In 1966, the Major League Baseball Players Association hired as their executive director former steelworker’s union economist Marvin Miller.Miller succeeded in turning what had been an ineffective company union into arguably the most powerful labor organization in the world.Of course, a natural part of that process would be work stoppages, of which there have been a total of eight so far (three lockouts and five strikes), both during Miller’s tenure and after.
Two of those work stoppages were very short.There was an eight-day strike to open up the 1980 season over free agent compensation, a precursor to the much longer 1981 strike over the same issue.