger...I said better."

The men stared at each other briefly before the intercom on Vincent's phone rang. "Mr. Vincent, you need to be uptown in a half hour. Your driver is ready."

"Thank you, Ann," Vincent replied. "Marvin...I..."

"You need to go," Miller said with a smile. He shook Vincent's hand before putting on his overcoat and his hat and heading toward the door. But at the doorway, he stopped and turned to his friend one last time.

"I'm an old man who doesn't have time for hypotheticals, Fay," Miller said with a glint in his eye. "But I meant it when I said I need you."

With that, Miller was gone, and a distracted Vincent tried to recall where he had to be and why.

01-22-2008, 02:12 AM	#1
PlayTheKids Banned Join Date: Oct 2007 Posts: 116	The American Baseball Coalition The man with the cane sat in a chestnut leather chair, thousands of books surrounding him while he looked out the window. There, from high above Park Avenue in Manhattan, he glimpsed forever down the streets, between 40-story complexes ensconsced in bustle. Well-read, the books ranged from law to history, science to showbiz. He'd lived quite the life, one that culled his broad interests. He was an all-star athlete growing up, excelling in track and football. A fateful fall in college shattered his spine and that was that. Sports, at least the way he had planned to get there, were no longer an option. No regrets. Chubby-faced and balding, he certainly never figured entertainment would be in his future. He couldn't make it on screen, so he rose to the top behind it, chairing Columbia Pictures for several years. It was good work, it made him more wealthy than he ever imagined he'd be. Yet he never loved it and when the chance came to move on to Coca-Cola as Vice Chairman, he took it. No regrets. More responsibility and more money. Executive Vice President of the ubiquitous Coca-Cola, he led all of the company's entertainment efforts, right when such a thing became major business for the beverage industry (though, thankfully, a few years after the Michael Jackson/Pepsi fiasco). He laughs when he thinks back on the all the business experience, the huge deals, the top positions at billion-dollar corporations. But when people want to talk to him, those things are never brought up. Nobody cares. And yet, no regrets. Except one. Sept. 7, 1992. He said stepping down rather than suing to keep his spot, and embroiling baseball in litigious wrangling at the top of the game, was "in the best interests of baseball." And he believed it in his heart. But today, and for many years now, Fay Vincent has known that his resignation - forced as it was - was in no way in the best interests of baseball. He speaks glowingly about the game, yet catastrophically about the business. Bud Selig - a glorified used car salesman - and Jerry Reinsdorf at the behest of Tribune Co., which didn't want anybody else cutting in on its revenue stream, had forced him out. That was bad enough. But now the league had implemented so much of what he proposed: realignment, stiffer drug testing, general peace between the owners and union. Sure, the American League still had the DH, but Vincent had learned to live with it. "A fight based solely on principle does not justify the disruption," he said in his resignation speech. And principled he was. And that is why his decision hurts to this day. For he abandoned principle to keep the peace when his fight was required. Regret. One simple regret. I should have stayed. I should have led. He gingerly pushed himself up from his seat, prepared to head to lunch. "Time for an old friend?" the gravelly voice asked. "Marvin?" Vincent asked rhetorically. "Of course." "Good," the man said with a crooked smile. "Because I'm 90, and time is short..." Vincent looked at Marvin Miller with confused glaze. "...And I need you."

