I've recently been reading A Whole Different Ball Game: The Sport and Business of Baseball, the autobiography of Marvin Miller, the founder of the Major League Baseball Players Association, and I stumbled across something interesting in relation to family law and fatherhood.

(I have been, by the way, supportive of the MLBPA in general. Baseball players make very good money now--as they should--but for most of the history of baseball they were terribly exploited. For details, I suggest Jim Bouton's 1970 book Ball Four. It wasn't until Miller organized the MLBPA in the late 1960s, and the strikes of 1972 and 1981, that baseball players received a proper share of baseball's huge revenues).

Anyway, Miller was discussing baseball in the late 1980s/early 1990s and the arbitrary, legally unsupportable punishments meted out by the Commissioner of Baseball to George Steinbrenner, Pete Rose, and others. Miller pointed out that there was little if any due process here, and that the punishments would not have held up in court were those on the receiving end able to make use of a judicial proceeding. So why was the Commissioner able to get away with them?

According to Miller, baseball commissioners were (and, I think, probably still are) able to get away with violating people's rights because they have the power to act in "the best interests of baseball." Sound familiar? This is exactly the same as the judicial abuses that occur under the "Best Interests of the Child Standard," wherein a judge can do practically anything he wants if he perceives it to be "best" for the child, including major abrogations of fathers' (and occasionally mothers') rights.

There is a distinction, in a sense, because the Commissioner of Baseball is the representative of the baseball owners, whereas a family law judge is supposedly neutral, though in practice these judges sometimes aren't neutral at all.

Miller quotes Steinbrenner, of all people, on the violations allowable under the "best interests of baseball" doctrine. Steinbrenner says:

"If the commissioner can't get a guy on this rule or that rule, he can always get him on 'the best interests of baseball.' The rule...places the commissioner above the law and baseball above the law of the land."

Substitute "family law judge" for "baseball commissioner" and you have the situation in family court.

This entry was posted on Monday, February 12th, 2007 at 4:38 pm and is filed under Family Law, Baseball/Sports, Fathers' Rights/Noncustodial parents' rights, Shared Parenting, Marriage, Divorce/Separation/Child Custody. You can trackback from your own site.