If this were an Internet version of the old television show “This Week in Baseball,” it would feature only two stars, Joe Torre and Jay McGwire. Jay McGwire? Yes, he’s Mark’s younger brother, and in trying to peddle an outrageous book, he has done Mark the kind of favor Brian McNamee has done for Roger Clemens; Kirk Radomski has done for dozens of players, including Andy Pettitte, and Jose Canseco has done for McGwire and others. With friends or brothers like these, who needs enemies?

Torre, on the other hand, has only himself to blame for planting his feet in his mouth, and boy did he plant them deep. Torre, with help from a co-author, has published an outrageous book.

When news of Torre’s new book first erupted last weekend, I initially decided I would not write about it. I’m not in the practice of selling books for misguided authors. But then I saw something that got my attention and changed my mind.

It was an interview with Torre’s co-author, Tom Verducci of Sports Illustrated, and it appeared on the magazine’s Web site, apparently aimed at justifying the book.

“Anybody who knows Joe, especially during his time in New York, knows he’s a very honest man and he is very honest in the pages of this book,” Verducci said.

Joe Torre is not an honest man. I have known that since the night in 1996 when he blurted what I took to be his true feelings about baseball writers.

Torre had long been a favorite of writers. He was friendly, easy to approach and talk to and helpful. I had long had a good relationship with him and at times went beyond the question-and-answer pattern of writers’ relationships with managers.

I was always interested in learning what I could of a manager’s philosophy and his approach to the job and would ask questions to elicit information that reflected those aspects of the job. Torre easily answered the questions, and I appreciated and enjoyed our conversations.

Then one night at Yankee Stadium in September 1996 the routine failed. The Yankees, in first place by four games over Baltimore, split a doubleheader with the Orioles, losing the second game when Mariano Rivera, not yet the closer, gave up three runs in the eighth inning on hits to four of the five batters he faced.

Well after the game, I asked Torre a question about strategy based on a development in the game. He could have answered it the way he had answered similar questions previously. He could have said he didn’t feel like talking about it at that moment. He could have said nothing. He chose none of the above.

“You don’t know shit about baseball,” he growled, sounding more like Billy Martin than the man I thought was Torre.

Had he stopped there, I would have taken his remark as a personal attack, but it wouldn’t have been the first time I heard such things from managers. But he didn’t stop there.

“None of you guys know shit about baseball,” he added in the same brusque tone.

His comment was no longer aimed at me alone. It was an indictment of the entire baseball press corps. It was an indictment of every writer who covered the Yankees and covered Torre and may have covered Torre through his then 15-year career.

Here was a manager who for all of those years had feigned a certain attitude toward writers that had now been exposed as phony. A person can’t have any regard for people whom he sees as knowing nothing about the job he and they are doing.

It was a stunning revelation. Torre had no visible reason to be upset that night, a reason that would have prompted his outburst. It wasn’t as if the tough loss imperiled the Yankees’ position in the division race. They had a four-game lead with only 10 games to play. The loss did not threaten to affect the outcome of the race or the team’s season.

Torre, however, never acknowledged his unusual response, never said he was having a bad night or had a bad headache. His statement stood, and from that moment forward, I looked at him differently, watched and listened to the way he spoke with reporters in group interview sessions before or after games and could only think he was wearing a mask that served as a barrier that shielded the real Torre from the couple of dozen or more reporters and columnists who surrounded him in the dugout or crammed into his office to hear.

I was not surprised in the fall of 2007 when he rejected the Yankees’ contract offer for one year and success-based incentive bonuses, saying the offer insulted him and he did not need incentives to do his job when he had accepted success-based incentives in previous contracts with the Yankees.

In the Internet interview about the Torre book, Verducci also said, “People also know Joe Torre doesn’t go around ripping people…”  I know Joe Torre, and I know that one night early in his Yankees’ tenure he ripped people, the writers who cover him.

