Maury Brown, who runs The Biz of Baseball blog, has part one of an interview with former MLBPA general counsel and player agent Dick Moss.

Some highlights:

Bizball: Walter O’Malley

Moss: Well, Walter O’Malley is an especially interesting man. I am so appalled that both Walter O’Malley and Marvin Miller are not in the Hall of Fame.

O’Malley – for as long as Kuhn was there – O’Malley ran baseball. He was the most powerful force in baseball. There were many who used to call him the crocodile. What they were referring to was that he would take positions on various things and it would be like if you were going in one direction and then he went in another direction and then he went in another direction until he ended up where he wanted to be and he really controlled the others. That was all true in the Kuhn administration.

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Bizball: Gussie Busch

Moss: Gussie Busch was, uh… I think he was appalled about the idea that players would have a union. There was a time when a labor dispute ended in a strike. And at a owner’s meeting Gussie sat up and made this long ranting speech about how they had to take the players on, and not compromise. Walter O’Malley at one point stood up and said, “Gussie, sit down.” And that was the end of that.

Over at LA Observed, Dave Davis interviews Jim Brosnan, author of The Long Season and Pennant Race, two of the best baseball books I've ever read. These were the first books written by a player with a real look at how a season unfolded.

LAO: What was the reaction to the book by fellow ballplayers – and did you lose any friends because of the book?

JB: I didn't lose any friends. There were a couple guys that I didn't like -– and they didn't like me -– and it remained that same way.

Joe Adcock hit a home run off me and said, "Stick that in your book." That got around: Frank Thomas said to me, "Stick that in your book." For me, it got to be a pleasurable joke.

Joe Garagiola was quoted as saying that I was a traitor. I heard that from a couple other people, who didn't know what "traitor" meant in the first place. It never became a serious thing. Since then, Joe apologized when we were getting into the Emil Verban Memorial Society. [Verban was a second baseman for, among other teams, the Cubs.] He said, "I take that all back. Your book was funny." Of course, he wrote a book called, Baseball Is a Funny Game.