Editor's note: On Wednesday at 2 p.m. ET, Marvin Miller might get a phone call that was once unfathomable: The news that he has been inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame. That phone call could send him into the same sanctuary as such legends as George Brett, Nolan Ryan, Dave Winfield and dozens more who might not have owed Miller their talent, but in many ways owe him their livelihood.

As executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association from 1966 to 1982, Miller organized players into their first coherent union, and then progressively fought for and gained improved pension plans, arbitration rights and free agency, shoving the repugnant reserve clause down the owners' throats. He most certainly helped the players. But separating the changes he brought from the blossoming of the modern game in general -- strikes and lockouts notwithstanding -- is impossible.

	Marvin Miller, seen here in 1972, was head of the Players Association from 1966 to 1982.

With the revamped Hall of Fame Committee on Veterans now populated by all 58 living Hall of Famers -- as well as 13 Frick Award (broadcasting), 11 Spink Award (writing) honorees and two holdovers from the old committee -- many expect the 85-year-old Miller to secure the 75 percent of votes needed for induction. He isn't so sure, however. Miller sat down with Alan Schwarz to discuss his chances and legacy, and in Part 2 of the interview, he hits on such current controversies as ephedra and tension with his direct descendant, Don Fehr.

Sitting in his New York apartment high above Manhattan's Upper East Side, reclining amiably on his sectional couch, Miller spoke as he did during all those interviews from his active days -- educationally, emotionally, controversially (calling Bud Selig a "jerk" is one highlight). Part 1 of the interview follows:

Alan Schwarz: Have you thought about the Hall of Fame much?

Marvin Miller: Depends when you mean. People have asked me, and the fact is that throughout almost all my tenure as director, I did not. I can honestly say that it never even crossed my mind. But when Dick Young (in the 1980s) ... wrote that I should be in the Hall of Fame, a reasoned column, it surprised the hell out of me. If it had been written by a sports columnist who had been supportive of the union, that would have been one thing. But Dick Young had become tremendously anti-union over a number of years. Had a great deal of hostility toward me. For him to write that, yeah, I began to think about it. That was so startling.

But through the years, as I learned how the voting was conducted -- the old Veterans Committee, as you know, had five former players, five former management people and five former media people -- you needed a 75 percent requirement, tough, as it should be. So each group had a veto, because you only needed four votes to stop anybody. So that committee began to get a reputation -- I don't know if it was deserved or not -- of vote-trading: I'll support your guy if you support my guy. So I basically lost interest in it: "It's not gonna happen."

Then, a few years ago, when they changed the composition of the Veterans Committee, and members of the Hall of Fame became the dominant vote ... for a while I played the arithmetic game. A few have been outspoken, publicly. But what people forget is that in the player group there is a fairly large contingent of pre-union players.

Schwarz: There are about a dozen, actually. But even though they might not have a visceral attachment to your work, many people forget that much of the pension checks that they cash were a direct result of your efforts.

Miller: I don't think you can group them. Each one is an individual. Each one has a somewhat different relationship with me and with the union and with baseball. Take Monte Irvin -- perfectly nice guy, but he worked for management. That was his job after baseball. He worked for Bowie Kuhn. That has to color his thinking. Bob Feller initially downgraded the union because he'd been an active candidate for executive director before I came in. But he's had very nice things to say about me. People are different.

Schwarz: It does sound to me, though, that you don't anticipate much resentment from players who came before you who didn't participate in the subsequent windfall.

Miller: You have to remember that the union, both under me and Don Fehr, has done something that gets so little attention it's ridiculous. The pension benefit increases for retirement and widows' benefits and more, all these have been made retroactive. We started it in 1967, and if you had one day of service in the prior 10 years, you were treated as an active player. For example let's take someone who retired before I came in, like Stan Musial. When we doubled the benefits in 1967, he was no longer a player. But he was treated as if he were. When we had another big, significant increase in '69, when we got the increases as a result of the '72 strike, in '73 when we increased it again, and in '76, he got all the benefits of the increases again. It's even more than what I'm describing here. They benefited -- and I don't mean slightly.

Schwarz: Does it feel odd to you that you might soon have a plaque of you hanging in the same room as, say, Charles Comiskey?

Miller: (Laughs.) I haven't thought about that. But I'll tell you what I have thought about if it happens, which I don't know. The most immediate regret will be that my father's not alive. He was such a great baseball fan. My mother, sports were not her thing. But he would have found it absolutely incredible that I would be in the same Hall of Fame as a Babe Ruth or a Lou Gehrig or a Christy Mathewson or a Carl Hubbell -- he was a Giants fan. It would have been so mind-boggling, I don't know if he could have accepted that.