As for the book, it has been the most popular subject for reporters and columnists the past week. The best column I have read was written by Mike Vaccaro of the New York Post. Questioning Torre’s wisdom in writing the book, Vaccaro wrote, “Why would you justify all the sinister things your enemies always hinted about you: that you were a champion grudge-holder, that the disparity between public pied piper and private grouch was considerable, that you were someone who’d do just about anything for a buck?”

Torre, who earned $16.5 million from his last contract with the Yankees, did not need the money, which has been estimated at $1.5 million to $2 million. Why, then, did he do the book? The Yankees’ treatment of him, offering a one-year contract, offended him so much that he was going to get even.

Jay McGwire apparently felt the same way in trying to sell a book that featured his older brother. Jay, the youngest of five sons of John (a retired dentist) and Ginger McGwire, is estranged from Mark, though no one has said why.

When Jay was a young boy, according to a family friend, a BB ricocheted off a rock and struck him in the eye, impeding his athletic career. Besides Mark’s career in baseball, Dan, the second youngest, was a National Football League quarterback for five years.

Jay became a bodybuilder and at one time had a gym. In his book proposal, according to published reports, Jay turned his baseball-slugging brother onto performance-enhancing drugs in 1994.

“I became the first person to inject him, like most first-timers he couldn’t plunge in the needle himself. Later a girlfriend injected him,” Jay wrote in the proposal for a book he titled, “The McGwire Family Secret: The Truth about Steroids, a Slugger and Ultimate Redemption.”

In Canseco’s first book he wrote that he got McGwire started on performance-enhancing drugs in 1988, but Jay McGwire disputes that tale. Why is he trying to sell the book idea, other than for money, of course?  

“My bringing the truth to surface about Mark is out of love,” Jay wrote. “I want Mark to live in truth to see the light, to come to repentance so he can live in freedom — which is the only way to live.”

In telling his brother’s story, Jay is following the lead of others who have turned friends and teammates onto steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs, then told about their use for the sellers’ own benefit – to sell books and make money or to stay out of jail.

McGwire and Canseco fall into the first category, Radomski and McNamee the second.

Without Radomski, George Mitchell would not have had a report. Of the 90 or so players named in the report, all but a few came from Radomski. They had been clients of his steroids distribution business, and he fed the names to Mitchell because the government told him that was his way of staying out of prison.

Like Canseco has done and Jay McGwire hopes to do, Radomski has written a book about his escapades. In a recent Internet interview, the former Mets’ clubhouse attendant said he wrote his book because “my side of the story needs to be out there.” Nonsense. His side of the story has been “out there” for a year.  He told it to Mitchell by squealing on his customers.

Radomski was sentenced to five years probation after pleading guilty to distributing steroids and laundering money. McNamee wasn’t sentenced to anything because he was never charged with anything. He was able to avoid charges by cooperating with authorities and testifying honestly about his involvement with performance-enhancing drugs in baseball.

He has become entangled in a lawsuit filed by Clemens for defamation of character, but McNamee’s tale of injecting Clemens with performance-enhancing drugs has jeopardized Clemens’ freedom and his chances of being elected to the Hall of Fame.

It’s impossible to feel sorry for any of them, dealers or customers, but you have to wonder about the deal and squeal guys.

You have to wonder, too, about Torre. He might have added a few dollars to his bank account with his new book, but he didn’t enhance his reputation. Actually, the best story I have heard about the book isn’t about Torre. It’s about the newspaper competition to be the first to report the book’s contents.

The New York Post and the Daily News had the story first, but the New York Times belatedly discovered it could have been first. The book had been sitting on a desk in the newspaper’s cultural news department for a week with nothing being done with it. Come to think of it, that’s what the book deserved to have done with it.

 

Frank Coonelly has been given a mandate to manufacture miracles. He was hired a year ago as the president of the Pittsburgh Pirates, a team that hasn’t had a winning season since 1992, and one does not seem to be coming in the foreseeable future.

The 48-year-old Coonelly is operating from a unique perspective. He didn’t come to the Pirates from a front office job with another team. His baseball experience came in the commissioner’s office as general counsel in the labor relations department. He negotiated collective bargaining agreements and guided clubs in their decisions on salaries they should pay players.

