Forty-five years after the Major League Baseball Players Association shed the MLB commissioner as MLB’s arbitrator and replaced him with an impartial arbitrator, the National Football League Players Association remains saddled with the NFL commissioner as the league’s arbitrator.

As the baseball union argued nearly half a century ago, there can hardly be anything impartial about a commissioner in a dispute between a player and the commissioner. That’s why Tom Brady, the New England Patriots’ quarterback, stands to miss the first four games of the 2016 NFL season as he serves a suspension that a Federal appellate court recently upheld.

At the time that the baseball union gained an impartial arbitrator, Ed Garvey was the executive director of the NFL union. Garvey was a loser in 1986 when he ran for the United States Senate from Wisconsin, he was a loser in 1998 when he ran for the office of governor in Wisconsin and he was a loser in 1976 when he ridiculed Marvin Miller for not taking what the arbitrator gave the players – free and unfettered free agency for all players every year.

In deciding the Messersmith-McNally grievance, Peter Seitz, the arbitrator, ruled that the renewal clause in players’ contracts did not mean their teams could renew in perpetuity. The ruling effectively killed the reserve clause, which bound players to teams for their careers unless they were traded, sold or released.

Seitz decided the case in December 1975. The following July negotiators for the players and the owners agreed to a provision that would allow players to become free agents if they had six or more years of major league service.

In a union newsletter, Garvey ridiculed Miller for giving up the total free agency Seitz had awarded the players. The criticism demonstrated Garvey’s ignorance in labor strategy. What Miller understood and Garvey failed to grasp was that if every player, or even a large segment of the players, were a free agent, it would dilute the bargaining leverage of each player.

You see, Ed, if a couple of dozen first basemen are available at the same time, teams have so many options that they don’t have to offer an exorbitant amount for any one of them.

“Garvey didn’t understand something that was basic,” Richard Moss, Miller’s general counsel, said last week. “Marvin understood that if all players had free agency the system doesn’t work. Their bargaining ability would be limited.”

Until Miller and Moss arrived on the baseball scene from the United Steelworkers in 1966 as the union’s dynamic duo, players were at the mercy of the commissioner, who served as prosecutor, jury and judge. In other words, he disciplined players, then heard their appeals if they challenged the penalties and, finally, ruled on the appeals if they appealed his decisions.

It wasn’t exactly the fairest system where the players were concerned, but that’s all they had.

But not for long.

“It was one of the first things we did,” Moss recalled in a telephone interview last week. “In the first basic agreement they agreed to arbitrate disputes but said the commissioner would have to be the arbitrator. We accepted that as a first agreement. Two years later impartial arbitration was on our list and we got it. We convinced them that it was the right thing to do.”

It was a remarkable development because how often do owners do something because it is the right thing to do? You wouldn’t have to use all of the fingers on one hand to count the number of times.

In that instance, the players uncharacteristically had a management ally whose identity was revealed to me with the understanding that I wouldn’t use the name.

The NFL union has had neither a management ally nor an executive director smart and clever enough to persuade management to replace the commissioner with an impartial arbitrator.

Garvey certainly wasn’t that man. Neither was Gene Upshaw, a former all-pro player, who led the union for 25 years, until he died in 2008.

Upshaw was a sports union leader much longer than Miller and accomplished far less. He was criticized for being too close to Commissioner Paul Tagliabue, whose term basically paralleled Upshaw’s, and as a result was too soft on labor issues. Upshaw always resented and scoffed at the accusation, but there was plenty of evidence to support it.

There is no guarantee that an impartial arbitrator would have ruled differently from Goodell on Brady’s appeal of his suspension, but he would have had a better chance of having the four-game suspension overturned or reduced. Who would have thought Goodell would have altered his own decision? It was highly unlikely.

Goodell’s decision as arbitrator was important for the NFL because, as Brady learned, courts don’t, as a rule, overturn arbitrators’ decisions. Inexplicably, a United States District Court judge did overrule the Goodell decision, but the United States Court of Appeals for the Second restored the suspension and judicial practice.

MLB learned the folly of challenging an arbitrator’s ruling in 1976 when it appealed Seitz’s free agency decision. Before he issued his decision, Seitz privately let Miller and John Gaherin, the owners’ chief labor negotiator, know how he was leaning and urged then to negotiate a settlement.

