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

Hardcover. Condition: New. Dust Jacket Condition: New. 430 pages. From Publishers Weekly-" 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 ballplayers who made sacrifices for their union. A top sportsbook. Photos not seen by PW. Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc. From Kirkus Reviews, July 1 (the pub date of the very special text at hand) will mark the 25th anniversary of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Miller, the first executive director of what became the first bona fide union in professional sports, takes the occasion to provide some brutally frank and immensely engrossing perspectives on the revolution he helped unleash in the national pastime. With an uncredited assist from Allen Barra (a Village Voice columnist), the author unsentimentally recalls a turbulent era during which club owners lost a protracted battle to retain the reserve rule (which effectively bound players to one team in perpetuity), thereby obliging them to bid for the services of erstwhile chattels as free agents or deal through impartial arbitrators. Without understating his own pivotal role, Miller attributes many gains won by players to the recalcitrant stupidity of owners and their minions, including commissioners. "