IT’S MILLER TIME
By Murray Chass
December 1, 2013
With the Hall of Fame’s “expansion era” committee scheduled to vote Dec. 9, this seems like a good opportunity to explore the Marvin Miller matter one more time. Maybe, for one reason or another, it will be the last time.
Over his objection to having his name appear on a Hall of Fame ballot, which he stated more than four years before he died in November 2012, Miller is one of 12 candidates (players, managers and executives) who will be discussed by a 16-man committee on the day of the vote.
Although Miller belongs in the Hall for his matchless impact on Major League Baseball, the Hall’s officials have …
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A DIFFERENT LABOR CHIEF
By Murray Chass
November 27, 2013
The children “adored” Michael Weiner, the retired rabbi related. That would be Mr. Weiner the Sunday school teacher. He was also the fellow who headed the baseball players’ union until his death from brain cancer Nov. 21, but it’s highly unlikely that many of his union members knew him as the teacher of fourth and fifth graders at the Jewish Center of Northwest Jersey in Washington, N.J.
Rabbi Ellen Lewis, who recently retired after 19 years at the temple, told me about one of Weiner’s students …
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WEINER’S TIME MUCH TOO SHORT
By Murray Chass
November 24, 2013
The word is ugly, the condition uglier: glioblastoma. It is a brain tumor, the worst kind of brain tumor, virtually always a fatal brain tumor.
Michael Weiner, executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, learned in August 2012 that he had a glioblastoma, and he died last Thursday, only15 months later, the average life expectancy after the tumor is discovered in one’s brain.
Weiner, who led the union for just under four years, died six days short of a year after Marvin Miller, the union’s founding director, died of liver cancer at the age of 95.
At 51 and a graduate of Williams College and Harvard Law School, Weiner was far too young and too bright and had too many productive years ahead of him to die now. Glioblastomas, however, are not selective.
That particular tumor has had a nasty history with baseball, particularly …
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