Mike Vaccaro

Mike Vaccaro

MLB

A-Rod commits his gravest sin yet

The last time I talked to Marvin Miller, 18 months before he died in November 2012, a lot of the old fight was absent from his voice — he was 93, after all — but none of the prevailing wisdom and humor. That was there to the end.

“Here’s the one thing you need to remember,” he said. “As long as you believe in the issue in front of you, and you’re willing to fight for that truth, then everything else is just trivia. Did I like everything I ever saw or heard from the baseball players I worked with? That was besides the point.”
He laughed a raspy laugh.

“If I only wanted to be liked, and if I only wanted to be around other people who were easy to like,” he said, “then I would have become a teacher.”

You would think even an old labor club fighter like Miller would’ve had a few moments of uncomfortable pause Monday when, if nothing else, he’d seen the heading of the complaint filed in the U.S. District Court, Southern District of New York:

ALEXANDER EMMANUEL RODRIGUEZ, Plaintiff
v.
MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL, OFFICE OF THE COMMISSIONER and MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL PLAYERS ASSOCIATION, Defendants.

Alexander Emmanuel Rodriguez has earned, to date, $353,416,280 strictly from playing baseball, his salaries in full from the Seattle Mariners, Texas Rangers and New York Yankees.

It is a figure even someone with the unparalleled vision of Marvin Miller could never have dreamt up back in 1967, when he left the steelworkers union and within a year had hammered out his first collective bargaining agreement for the MLBPA with baseball, the core of which raised the minimum salary for a major leaguer from $7,000 to $10,000 ($69,781.14 in today’s dollars).

In many ways, Alex Emmanuel Rodriguez is the living embodiment, the final evolution, of everything Miller fought for in the days when the owners treated him as a gnat, trying to ignore him, hoping he’d just go away. Rodriguez is the yield of all those work stoppages, all those strikes and lockouts, all the contentious meetings across the last five decades.

And it wasn’t just Miller who made this happen. It was a few thousand ballplayers over the years who forfeited paychecks in the name of the greater good, who had to endure the ironic derision of being “greedy” by much of the general public, especially in the earlier strikes, people unable to fathom how athletes could walk out on their jobs.

And remember: Baseball is the one game that has forever shown rank-and-file unity. Football players, the second time they struck, wound up running across picket lines as if they were being chased by pitchforks and shotguns. A lot of hockey players and basketball player sought financial refuge overseas, letting others fight their labor battles for them.

Baseball players?

Not one of them ever crossed — and when scabs replaced them in 1995, there were the same hard feelings directed at them as any Teamster or iron worker has ever sent to a replacement worker. Fans may have hated them for it, but baseball players really did embrace the brethren of their union activity. Because they knew they were a part of something bigger. Because while Rodriguez wantonly claims he’s fighting this one-man fight for “the kids who come after me,” the MLBPA members really DID do that.

Did that for kids like Alex Emmanuel Rodriguez.

Who sued them Monday.

It is fine to defend Rodriguez’ decision to round up the usual suspects and drag them into the muck with him, to try and bring down Bud Selig and Rob Manfred and Anthony Bosch and everyone else who, in his fevered mind, had it in for him. At this point, he has little to lose. And maybe in its desperation, Team A-Rod figures, hey, what’s one more defendant atop an already crowded pile?

But this is where seamy become unseemly. Where it is clear that Rodriguez has no desire to even spare the operation that allowed him to earn $353,416,280 before age 40, whose protocols of arbitration have saved and earned past union members hundreds of millions of dollars in showdowns with MLB brass.

Where he has such little shame that, in the complaint, he actually slanders a dead man. “His gratuitous attacks on our former Executive Director, Michael Weiner, are inexcusable,” Tony Clark, the PA’s new chief — and a former Yankees teammate of A-Rod’s — said.

They are. But it is right, when reading even those deplorable comments, to remember Miller again: That’s beside the point.

Although you have to wonder if, if he’s watching Alex Rodriguez now, Marvin Miller doesn’t shake his head and mumble to himself: “Maybe I should’ve been a teacher.”