MLB executives and owners feared Marvin Miller, but they weren't the first. FBI documents reveal that the federal government, at the height of the Red Scare, undertook an embarrassingly extensive investigation into Miller's liberalism to determine whether or not he was a loyal citizen of the United States.

He was in the phone book. That's the thing that always got me about Marvin Miller, the former head of the MLB players association and the man who pulled baseball out of its crude prehistory. You expect your heroes to be unlisted. You don't expect to find one of them in the white pages, right there between a Marva and a …

Excerpted from Twilight of the Elites, available now wherever books are sold.

Murray Chass, senior writer for murraychass.com, recently threw heat at HOF Expansion Era committee member Tom Verducci for apparently voting against Marvin Miller. Verducci fired back, and thus the post became unique to the Chass oeuvre in that someone actually read it.

George Steinbrenner and Marvin Miller had perhaps the biggest impact on the modern era of baseball. Their failing to make the Hall of Fame just shows that the Veterans Committee is full of old farts who don't get/don't like the game today.

"Heh," Marvin Miller chuckles. "I haven't talked to Jim for a long while." Jim is Jim Bunning, the obstreperous shitbag who sought to deny thousands of Americans their jobless benefits but who, once upon a time, fought baseball's good fight.