Having worked in that capacity, he would seem to have a militant stance on players’ salaries and the team’s payroll. But in discussing that aspect of a winning team, Coonelly offered a stunning view of his job.

“I’ve heard from some fans about their frustration over the lack of success on the field,” he said. “One of the things I felt I needed to do when I first came here — and there are some people I haven’t quite convinced yet — I had to dispel the notion that we can’t win because our league doesn’t have a salary cap. That’s hogwash. I couldn’t say that 10 years ago. But I have evidence that it’s hogwash.”

For Coonelly to have made such a statement when he worked in the commissioner’s office would have been heretical, not to say suicidal, because he would have been undermining the company line. Baseball was shut down for the last two months of the 1994 season and the World Series was canceled because of a labor fight over a payroll cap.

“Previous management trumpeted the fact that we need a salary cap for the Pirates to be successful,” Coonelly said. “I don’t believe that. The system can work in small and mid-market towns. We need to work harder, make good decisions. We can’t afford to make mistakes. We have to be most efficient in by building our ball club. I don’t use that as an excuse and I try to convince fans that we can do it.”

“Ten, 15 years ago, I may not have been able to say this. Our record in baseball at that time in having low-revenue clubs be successful was poor, but it is no longer true and we can’t use it as an excuse. As an architect of the system, I can’t blame the system for the problems here.”

And what, for him, is the difference between then and now? “I had a different boss and a different charge,” he said. “My charge here is clear.”

Which is why Coonelly is prepared to go against another part of the system he helped create. In an effort to curtail the large bonuses paid to draft choices, the commissioner’s office created a slotting system by which it would establish bonus levels based on the slots in which players were drafted. Coonelly had an integral role in setting the bonuses, and clubs were expected to adhere to the stipulated bonuses. However, clubs often ignore the slot recommendations so they can sign a draft choice, and now the Pirates have become one of those teams.

“There was some evidence that before we got in here some selections were made for safer picks who were easier signs and had easier representatives,” Coonelly said. “We came in here and said we would not do that. We’d be aggressive in the draft, take the best player available, and we did that with Pedro Alvarez last year. We paid guys well over slot. If we value a player over slot, we’ll pay over slot.”

Coonelly is confident the Pirates can change their direction because he has seen other low-revenue clubs, Minnesota and Oakland in recent years and Tampa Bay last year – become competitive. None has yet to win a World Series, but a team has to have a winning record before it can win a World Series.

“You can develop good players as Minnesota and Oakland have,” Coonelly said. “You have to make good decisions. And you better be prepared, as Minnesota has been, to have players like Torii Hunter and Johan Santana, leave. The draft is absolutely critical to our success. It may not be critical to some higher-revenue clubs, but we’re not in that market. We need to be successful in the draft and in Latin America and other markets.”

Toward that goal, the Pirates have stepped into the 21^st Century, building an academy in the Dominican Republic, as other teams, such as the Mets and the Yankees, have done. In the 1950s and 60s, the Pirates had good scouting in Latin countries; the name Roberto Clemente comes to mind. But that is ancient history.

In Pittsburgh, Steelers’ Envy

The Pittsburgh Steelers will play in their seventh Super Bowl next Sunday and have a chance to win their sixth, which would be more than anyone else has won. The Dallas Cowboys and the San Francisco have also won five.

The Pittsburgh Pirates have won five World Series. Should the Steelers lose to Arizona, they will match the Pirates’ World Series record of 5-2.

The Pirates’ appearances in the World Series, however, have been spread out far more than the Steelers’ Super Bowl participation. The Pirates played in the first World Series in 1903, meaning they have played in seven World Series in 106 years, and haven’t played in it since 1979. The Steelers are playing in the Super Bowl for the seventh time in 35 years.

Only the Yankees, the Cardinals, the Red Sox, the Athletics, and the Dodgers (the last two in two cities) have won more World Series than the Pirates, but no team has had more consecutive losing seasons than the Pirates. When the Pirates finish the coming season with a losing record – and they surely will – they will leave the 1933-48 Philadelphia Phillies behind and stand alone with 17 successive losing seasons.

