Nashville, Tenn. ? At last, Bowie Kuhn beat Marvin Miller at something.

The late commissioner was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame on Monday while Miller was rejected by a revamped Veterans Committee stacked with those he regularly opposed – and beat – in arbitration and bargaining sessions that altered the history of the game.

“Bowie was a close friend and a respected leader who served as commissioner during an important period in history, amid a time of change,” commissioner Bud Selig said, adding: “I was surprised that Marvin Miller did not receive the required support given his important impact on the game.”

Former Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley, managers Dick Williams and Billy Southworth and ex-Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss also were elected.

Manager Whitey Herzog and umpire Doug Harvey each missed induction by a single vote. Ewing Kauffman, the former owner of the Royals, did not receive enough votes.

Dreyfuss helped bring peace between the American and National Leagues by arranging the first World Series in 1903. O’Malley united the East and West Coasts under baseball’s flag when he moved the Dodgers to Los Angeles.

Kuhn presided over the introduction of night games to the World Series and baseball’s first, tentative steps into national marketing. But the game also changed in ways he fiercely resisted: Free agency, salary arbitration and dozens of other benefits that Miller won for the players as the head of their union.

“I think it was rigged, but not to keep me out. It was rigged to bring some of these (people) in. It’s not a pretty picture,” Miller said by telephone after being informed of the results by the Associated Press. “It’s demeaning, the whole thing, and I don’t mean just to me. It’s demeaning to the Hall and demeaning to the people in it.”

Miller, who was head of the player’s union from 1966 to 1982, did not come close, receiving only three of 12 possible votes. Under the previous system, Miller received 63 percent of the votes earlier this year while Kuhn got 17 percent – a reversal noticed by Miller’s successor at the players’ union, Donald Fehr.

“Over the entire scope of the last half of the 20th century, no other individual had as much influence on the game of baseball as did Marvin Miller,” Fehr said.