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Review of Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary

A strong case could be made that a person who never played professional baseball was one of the most influential individuals in the history of that sport. Marvin Miller, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLPBA) from 1966 to 1982, transformed not only the business and economics of baseball but the very nature of how players, owners, management, and fans perceive and relate to one another. Robert F. Burke’s groundbreaking and thoroughly researched study, Marvin Miller, Baseball Revolutionary, is the first full-length biography of the man who once stated that baseball players were “the most exploited group of workers I had ever seen—more exploited than the grape pickers of Cesar Chavez” (100). According to Burke, Miller’s objective as head of the player’s union was “to peacefully compel employers to accept a modern system of profit sharing with their workers” (viii). The result was that players’ salaries escalated radically over the next two highly contentious and litigious decades during which Miller negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement between players and team owners, instituted both a grievance panel and arbitration system for players’ concerns, challenged the reserve clause, initiated two players’ strikes, and ushered in the era of free agency.