This is the disaster Frank Coonelly inherited a year ago when he was hired as the club president.

“We came into a situation where this team did not have enough good players;” Coonelly said. “We had to work very hard to secure more good players and players who we could develop and retain as long as we can.”

The Pirates haven’t recorded a winning record since 1992. There are teen-age fans in Pittsburgh who have not witnessed a Pirates team finish a season with more wins than losses, or even as many wins as losses.

“I think there are some fans who think about it all the time,” Sally O‘Leary said of the losing streak. O’Leary worked in the public relations department when the Pirates won the World Series in 1971 and ‘79 and now runs the team’s alumni association. “They just keep hoping that this year maybe is the one we can turn it around. There’s always a loyal group that has hope something better can happen. I’m like a lot of fans. I’m waiting for that.”

Building a good baseball team is more difficult than building a good football team because football teams have the advantage of watching players develop in college and selecting them only when they have matured through three or four years of intense college competition. Baseball teams draft players out of college more than they used to, but they still scout 16-year-old kids, especially in Latin America, and have to decide which ones will be potential major leaguers in five to eight years.

Because of their consistently low finishes the Pirates have had high draft picks, but they usually squandered their advantage by poor scouting and selecting or refusal to pay the going rate. With teams like the Pirates, good management is essential, but the Pirates have had poor management for many years.

The Steelers have been a model of consistency when it comes to good management. They have lost good players through free agency because they didn’t want to pay them, but they have replaced them and remained competitive. Coonelly does not begrudge them their success.

“We applaud the Steelers,” he said. “It is a testament to stability in ownership and stability in implementing a vision and a plan. We applaud it and rejoice with the rest of Pittsburgh in their success. We believe we’re implementing the same type of vision. Management of a sports team requires a vision and a plan and having the dedication to see that plan through. The Steelers are an example of what a team can do.”

The Steelers, he added, have made the “tough decisions that are consistent with building winning teams. Some of the decisions they made were not popular, but they were carrying out a consistent plan.”

Some, if not many, people in Pittsburgh are skeptical about Coonelly’s ability to back his words with substance. He came to the Pirates with no front office experience, and he hired a general manager, Neil Huntington, who basically had no front office experience.

“Some people in the front office don’t feel he’s a baseball front office man,” said a person close to the Pirates. “He hasn’t had that experience. They’ve hired 18 ticket salesmen working on commission only. They’re spending a lot of money for office space. A lot of current front office people feel that money could have been better spent on players.”

Selling tickets, though, is important for the Pirates. They have had the smallest or next-to-the-smallest attendance in the National League each of the last five years.

The person close to the Pirates said people are also skeptical about Bob Nutting, the Pirates’ board chairman. “A lot of people think the Nuttings aren’t interested in having a winning team as long as they’re making money,” the person said. “They’re not convinced they’re a good baseball family.”

But Nutting obviously has authorized at least some spending. And how does Nutting expect to make money if the team isn’t good enough to draw people to PNC Park?

Not everyone is skeptical. Sam Reich is a Pittsburgh attorney and a long-time Pirates fan. He also knows Coonelly from having argued salary arbitration cases against him when Coonelly was in the commissioner’s office.

“I believe they have a chance to be successful,” Reich said, referring to Coonelly and Huntington. “I know Frank Coonelly. I’ve had some personal dealings with him. He has intelligence. I think he can do a great job.”

Coonelly will be doing that job while the Steelers are preparing for and playing in the Super Bowl. “I went to the home playoff games,” he said, “but I have Pirate work to do here instead of going to Tampa and enjoying myself.”

Bring Me the Arm of Freddy Garcia

Freddy Garcia, a 33-year-old pitcher looking to revive his career, had the option of choosing to play for the Yankees or the Mets. Both teams offered him a minor league contract with a chance to make the major league pitching staff, possibly as a starter.

