National Portrait Gallery, Smithsonian Institution; gift of Peter D. Miller, son of Marvin J. Miller. © Ray Fisher
This Hall of Fame season, like several before it, has invited baseball to reckon with the question of Marvin Miller. This is not so much a question about him—Miller’s influence is too obvious to be much debated—as it is a question about the Hall, what it means for the institution to exist without him and what sort of baseball history can be written around him. (Given that Miller’s work as the first director of the players’ union created the very structure of the modern game, it seems fair to say that the answer is a peculiarly partial one.