Schwarz: Would it be a sign of how the game's sensibilities have evolved for you to be inducted alongside the Comiskeys and Happy Chandlers?

Miller: I don't think so. Maybe I'm naïve, but I don't think the owners control the actions of the Hall. I know that they're major contributors and they have an obvious influence, and when crisis time comes like how to blackball Pete Rose, yeah, they're subservient to the owners, without question. But I don't think of them as being one and the same. Therefore, I don't think of this as an evolution of baseball.

	“	I have a hard time, frankly, with the whole concept of executives in the Hall of Fame, including me. I really do. I know they've got the category. They've had it for a long time. But I'm also mindful that they've had it so they could reward commissioners, league presidents, an owner here and there. I doubt if it was ever done on the basis of any known standards. ”
		— Marvin Miller

Recently, there were a couple of interviews of owners, like around the time when it was announced I was on the ballot. George Steinbrenner made some very complimentary remarks to the newspaper reporter that I should be in the Hall of Fame for my obvious impact on the game. And one of the new owners of the Red Sox was interviewed. Same kind of thing. I think that might be described as evolutionary, in the sense that if you had asked owners a question like that in 1967 and 1972 you would have gotten a very different answer.

Schwarz: If you get in, you get to vote in subsequent elections. How tantalizing is that?

Miller: I don't know. I don't have any favorite person who's not in and ought to be in.

Schwarz: One name that stands out on the current ballot is Curt Flood. As a painfully obvious question, how would you vote on him?

Miller: I'd vote for him. He is the ideal one for this. The statistics stand up, I think. I haven't examined them closely. But for a number of years he was the outstanding center fielder in baseball. It was a period when Willie Mays was admittedly entering his last days as a player. But Curt Flood was clearly the best center fielder in baseball.

And his off-the-field thing ... let me tell you a story when he was deciding about the lawsuit. He's all gung-ho. I felt it was my responsibility to play devil's advocate. It was easy to do because I really felt pessimistic about the whole thing. The court was never going to reverse itself. So I ply him with all the reasons that any sane person would decide not to do this: "I don't think you can play and do this lawsuit. You're 32 years old and I don't think you can take a year off. Furthermore, I don't think (the owners) would let you come back. They have long memories. And it's million-to-one shot -- the Supreme Court almost never reverses itself. Finally, I threw him the final punch -- even if you prevail against the odds and they rule for you, you will not benefit. They won't assess damages retroactively. Curt, as far as they're concerned, you're dead. You're not gonna be a player, you're not gonna be a coach, you're not gonna be a scout."

"I won't get any benefit?"

"No."

And he said, "But it would benefit all the other players and the others to come, wouldn't it?"

"Most certainly."

And he said, "That's good enough for me."

That's why I think Curt Flood belongs in the Hall of Fame.

Schwarz: Any other players?

Miller: Honestly, I haven't really studied the statistics to make an informed decision. But I think I might find Dick Allen's record impressive.

Schwarz: What about a management person you butted heads with, like Buzzie Bavasi?

Miller: I have a hard time, frankly, with the whole concept of executives in the Hall of Fame, including me. I really do. I know they've got the category. They've had it for a long time. But I'm also mindful that they've had it so they could reward commissioners, league presidents, an owner here and there. I doubt if it was ever done on the basis of any known standards. So I personally would have trouble with any of the current candidates, with a couple of exceptions.

I would say that Walter O'Malley, with his dedication to leading that group of people, like a bunch of balking horses ... O'Malley was the real leader of baseball management and ownership for so many years. I remember one owner once told me -- I had asked him how O'Malley maintains his leadership -- and he said, "Well, we have a number of owners meetings each year, and the overwhelming majority, if not all of them, come there so ill-prepared that they don't even know what the hell is on the agenda. O'Malley comes, and not only does he know what's on the agenda, he's prepared to speak in rational terms on everything. He does his homework, he's intelligent, and he's always there."

I think O'Malley will probably get in. Harry Dalton was an unusually effective and smart general manager. Again, I don't know what the standards are, but he was outstanding.

Schwarz: In your estimation, what percentage of players today know who you are?

Miller: No idea. But I'll tell you that I was pleasantly surprised on the recent All-Star trip to Japan, where my wife and I went, because the players on the team, none of whom that I had met, all seemed to know who I was. They all couldn't have been more kind and courteous -- come by the table, talk with me, shake hands. Stop and talk at the hotel. But I don't know how representative they are. It has been 20 years since I was the director. That's several careers worth of players.

Schwarz: To what extent were you a product of your time? The 1960s were a time when change was in the air, African-Americans were gaining long-awaited civil rights, young people were asserting themselves and women were not far behind. Would change have come to baseball anyway?

