Finding the Gaps: A Plea for Help with a Chronology of Baseball and Labor

Marvin Miller, the first executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, died late last year at the age of 95. A few months before his death, Miller delivered a long, in-depth, and interesting final speech at the NYU Center for Labor & Employment Law about his career and the union he helped to establish. The speech was followed by comments from a panel of experts (Robert Boland, Murray Chass, Charles Korr, Richard Moss, and Michael Weiner) moderated by Arthur R. Miller.

The NYU Journal of Legislation & Public Policy is going to publish the whole thing. I’ve drafted an introduction that’s supposed to put Miller’s speech in context: It is a chronology-with-commentary-and-footnotes of labor-management relations in major-league baseball from the beginning (post-Civil-War) to today. There are some new (or at least very obscure) tidbits, such as the role that a vaudevillians’ union played in frustrating an effort by an early ballplayers’ union to affiliate with the American Federation of Labor, and an inconsistency between Justice Harry Blackmun’s public and private views of a factual predicate for his opinion for the Supreme Court in the Flood v. Kuhn case. There are also some events and characters that will be familiar to any reader with an interest in labor law or baseball.

What I am looking for is advice on additions and subtractions -- What is missing, who is missing, and what and who should be made to be missing? And what should I be saying about them that I haven’t? Please do not be shy. It is a rough draft and my skin is thick. And I have no doubt that some of you know a great deal about this subject that I do not.