Marvin Miller, the founding executive director of the baseball players union, was confounded. He had just been told that his union had agreed to blood testing for human growth hormone, and he was bewildered.

“Oh boy,” he exclaimed. “What did they get for it?”

Based on initial information, he was told, the players didn’t seem to get much, if anything, in exchange for agreeing to the controversial testing the players had long resisted. Even the National Football League union has delayed blood tests after agreeing to accept them earlier this year.

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Negotiators for baseball’s players and club owners have details to work out on several issues before they have a new labor agreement, but Jim Crane, a Houston businessman, has a deal of his own because he accepted an offer he couldn’t refuse.

Crane was expected to be approved as the Astros’ new owner at the owners’ meeting in Milwaukee Thursday.

Crane’s purchase of the Astros’ will trigger realignment of the National and American Leagues, most likely for 2013 because the 2012 schedule has already been completed, although Major League Baseball officials may have a revised 2012 schedule in their pocket ready to pull out at a moment’s notice.

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Bud Selig thinks his minority interviewing and hiring program is working just fine, thank you. I think he needs to take another look at it.

The commissioner sees the hiring of mid-level and low-level club employees as a sign of the success of the program. Maybe that’s true for that part of the program. But I see the absurdly paltry number of minorities being interviewed for jobs as general managers and managers as a sign that the program is not successful.

“I’m quite satisfied that all the clubs have done what they’re supposed to do,” Selig said on the telephone Friday after telling me what he thought of a recent column I had written, in part about him. But he would offer no specifics on this off-season’s interviewing process. “We don’t talk about it,” he said.

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