01-24-2008, 12:58 AM	#2
PlayTheKids Banned Join Date: Oct 2007 Posts: 116	Vincent's secretary, Ann, had ordered in for the old friends per his request. When a man in his 10th decade alive comes to visit, you alter your plans. When that man was one of the largest contributors to the modern era of the game you cherish, you listen, no matter how wild the idea. But with Marvin Miller, there was never a wild idea. Everything was thought out, and thought out completely. He was meticulous, he was thorough, and was incredibly bright. And he'd lost none of these despite his age. He had worked at National War Labor Relations Board, the Machinist Union and the United Auto Workers before becoming lead economist and negotiator for the United Steelworkers union. But in 1966, Miller eyed the joint holdouts of Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale with the Los Angelese Dodgers. Miller would ultimately become head of the MLB Players Association in 1966. Two years later, he had an agreement in place with owners that raised the minimum player salary to $10,000 from $6,000, the first such increase in more than 20 years. Two years after that, Miller maneuvered arbitration - the taking of disputes to an independent party rather than the owner-friendly commissioner - into the agreement. But it was his obliteration of the reserve clause, and thus the beginning of free agency, that was Miller's greatest achievement. Players had gone from nonexistent negotiating power to full negotiating power in a decade, all orchestrated by Miller. And the owners, having lost ground in every one of these agreements, viewed Miller as the devil incarnate. Vincent, on the other hand, was the Miller of baseball's social compass. Concern for the fans, the integrity of the game, "the best interests of baseball." Those were Vincent's concerns. There was some common financial ground, though. Though a few years after Miller's departure as head of the MLBPA, the collusion scandal of the 1980s - in which MLB owners were found to have conspired to keep salaries from escalating further thanks to Miller's free agency manuevering - was a direct result of his earlier work. Koufax and Drysdale had negotiated in tandem with the Dodgers in '66. Needing their star pitchers to return, the Dodgers handed out the two largest contracts in baseball history at once. So when the CBA came up again, the following clause was entered: ""Players shall not act in concert with other Players and Clubs shall not act in concert with other Clubs." The players abided by this, but the owners, evidence showed, had not. Three separate cases were ruled on between 1985 and 1989, with the owners losing all three. Near the end of that, Vincent boldly told the owners "The single biggest reality you guys have to face up to is collusion. You stole $280 million from the players, and the players are unified to a man around that issue, because you got caught and many of you are still involved." The owners paid $280 million to the MLBPA. Vincent had struck a vital blow for the players Miller had so long represented. And their common ground was born. "Selig's going to be extended, Fay," Miller said with a knowing tone supposing, rightly, Vincent's disgust at this fact. Selig had led the charge to run Vincent out when he had the temerity to push strongly for revenue sharing that, like so much else Vincent stressed would be good - be NECESSARY - for the game's survival, the owners would eventually yield to. They tapped it "competitive balance," and Selig spoke of it as though he'd championed it all along. Vincent knew better. Miller knew Vincent knew better. He knew that, despite 15 years outside of the game his best friend, Bart Giamatti, had drawn him into officially, Vincent wanted to shout "I told you so," from the mound of each packed stadium. More than that, though, Miller knew that Vincent wanted in.

01-24-2008, 02:22 AM	#3
kenyan_cheena Hall Of Famer Join Date: Jul 2004 Location: Sydney, NSW, Australia Posts: 9,037	Great start, PTK. I'll be following.

01-24-2008, 08:53 AM	#4
PlayTheKids Banned Join Date: Oct 2007 Posts: 116	Thanks, KC. Hope some don't mind the history lesson. I just figured we have a lot of younger posters here who may not know about Vincent, and most certainly don't know about Miller. So I needed to establish the link.

02-06-2008, 01:03 AM	#5
PlayTheKids Banned Join Date: Oct 2007 Posts: 116	Vincent twirled his fork aimlessly, his crusted salmon dangling precariously. His jaw was clenched for a moment before he pointed it at Miller. "He's a sonuvabitch," Vincent said firmly but calmly. "But he's their sonuvabitch, and they're gonna ride him until he shows signs of running out, then they'll groom a new one in his image." Miller nodded as he sipped his water. "Now don't you wish you had stayed?" Vincent sat back and looked at his friend. He set his fork down and wiped his mouth with his napkin. "I don't wish I stayed, Marvin," Vincent replied. "I wish I hadn't been forced to leave." Miller sensed a degree of upset from his friend, which was not his intention. "I know you didn't leave of your own accord, Fay," Miller said. "But what I mean is, do you wish now, seeing what he and his puppetmasters have done to the game, that you had fought harder to stay?" "What was I supposed to do?" Vincent replied, almost weakly. "It was an unwinnable battle, and for me to drag the game through a fight like that..." Vincent's regret was palpable, his anger muted but visible to Miller. "You weren't wrong, my friend," Miller said knowingly. "I wanted to fight," Vincent replied. "I knew the direction he would take the sport, the direction the owners would steer the game. Myopic crap, short-term benefits without long-term vision..." Vincent removed his glasses quickly, for no real reason, before putting them right back on. He stabbed another piece of his lunch, swallowing but not tasting as he shook his head. "Every damn thing I predicted happened. Drugs, the need for revenue sharing...even though they've botched that, too...it's all come to a head." Miller removed his own glasses, rubbing them with a handkerchief as he eased back, sensing the time to lob his grenade and see if it detonated. "In business, as you well know," Miller began, "competition breeds improvement. It makes it necessary. And baseball has never had that." Vincent looked at Miller, who while looking down was peering through his eyelids to see Vincent's reaction. "The Pacific Coast League had Williams, Dimaggio, Paul Waner...legendary players," Vincent replied. "And look what happened." Miller waived his hand dismissively. "PCL was a regional league where the best players were cherry-picked from it," he said. "That's not competition. It's a small monopoly that got swallowed up by a bigger one from a different area." Vincent shook his head. "The Dodgers and Giants going west killed the PCL." "Exactly," Miller bellowed. "New competition won out." Vincent smiled. "That wasn't competition, Marvin. That was a superior product expanding its market to run out an inferior product." His eyes met his friend's somewhere over the untouched dinner rolls. "And that's why your plan, whatever it is, can never work."