Gaherin suggested to the owners that they take Seitz’s suggestion, but Commissioner Bowie Kuhn and his lawyers rejected the idea. Let him rule against us, they said; we’ll go to court and win there. Seitz ruled for the players, the owners went to court and the owners lost.

The change in baseball arbitrators came in 1970, but the arbitrator, Lewis Gill, heard the first significant grievance in 1971. Alex Johnson, the 1970 American League batting champion, was the player, and he challenged a 30-day suspension the Angels had levied against him.

Johnson had been acting erratically, and Manager Lefty Phillips fined him 25 times before the Angels suspended him. Just as that suspension was ending, Kuhn placed Johnson on the restricted list, effectively ending his season.

In testifying at the hearing, Miller said Johnson was emotionally disabled and should have been placed on the disabled list, the same as an injured player. Gill agreed and ordered Johnson restored to the Angels’ roster.

“It’s 100 percent clear,” Moss, who argued the case, told me, “that if the commissioner had been the arbitrator Johnson would not have won. Everything the Angels did with Johnson was cleared with the commissioner’s office.”

In agreeing to the use of an impartial arbitrator, the clubs retained the right for the commissioner to hear grievances in cases of integrity of the game. Kuhn apparently had a strange way of viewing integrity of the game because after the Seitz decision he lamented that he had seriously considered taking the grievance from Seitz but opted not to under advice from his lawyers.

“In hindsight,” he wrote in his 1987 book “Hardball: The Education of a Baseball Commissioner,” “my greatest regret about my sixteen years as commissioner is that I did not take that grievance and head off Seitz.”

This comes from the same guy who said free agency would kill baseball.

RODRIGUEZ REDEEMED

If you thought Alex Rodriguez became relevant again last season when he slugged 33 home runs and drove in 86 runs, look at what has happened in the past week or so.

Suffering a strained hamstring that forced him onto the disabled list, Rodriguez has fans and the news media alike lamenting his absence. When he sat out the 2014 season serving a drug suspension, those groups couldn’t wait to get rid of him.

Some fans would have spit at him had they passed him on the street. Reporters and columnists wrote of him with disgust. Some writers searched seriously for ways the New York Yankees could void his contract or otherwise avoid paying him.

The Yankees themselves – General Manager Brian Cashman and Manager Joe Girardi – said before last season Rodriguez didn’t necessarily have a job and would have to earn one. President Randy Levine said the team would not honor their deal with him that would pay him a $6 million marketing bonus when he matched Willie Mays’ 660 career home runs because he had destroyed their ability to market the milestone.

Well, not only did A-Rod redeem himself last season with his hitting that was instrumental in helping the Yankees make the playoffs, but last week he also showed that he was still marketable.

Harman Industries named Rodriguez a brand ambassador for its JBL audio brand. Rodriguez, the company said, will play a role in its marketing efforts, including social media and content programs. The announcement said the deal continues JBL’s ties to the Yankees.

The Yankees apparently think Rodriguez is marketable after all.

Does that mean they will pay him a $6 million bonus if he hits 22 more home runs and matches Babe Ruth’s 714? We’ll just have to wait and see.

Meanwhile, A-Rod’s surprisingly strong 2015 season and his five pre-injury homers this season after a slow start have prompted civility from the news media.

For example, The New York Times’ Tyler Kepner, whose articles about A-Rod the past few years have dripped with disdain, last week referred to him as “a slugger who will never be forgotten.” He also wrote that “Rodriguez makes things interesting, and that counts for something.”

That’s probably the nicest thing Kepner has written about Rodriguez since both were in Seattle in the late 1990s.

NON-HISTORICAL HISTORY

MLB.com has a thing about history, and sometimes the website seems to have its own definition of what history is.

Two Saturday night examples:

• “Young Rangers make history in 5-HR attack”
• “Blasts by Odor and Mazara marked the first time in Major League history that two players 22 years old or younger homered in back-to-back at-bats to begin a game, according to Fox Sports 1.”

Don’t we have enough history without that category?

• “6^th straight W puts Cubs in historical company”
• “The Cubs improved to 23-6 and are the first NL team to win 23 of its first 29 games since the 1977 Dodgers.”

What’s historical about that?

• “Chicago’s start is its best since the 1907 team opened 24-5.”

That’s impressive but not historical.