The Hall of Fame continued its annual exercise in exclusion today, as the Committees on Executives and Pioneers and on Managers and Umpires announced the selections of two deserving candidates, Whitey Herzog and Doug Harvey, and continued its petty and vindictive rejection of Marvin Miller.
The category is “Executives and Pioneers.” Who is a more important pioneer in changing the business of baseball, the core relations between players and owners, than Miller? For 100 years, owners and management held all the cards, and Miller was the man, the pioneer, most responsible for the fundamental shift that forever changed the bargaining structure.
And the committee, stacked with too many former and current baseball executives to overcome the former players and media members who pushed and voted for Miller’s inclusion, came up short again.
Insight into this oversight comes quite accidentally from the veteran baseball writer Tracy Ringolsby, now of FoxSports.com. He concluded today’s article, which was uncharacteristically replete with typos and misspellings, by listing Ewing Kauffman, Gene Autry, Sam Breadon and Bob Howsam as among the committee members, rather than candidates.
Which would explain a lot, as all of those gentlemen are, of course, dead at the present time.