He was 10 days into his 96th year, and Marvin Miller was still speaking in a voice that has grated on baseball club owners’ nerves like a fingernail on a chalk board. To those of us who listened to him Tuesday evening, though, Miller’s words were as melodious and as meaningful as they have ever been.

Collusion, Miller said at an event at New York University law school honoring him, was worse than the Black Sox scandal of 1919, but few are willing to recognize it as such.

“They put the Black Sox scandal into infancy,” Miller said of the owners’ illegal concerted action against free agents in 1985, ’86 and ‘87. “This was really a scandal of major proportion and to this day it hasn’t been treated as such or written about or really researched at any time. It’s kind of shocking when you think about it.”

Collusion wasn’t supposed to be Miller’s primary topic of discussion at the event at which a portrait of him was unveiled before its deposit in the building of the Supreme Court of the United States in Washington, D.C. But the evening was billed as a “celebration of Marvin Miller and baseball unionism,” and it belonged to Miller.

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The best thing I think I can probably say about Bobby Valentine and the Boston Red Sox is to borrow part of an infamous remark from something another infamous manager once said: The two of them deserve each other.

I’m not suggesting that, as Billy Martin said about Reggie Jackson and George Steinbrenner, one’s a born liar, the other’s convicted. But they surely do deserve each other.

As of their celebration of the 100th anniversary of Fenway Park last Friday, the Red Sox were off to a rotten start. Throw in Valentine’s off-the-field comments, and the manager was off to an even worse start.

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In the absurd outcome of the 2007 voting of the Hall of Fame veterans committee, Bowie Kuhn was elected to baseball’s Hall in Cooperstown, N.Y., but Marvin Miller was not. No matter what Hall officials say, it was exactly the outcome they wanted because it was the outcome the owners wanted. In their twisted thinking, it was a fitting revenge for all of the dastardly deeds Miller had perpetrated against them.

Now comes a development to which I can only say eat your heart out, Bowie, wherever you are, and your management sycophants, too. Miller has achieved a status that is unprecedented, unique and most unlikely to be matched by any civilian.

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