Until he developed shoulder problems in 2007, Garcia, a Venezuelan, pitched impressively, compiling a 116-71 record for a .620 inning percentage. In four of his eight seasons, he won 16 or more games. In three seasons with the Chicago White Sox he had a 40-21 record and pitched seven shutout innings in winning the final game of the World Series.

However, his workload – more than 200 innings in seven of eight seasons — apparently caught up to him, and he started only 14 games the past two seasons. He had shoulder surgery in 2007.

But his past was good enough for him to attract interest, and the Mets and the Yankees liked him. How to decide which team he should sign with?

Garcia asked his former White Sox manager and fellow Venezuelan, Ozzie Guillen. Mets, Guillen said, so Garcia signed with the Mets and is ready to work to claim one of the vacancies the Mets have in their starting rotation.

Choose Your Position Wisely, Children

Do infielders live longer than outfielders, pitchers and catchers?

No such study has been made, but Billy Werber (at left), an infielder, was the oldest former major leaguer when he died recently at the age of 100, and the new oldest living former major leaguer was an infielder, as was the second oldest living former major leaguer.

Tony Malinosky, 99 years old, was an infielder with the Brooklyn Dodgers but played in only 35 games in 1937. Lonny Frey, 98, played much more. He played for 11 seasons, 1933 through 1943, mostly with the Cincinnati Reds, then returned after World War II and played for three more seasons, 1946 through 1948, finishing his career with the New York Giants as a .269 hitter.

The Hall of Fane provided the oldest-player information but acknowledged it came from a Web site, WhosAliveandWhosDead.com.

The Ricketts Cash in on the Cubs

If you’re old enough, you might remember Dick and Dave Ricketts, brothers who played basketball at Duquesne University in the 1950s and later baseball for the St. Louis Cardinals.

Neither had much of a career. Dick spent one season with the Cardinals, 1959, compiling a 1-6 record with a 5.82 earned run average in 9 starts and 3 relief appearances. Dave, a catcher, batted .249 in 130 games spread over 6 seasons. They are the only Ricketts who appear in baseball encyclopedias.

Now, though, a whole family of Ricketts is poised to enter Major League Baseball, father J. Joseph and sons Thomas and J. Peter Ricketts. If they get past bankruptcy court in Chicago and owners in M.L.B., they will be the new owners of the Cubs, the team that has wandered in the wasteland of non-World Series winners for 100 years.

The Ricketts family founded Ameritrade Holding Corporation and has flirted in recent years with the Forbes 400 list of wealthiest Americans. They fell short of last year’s list, having to settle for mention in the magazine on a list of billionaires who didn’t make the cut.

According to a baseball official, they have offered $830 million and are prepared to pay a large portion, perhaps as much as half, in cash, more than the other bidders offered. It’s the cash that will appeal to creditors of Tribune Company, which is in bankruptcy, and give the Ricketts family a strong shot at winning approval.

The prospective owner has to gain approval from the creditors’ committee and from M.L.B., which apparently has no problem accepting the Ricketts group as the Cubs’ owner.

The man from whom the Ricketts are buying the Cubs, Sam Zell, is the wealthiest baseball owner among the Forbes 400, ranking in a tie for 68^th with a worth valued at $5 billion. Carl Pohlad, the next wealthiest baseball owner at $3.6 billion, died recently so that and Zell’s departure from baseball leaves Ted Lerner of Washington as No. 1 at $3.5 billion, which only ties him for 105^th on the list.

Other baseball owners on the list of 400 are John Malone, Atlanta, tied for 190^th at $2.3 billion; Drayton McLane Jr., Houston, tied for 301^st at $1.6 billion; Tom Hicks, Texas, tied for 355^th at $1.4 billion, and George Steinbrenner, Yankees, tied for 377^th at $1.3 billion.

Peter Angelos of Baltimore, John Moores of San Diego, John Henry of Boston and Arte Moreno of Anaheim join the Ricketts family on the list of also-ran billionaires.

Kent: Jeff, not Clark

When Jeff Kent announced his retirement last week, everyone seemed to ask the question at once: Should he be elected to the Hall of Fame?

