By Barry M. Bloom / MLB.com

Marvin Miller (left) announces the end of the 13-day players strike in 1972. Alongside Miller is Joe Torre, then of the Cardinals. Both came up short in Wednesday's Hall of Fame Veterans Committee vote. (AP)

"It would be an honor to get in," Miller said late last week when reached on the telephone from New York. "But if I don't that would be OK. It doesn't change anything."

Miller, the former executive director and virtual founder of the Major League Baseball Players Association, was third among the choices for the "builders" category with 35 votes. He needed 60 votes -- 75 percent of the committee -- to be elected. Under the new rules, candidates for that category can only be elected every four years. Miller turns 86 in April.

Miller was once an adversary of former baseball owners and executives alike. He took the union's top job in 1966 when the average salary was $19,000, the pension plan was a mess and players were bound to one team for perpetuity by the reserve clause.

By the time he faded away from the scene after the short players strike of 1985, during which he served the union as a consultant, the players association was considered one of the strongest unions in the U.S.

"I'm most proud that the organization is a still a tight knit, effective group," said Miller. "That was true then and it's still true 20 years after I left it."

He plays tennis, travels with his wife of 64 years, Terry -- including a trip to Japan last November for the MLB-Japan All-Star Series -- and remembers his days battling the established baseball powers fondly.

"When I came on board, the baseball players knew nothing about what it was like to form a union," he said. "But they were the quickest learners of any group of people I ever represented. It was like they had a real hunger for knowledge and wanted to act quickly upon it."

Among the 58 former players in the Hall of Fame and on the Veterans Committee are a number who benefited from Miller's labor expertise, including Robin Roberts, the pitcher who was on the original steering committee that selected Miller as the union's first executive director. The list of players in the Hall from Miller's era is long and glorious and includes Tom Seaver, Joe Morgan, Steve Carlton, Reggie Jackson, Jim Palmer, Robin Yount, Phil Niekro and Nolan Ryan.

That group evidently helped comprise the basis for Millers' 35 votes.

Miller's impact on the game was exponential. The average Major Leaguer's salary was $241,000 when he left and had soared to $2.3 million last season. The reserve clause was wiped out by an arbitrator's decision and led the way to free agency, which began in 1977. The salary arbitration system was negotiated under Miller. The pension plan, his first project, was tied to television revenue and expanded under Miller into what is now a $100 million piece of the Collective Bargaining Agreement.

The perception of baseball's players changed as well.

"They earned their dignity," Miller said.

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They also endured two strikes under Miller, in 1972 and 1981. The price of all the gains did not come cheaply in the last quarter of the 20th century.

Miller said he has to laugh. His main contribution, he feels, is that he built an organization with continuity. From 1966 to the present, Miller and Don Fehr have been the MLBPA's main executive directors. Meanwhile, there have been six commissioners, and only two ownership groups remain from the end of Miller's tenure -- George Steinbrenner's with the New York Yankees and Jerry Reinsdorf and Eddie Einhorn of the Chicago White Sox.

Commissioner Bud Selig, of course, was the principal owner of the Milwaukee Brewers back then.

Barry M. Bloom is a reporter for MLB.com. This story was not subject to the approval of Major League Baseball or its clubs.