Long read: "Major league baseball has a long but little-known history of rebels, reformers, and radicals."

Bud Selig is to be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. That's actually more repulsive as Donald Trump being elected president.

As a corrective, this long but necessary survey, ranging from the early days to the present.

Out of Left Field, by Peter Dreier and Robert Elias (Jacobin)

Major league baseball has a long but little-known history of rebels, reformers, and radicals.

... Despite their courageous and pioneering efforts, neither (Marvin) Miller nor (Curt) Flood have been elected to the Hall of Fame. While Miller was alive, the baseball establishment blocked him from the Cooperstown shrine five times. The owners and executives who control the Hall of Fame kept changing the voting rules to keep him out.

Yet baseball experts overwhelmingly agree with Hall of Fame broadcaster Red Barber, who claimed that Miller is one of the three most important figures in baseball history, alongside Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson.

Flood’s fifteen years of Hall of Fame eligibility ended in 1996 when he garnered just 15.1 percent of baseball writers’ votes. He died the following year at fifty-nine, which made him eligible to enter the Hall of Fame posthumously if the Veterans Committee voted him in. There’s been no effort to resuscitate his candidacy.