Because everyone else was asking the question of people who have no say on the matter, I asked three writer friends who do have a say because they will vote on Kent five years from now. I also asked if he was a first-ballot Hall of Famer.

Writer No. 1: He’s in the conversation for any year – first to 15^th.

Writer No. 2: This was brought up to me a while back but all I could think of was whether I considered him a Hall of Famer when I was watching him and the truth is I never did. Now that may not be a fair assessment and it’s one I will eventually have to think about because I was a supporter of Ryne Sandberg for the Hall and Kent will have better stats.

So my honest answer to your two questions: No, he’s not a first ballot guy, and to the second question, probably he gets in, but I’m not yet sure.

Writer No. 3: I guess he’s worth considering because he’s a second baseman with good offensive numbers. I think middle infielders and catchers who are good at their positions and have impressive offensive numbers should be considered as much or more than corner infielders/outfielders who have somewhat better offensive numbers.

Saying “Jeff Kent” doesn’t make me think of Hall of Fame player, and I doubt he would get in his first year, based on the voting pattern. But he might get in eventually.

My answer? I’ll let you know in five years when he becomes eligible after his required waiting period. I always wait until then to think about candidates. It helps with perspective and removes all of the emotion, if any, from a decision.

 

 

Some day, some year, some decade the National Football League Players Association may get it right, but it apparently won’t be this year. The players are searching for a new executive director to replace the late Gene Upshaw, and they are looking in the wrong place.

According to a recent column by William Rhoden in The New York Times, the union had been focusing on eight candidates.  That number was then reduced to seven. Six are former players; the seventh is the chief executive of a gas and electric company. That’s right he’s management, just what the N.F.L. players need heading into negotiations for a new labor agreement.

Now readers might ask why am I writing about the N.F.L. when this Web site is about baseball. The link is the Major League Baseball Players Association. The baseball union has always been the strongest, most successful union in professional sports. The N.F.L. union, a disaster by comparison, could learn a lot by copying its baseball brethren.

One thing the football players can’t do is hire Marvin Miller, the former leader of the baseball union, but they could listen to him and learn from him. One of Miller’s great strengths was educating his members after he became their labor leader in 1966. No leader of the football union has ever educated its players, and that oversight is probably at the heart of the union’s weakness.

The list of finalists for the union job reflects the players’ labor ignorance. They have just gone through 25 years of questionable leadership of a former player, and they are bent on hiring another one.

Miller, who was a trade unionist, not a former baseball player, had a few thoughts on former players as union leaders.

“The record in all professional team sports is a miserable one whenever they have had a former player,” he said in a telephone interview. “Why anybody thinks that’s the essence of a good director I don’t understand. It is true that somebody who has had experience in the ranks knows initially more about the life and problems and obviously the aspirations of the players than other people, but that’s a learnable set of facts.

“More important there is such a lot of evidence that professional players, regardless of the sport, always bear the hammered down feelings that players get when they’ve had to deal with owners, who paid no attention to them as individuals, who had no concerns about them as people. I don’t think that’s the best training for what has to be done.”

Miller recalled a question players asked him constantly when he was assuming command of the baseball union. “They had read about me and my life as a trade unionist and an aggressive negotiator,” he related. “They wanted to know can you and will you be able to get along with the owners. That was their paramount question.”

Miller said he assured them that he had gotten along with management officials and owners his whole professional life but added, “That’s not the object of the job.”

“It’s an adversarial relationship,” he told the players. “If we got to the point where the owners were sincerely praising me and saying great things about me to the players, they ought to fire me because that doesn’t go with a union official who has to represent players.”

I asked Miller, who at the age of 91 remains sharper than maybe any union leader in any other industry, if he ever found a former player who was an effective union leader. He ran through a mental list of former players who became heads of their sport’s union. These were his assessments of leaders of the football union:

• Jack Kemp, Buffalo Bills quarterback, who in his post-playing life became a Congressman: “He was the worst company unionist you’ve ever met. He was management incarnate. He was to the right of management.”
• Creighton Miller, another former football player; he became a lawyer and then director of what Miller called the N.F.L.’s “company union:” “Nice guy, pleasant man but a bust in the job. He didn’t have any idea of how a union should operate.”
• Upshaw, a all of Fame guardHall of Fame guard, who after he retired worked with Ed Garvey, the union’s director, before replacing Garvey: “They had some bad experiences with a membership that would not support trade union action. These were players who scabbed on each other several times.”

