NEW YORK – Marvin Miller was a labor economist who never played a day of organized baseball;
he preferred tennis. Yet he transformed the national pastime as surely as Babe Ruth, Jackie Robinson, television and night games.

Miller, the union boss who won free agency for baseball players in 1975, ushering in an era of multimillion-dollar contracts and athletes who switch teams at the drop of a batting helmet, died Tuesday at 95. He was diagnosed with liver cancer in August.

“I think he’s the most important baseball figure of the last 50 years,” former baseball Commissioner Fay Vincent said. “He changed not just the sport, but the business of the sport, permanently. He truly emancipated the baseball player – and in the process, all professional athletes. Prior to his time, they had few rights. At the moment, they control the games.”