King Kaufman's Sports Daily

Bowie Kuhn in, Marvin Miller snubbed. The baseball Hall of Fame embarrasses itself. Plus: Evel Knievel.

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Dec. 4, 2007 | The Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y., is a great museum and research institution. The least interesting room in the joint is the actual hall containing the plaques of the enshrined, of the greats, the near greats and, starting next summer, the late Bowie Kuhn.

That room keeps getting less and less interesting. It's missing Pete Rose and Buck O'Neil, and in a few years it'll start being notably absent some deserving players who happened to be among the few who either got caught taking or were widely assumed to have taken steroids, thus depriving them of the chance to join the various and sundry users already honored, not to mention scoundrels like Tom Yawkey and Ty Cobb.

The hall also continues to ignore the two nonparticipants who have had the greatest impact on the game in the last half century, Marvin Miller, the first executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, and statistical analyst Bill James. James wasn't considered in the voting announced Monday. Miller, 90, was snubbed Monday, kept out in a classic stacked election.

Kuhn, who died in March, was elected along with former Dodgers owner Walter O'Malley, early 20th-century Pittsburgh Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss, and former managers Dick Williams and Billy Southworth. Of those elected, only Williams is alive. All but Kuhn had strong cases for enshrinement, though we'll leave them to others to discuss.

They were voted in by the latest iteration of the Veterans Committee. The last version, consisting of every living Hall of Famer, never let anyone else into the club, so it was revamped into 12-member panels that separately consider players, managers and umpires, and executives and pioneers.

That was too bad for Miller, who had gone from being named on 44 percent of ballots in 2003 to being named on 63 percent in the last election earlier this year. The cutoff for election was 75 percent.

The new executive/pioneer panel was made up of seven people connected with management as owners or executives, along with three writers and two former players. Candidates needed nine votes. Miller, the greatest foe management ever had, never had a chance. He got three.

"Because he was the players' voice, and represented them vigorously, Marvin Miller was the owners' adversary," Donald Fehr, the players association chief since 1985, said in statement. "This time around, a majority of those voting were owner representatives, and results of the vote demonstrate the effect that had."

Any institution that claims to honor baseball's greats that votes Bowie Kuhn in on the same day it leaves Marvin Miller out deserves to be ignored. At least it's still a hell of a museum.

Next page: Bowie Kuhn, reactionary stuffed shirt. Plus: Evel Knievel's painful legacy