“I think partly as a result of that,” Miller added, “Upshaw felt the only way he was going to get anywhere was to become cuddly with the owners. The players were incorrigible. Unlike baseball, the star players were the worst on turning their backs on the union. The quarterbacks were the first to volunteer to be replacement players.”

Upshaw was notorious for his cozy relationship with N.F.L. commissioners. The union enjoyed labor peace but at a price. Upshaw demonstrated his lack of labor understanding with his reaction to baseball’s free agency.

“At the time, he was one of the worst critics of our free agency settlement,” Miller recalled. “He later gave what amounted to an apology. I ran into him at somebody’s funeral or memorial service, and in a very embarrassed fashion he brought it up himself and said he had misspoken.”

Garvey reacted similarly when Miller negotiated free agency in 1976, giving up the complete free agency the union gained from an arbitrator, Peter Seitz, and settling with the owners on a six-year requirement for players to be eligible for free agency. Garvey ridiculed Miller and the union for their settlement.

Yet baseball free agents became the freest and best paid of the free agents of all sports. After N.F.L. players subsequently gained free agency and only one player changed teams in the first year, Garvey ran to the judge who was overseeing the N.F.L. labor dispute and complained that the owners weren’t playing fairly.

“I never got over the fact,” Miller said, “that what football became in this country was the most successful financially of all the sports. It had the greatest revenue, the greatest profits and the largest television contracts. Yet in spite of all that, it had the lowest salaries of any team sport, the shortest career, the most dangerous conditions on the field, the worst pension and disability provisions, the worst contract provisions over all. This in the most prosperous of all team sports.”

If Garvey and Upshaw thought Miller blundered when he negotiated free agency with baseball owners, he was not impressed with what the football union did when it had a court decision – the Mackey case – in its favor. The Mackey decision outlawed the Rozelle rule, under which the commissioner determined compensation for lost free agents, but in subsequent negotiations, the union accepted many of the free-agent restrictions.

“It was such a painful history, awful,” Miller said.

A major problem, Miller said he suspects, is that football players don’t know the league’s labor history. “That’s a guess,” he said, “but I think it’s true. The only history they’ve got is Upshaw. By all accounts they didn’t like him. Why would you go back to the same category? It’s hard to figure.”

Miller said it’s also hard to figure why football players accept their contractual situation. “No player has a contract,” he said. “They can be let go at any time. Football players know it. What they say among themselves is what you don’t get as a signing bonus you may never get, no matter what the contract says.”

In baseball, multi-year contracts are guaranteed. If a player has a five-year contract and gets hurt in the first year and can never play again, he receives his salary for the next four years. Nothing is guaranteed in the N.F.L. A player can sign a five-year contract, but he has to make the team each year to get his salary.

“There’s no real way for players to have rights that are enforceable under the setup they have,” Miller said. “I don’t understand how players can go year to year like that.”

And now players will most likely select someone from their ranks to contend with these issues and find himself overmatched by the league’s labor professionals.

“I was asked recently if I would talk to the players about the situation,” Miller said. But it was Rhoden, the Times columnist, who asked, and Miller has heard nothing further. Rhoden did not respond to an e-mail seeking information on his idea.

As critical as Miller is of N.F.L. players, he doesn’t claim that baseball players are perfect. He recalled a 25-year-old experience to demonstrate that they, too, can go astray.

“When I told the players I was retiring the next year, they formed a committee of players to find a successor,” Miller related. “One player came in with a recommendation of a management executive. This was not an ignorant player. He was someone who had been involved in union activities and struggles we had. I asked him why would you think a management executive would be the right man for this job. He thought he was a bright guy.”

But Miller was there to help the baseball players avoid making a mistake. The N.F.L. players have no one to prevent them from making another mistake.