Miller: Obviously it's an iffy question, as Roosevelt would have said. But in the period you're talking about and extending to today, the organized labor movement as a whole in this country had declined. Everything that happened in baseball -- the establishment of the union, its solidarity, its gains -- coincided with a tremendous decline in the influence of the labor movement, its numbers, its successes and so on. If that is a clue, I would have to say that it was not dependent upon the times.

Schwarz: I know you still play tennis regularly. What else takes up your time?

Miller: We decided to give all my papers to the labor library at New York University. It's a lot of papers -- they include my career in government, labor law, World War II, 16-plus years at the Steelworkers' Union, 17 years at baseball, it's a lot of paper. We're still going through it all. There will be an official announcement on May 21 what is available.

Schwarz: Is there a smoking gun in there? What's the most interesting baseball document we'll get to see?

Miller: It's hard to say. To me, it's a copy of a note from Satchel Paige in which he applies for his pension. It's not illiterate, but it's close to it. But to me it's interesting because when I came in, he was coaching for the Atlanta Braves. He was as remarkable as everyone said he was, in every way. Even then, no one knew how old he was, but he had the upper body of an athlete. He was remarkable.

The note said simply that he thought it was time for him to apply for his pension. He didn't have a birth certificate. There were no school or church records. I just remember in pension meetings saying, "For God's sake, we don't have to have a precise age on this guy. It's Satchel Paige!" I didn't realize I had a copy of that note until I started going through those papers. It's just sentimental to me.

Schwarz: You published your autobiography ("A Whole Different Ball Game") in 1991. I know you're thinking of writing another book.

Miller: I would like to, but as I get older, I don't know that I have the self-discipline to do this. It obviously will have some grounding in sports and baseball and labor relations. I have viewed it as a collection of essays on all sorts of political and economic and labor-relations subjects. I have some of it done.

There's an underlying theme in my head, which is that in American society for a long time now there's been a growing non-awareness of conflicts of interest. That is, conflicts of interest that at one time were easily recognized by anybody you talked to, now get by with people asking, "Why is that a conflict of interest?"

Schwarz: Give me two examples, neither of them being the Montreal Expos.

Miller: When the Flood case was pending before the Supreme Court, when they hadn't yet heard the case but had accepted it for review, Justice Powell recused himself. Withdrew from the case. He did so because, he said, he was a small stockholder in the Busch Brewery -- Busch, of course, owned the St. Louis Cardinals. He viewed it if not as a conflict of interest, the appearance of a conflict of interest. It probably was not, because the scuttlebutt and subsequent writings that Powell would have voted on Flood's side.

Schwarz: Wasn't the vote 5-3 anyway?

Miller: According to Bob Woodward, who wrote "The Brethren" on the Supreme Court, at the time it was 4-4 without Powell. It later got shifted. Blackmun shifted. But at the time it could have been crucial.

Anyway, in the period of the Flood case, it was not unusual to do what Powell did. Now jump to the year 2000, when you have a far more momentous decision before the Supreme Court (unraveling the 2000 Presidential election), which affects God knows what yet. And they sit there with the leading conservative doing all the questioning, and is clearly leading what becomes a 5-4 vote. This is a case that's being argued for (George) Bush by a man who employs Justice Scalia's son. Scalia's son is awaiting, hopefully, a partnership. And Scalia sits there on the bench and becomes the leading activist in a 5-4 decision on the Bush side -- in a case that's argued by him by his son's employer. That isn't a conflict of interest? That's such a giant step backwards, from Powell to Scalia.

You have the stories of the oncologists, the cancer doctors, who have taken to the habit of buying particular drugs wholesale, writing prescriptions for them and selling them to the patient for whom they write the prescriptions. It's profitable to diagnose and act accordingly when they are the middle man. These are expensive drugs. On and on like this. The nature of what we accept as legitimate lobbying -- it's legitimate to contribute money to congressmen and senators, and use that entrée to persuade them to adopt or not adopt particular legislation. You're financing your own legislature. I'd like to write about all that.

Schwarz: Getting back to baseball, which hat are you going to wear on your Hall of Fame plaque if you get in?

Miller: Brooklyn Dodgers. It would have to be.

Schwarz: And in all seriousness, if it happens, what do you want the plaque to say? What should be your legacy for baseball posterity?

Miller: I really haven't thought about it. I don't know.

How about this: "He was the leader of the first true union in the history of the game, and working closely with the players he helped form the structure of what has been termed one of the strongest and best unions in the country. And contrary to certain beliefs, the arrival of the players union coincided with, and was instrumental in, the greatest prosperity and expansion the game has ever seen."

Alan Schwarz is the senior writer of Baseball America magazine and a regular contributor to ESPN.com.