Marvin Miller, the labor leader who built the Major League Baseball Players Association into sports’ most powerful union, died today. He was 95.

You won’t find Miller in baseball’s Hall of Fame, but that doesn’t mean he isn’t among the game’s most important figures. The Babe Ruth of labor negotiations, Miller took over a weak union in 1966 and immediately turned it into a force that would be modeled in other sports thereafter.

Miller led the union through a total of five work stoppages and, as adviser to the MLBPA, worked alongside it during three more. His victories were numerous. He led baseball players into the first collectively bargained contract in professional sports history in 1968; in 1972, he led the first major players’ strike in the history of American professional sports. Later that year, he led former St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood’s unsuccessful challenge of the reserve clause, the rule that gave owners sole control over player contracts and movement. In 1975, baseball’s independent arbitrator — who existed because of a union victory — invalidated the reserve clause in response to another Miller-led challenge, paving the way for free agency that gave players labor rights they had never had before.

Free agency ensured that baseball’s players wouldn’t be excluded from the new-found prosperity that came from television contracts. When Miller took over the union in 1966, the average salary was just $14,000. By 1976, it had grown to $52,000 and the next year, star players like Reggie Jackson received multimillion-dollar contracts. The rise in salaries bolstered the players’ once-meager pension plan, making it the real retirement program they had long sought. By the time he retired in 1982, the average salary was up to $245,000; on the day of his death, it exceeded $2.3 million.

Critics of professional sports often point to the astronomical salaries players now receive. Those are, in part, Miller’s doing, but that is a point to praise, not to criticize. Miller recognized that the labor of the athletes he represented had substantial value, and a $6,000 minimum salary that hadn’t moved in nearly two decades wasn’t close to meeting it. It was Miller who convinced players to think like union workers (he came from the steelworkers union) who had extracted better salaries and benefits from corporate owners in other industries; it was Miller who got players to hold firm during fights for their rights. It was Miller who, when players were angry at Flood for disrupting the status quo, eventually coalesced them behind the idea that they weren’t just lucky to play a boy’s game for a living, but that they had worth and rights and that neither was being honored by baseball’s employment structure.

His victories resonated both inside and outside baseball, which today is home not just to the strongest union in sports but perhaps the strongest union in America. The 1981 strike he led and the 1994 World Series-cancelling strike that followed still stand as models of solidarity and determination; rather than break the union, the ’94 strike seemingly broke owners, who finally realized they would have to negotiate in good faith. After labor disputes ground baseball to a halt eight times between 1972 and 1995, the sport hasn’t had a work stoppage since. Miller is gone, but the union that has made baseball prosperous for both owners and players today is built on the foundations he put in place.

“All players – past, present and future – owe a debt of gratitude to Marvin, and his influence transcends baseball,” MLBPA director Michael Weiner said in a statement. “Marvin, without question, is largely responsible for ushering in the modern era of sports, which has resulted in tremendous benefits to players, owners and fans of all sports.”

Miller’s victories spurred labor movements in the other major American sports, leaving a legacy that today makes sports one of the labor movement’s strongest fronts. It isn’t implausible to think that without him, sports today would be union-free games where the labor didn’t share in the prosperity gained by the corporate class. Even if baseball owners never get over themselves and put Miller in baseball’s Hall of Fame, his legacy will stand among the giants of sports. Marvin Miller didn’t just change baseball. He made all of our sports better games.

On July 1, 2009, Major League Baseball’s Florida Marlins were cruising toward a second-place finish in the National League’s East division. The same day, county commissioners in Miami-Dade County finally approved a package that would give the team public funding for a new stadium — $409 million in public bonds, to be precise — ending a struggle that had lasted nearly five years.

On April 4, 2012, Marlins Park opened, and the franchise that had won two World Series titles but hadn’t fielded a playoff team since 2003 was starting over. They were now the Miami Marlins, replete with a new stadium, new uniforms, and a host of new faces. Owner Jeff Loria, banking on big revenues from his shiny new stadium digs, had spent big, bringing in All-Stars like Jose Reyes and Mark Buerhle to give his fans a contender.

Last night, after the once-promising Marlins failed to contend for the East Division title and finished in last place, the team traded its best players — Reyes, Buerhle, and star pitcher Josh Johnson — to the Toronto Blue Jays in a lopsided deal that, combined with earlier trades of star third baseman Hanley Ramirez and closer Heath Bell, will almost assuredly keep the Marlins in the National League basement next year.

It turns out the promises Loria made to fans — that he’d spend the money it took to turn the Marlins into a contender — in order to secure a stadium deal were emptier than Marlins Park was all season.

From the start, Marlins Park has been a disaster. Negotiations between the Marlins, Miami, and Florida’s state government repeatedly broke down between 2004, when a new stadium was first proposed, and 2009, when a project was finally approved. A federal judge dismissed a lawsuit that attempted to put the funding plan to a popular vote, and once a deal was approved, the initial bond sale fell far short of expectations on Wall Street.

In the end, the cost of the stadium rose to $634 million. All told, the cost of repaying the bonds will be an estimated $2.4 billion over the next 40 years. The stadium deal, and leaks of official documents detailing franchise profits that indicated a higher value than the team had let on during negotiations (and that owners had pocketed revenue-sharing money), led to an investigation by the Securities and Exchange Commission.

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Now that we’re in the midst of playoff baseball, there’s been a lot of discussion at ESPNw and Jezebel over the past couple of days about how Major League Baseball’s first season with a dress code for reporters went. And a lot of people, including some of the women to whom it applies, aren’t very happy about it. As Erin Gloria Ryan writes at Jezebel:

The League was cognizant of possible charges of sexism when they put the code together, which is why they included a woman on the panel behind the policy. But just because a vagina was present doesn’t mean that the end product didn’t turn out a little dickish. The new code addresses nearly exclusively wardrobe features found on women’s clothing, banning such non-gender neutral staples as short shorts, sheer fabrics, tank tops, one shoulder tops, and strapless tops and dresses. For women who work in warm weather environments covering a sport that plays right through triple digit temperatures, being barred from going sleeveless often means filling the undersides of sleeves with unladylike pit stains.

The best practical argument against the dress code is heat, and as someone who gets easily bedraggled while sitting in the stands at a baseball game, I sympathize with female sideline reporters who have to stand, doing their jobs, in full sun, for three hours. That’s an issue that seems like it could be in conjunction with both the league and news organizations: if Major League Baseball wants sideline reporters to dress a certain way, perhaps it could also require teams to provide them easy access to break rooms, water, shade in between takes, and it could set standards for how much time the organizations it credential games have to allow its reporters out of the sun or heat on days when the temperature ventures above a certain threshhold.

If MLB is really concerned about the presence of attractive women on the sidelines at games, teams could also just decline to credential sideline reporters of any gender, from any organization, confining interviews to the locker room and dugout, and commentary to the broadcast booth. There are exceptionally good sideline reporters, but there are also an enormous number of substanceless ones, and the league could easily shift patterns of coverage with new credentialing rules. The thought of listening to a few more minutes per game of Joe Buck talking about sports isn’t a prospect I find particularly attractive. But I wouldn’t complain if the networks had to think a bit more carefully and creatively about how to structure their coverage without cheesecake or fluff interviews as an option.

At the end of the day, though MLB should have saved itself a headache and been as clear and detailed about what kind of clothing is professional for men as well as for women. I don’t really think a one-sleeved top in sheer fabric is professional attire. But the fact that Craig Sager’s suits are considered less distracting and unprofessional than the suggestion of a woman’s breasts says a great deal more about us than it does about the people wearing the clothes.