Sports labor pioneer Miller dead at 95

NEW YORK – Marvin Miller was a labor economist who never played a day of organized baseball. He preferred tennis. Yet he transformed the national pastime as surely as Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, television and night games. Miller, the union boss who won free agency for baseball players in 1975, ushering in an era of multimillion-dollar contracts and athletes who switch teams at the drop of a batting helmet, died Tuesday at 95. He had been diagnosed with liver cancer in August. “I think he’s the most important baseball figure of the last 50 years,” former baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent said.