02-06-2008, 10:00 AM	#6
weidner Minors (Double A) Join Date: Mar 2005 Location: Coleman, Wisconsin Posts: 136	I like where you're going with this. Sounds like it will be a lot of fun. I've always wished there were an alternitive league to the MLB. Keep it up. I'll be following closely.

02-09-2008, 10:34 PM	#8
PlayTheKids Banned Join Date: Oct 2007 Posts: 116	"You know your problem, Fay," Marvin Miller said with a smile. "You've tried to convince yourself you're content." Vincent smiled back in a degree of awe of his friend. Even at 90, Miller's eyes are as bright as his mind is sharp. He speaks through a narrow mouth, shrunken by a weathered face with wrinkles his smile desperately tries to make up for, and often - such as now - does so successfully. "That I don't harbor bitterness 15 years later doesn't mean I'm content with how things turned out, Marvin," Vincent responded. Miller pulled a small tin pillbox from his pocket, popped one in his mouth and drank slowly from his water glass. "I didn't say you were content," he said matter of factly. "I said you've tried to convince yourself you're content. But you're angry about it, and you can't help but be angry about it." Vincent laughed as he turned on his heel before looking back at Miller. "And why can't I help it?" "Because you convinced yourself they couldn't fire you, and then they did, as they had done to all of them before you." Vincent sat back down and, leaning forward, he clasped his hands on the table. "So now that we've established I'm bitter and angry and screwed up 15 years ago, what is it that you, here at my table today, say you 'need' me for?" "I need a partner," Miller replied flatly. "A partner?" "Consider this," Miller began as he rose from his chair. "Our ideals, our views, used to shape an alternative to Major League Baseball." Vincent laughed a stunned chuckle. "You want to compete with America's pasttime? A multibillion dollar industry, and you - as financially sharp a man as I've ever encountered - want to compete with it?" Miller smiled himself and raised his hand slowly, haltingly toward Vincent. "I long said the weakness of the modern players union is because its players have no grasp on what it was like before the union. This is no different. You and I have seen the mistakes, seen the misdirection in the way MLB has gone. We are powerless to fix those errors or turn back the clock, but we are not powerless to use that knowledge to shape something better." It was clear to Vincent that his friend was completely serious. It was also clear to him that he was completely crazy. "Even if I agreed with the concept, Marvin," he said, "where would we get players, stadiums...what cities would buy into a losing proposition?" "It's not a losing..." "BILLIONS, Marvin," Vincent interjected with a tone as though he was trying to talk Miller off a ledge. "You want to lay a groundwork to be bigger than that..." But Miller shook his head, waving a finger at Vincent. "I didn't say bigger...I said better." The men stared at each other briefly before the intercom on Vincent's phone rang. "Mr. Vincent, you need to be uptown in a half hour. Your driver is ready." "Thank you, Ann," Vincent replied. "Marvin...I..." "You need to go," Miller said with a smile. He shook Vincent's hand before putting on his overcoat and his hat and heading toward the door. But at the doorway, he stopped and turned to his friend one last time. "I'm an old man who doesn't have time for hypotheticals, Fay," Miller said with a glint in his eye. "But I meant it when I said I need you." With that, Miller was gone, and a distracted Vincent tried to recall where he had to be and why.