A Whole Different Ball Game: The Sport and Business of Baseball

For more than a century the owners of baseball franchises conducted their business like feudal barons, with the players in the role of serfs. This situation began to change in 1966, when the Major League Baseball Players Association was formed and Miller, who had been the chief economist and assistant to the president of the steel-workers union, became its first executive director. As he notes here, he saw through the hyperbole of the club owners, including the assertions that the commissioner was more than a spokesman for management and that change would spell the destruction of the game. By the time he left the job in 1982, Miller had been instrumental in virtually ending the system that bound an athlete to one team forever and in raising salaries enormously. The author is not modest in paying tribute to himself, but he is also generous in his comments about the ball players who made sacrifices for their union. A top sports book. Photos not seen by PW. (July)