CONCOURSE — A legendary baseball scout who worked for the Yankees was stripped of his pinstripes for being too old, a lawsuit charges.
Robert Miske, 80, says he was forced to hand in his radar gun and unceremoniously end his career when the Yankees canned him without explanation after the 2014 season.
Miske had been working for the team for six years, scouting players during spring training and Triple A squads in northern New York. He sometimes worked 70 hours per week, but received compensation that was less than the minimum wage, according to the lawsuit.
He is suing the team, its owners, Hank and Hal Steinbrenner, its general manager, Brian Cashman, and its director of professional scouting, William Eppler, claiming he was drastically underpaid and discriminated against for his age.
“The Yankees purposefully and illegally misclassified Mr. Miske as an independent contractor and paid him a pittance of $1,000 per month despite handing out contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars and raking in revenue last year of approximately $500 million as estimated by Forbes,” the lawsuit says.
As if giving him the ax wasn’t bad enough, the Yankees tried to block Miske from receiving unemployment, the lawsuit says.
But Miske, who worked as a professional scout for five decades and lives in Amherst, N.Y., fought back against the hardball tactics.
He got the Department of Labor to rule that he was an employee entitled to unemployment, according to the lawsuit filed in Erie County Supreme Court earlier this year. During a Labor Department hearing, Eppler even testified that he had no problem with Miske's scouting reports.
The lawsuit says that, during his tenure with the Yankees, management made snide remarks about his age.
“By way of example, Mr. Miske was told by the Yankees that he was ‘taking well’ to receiving an iPad that they required he use, and his suggestions and comments were often ignored at scouting meetings,” the lawsuit says.
Miske, a member of the Professional Baseball Scout Hall of Fame, had worked as a scout from 1964 until his termination. He has worked for the Los Angeles Dodgers and did a previous stint with the Yankees from 1994 to 2001, when the team won several World Series championships.
Despite his decades of experience, Miske was getting signs from the Yankees that it was time to go.
Before the start of the 2014 season, Eppler told Miske that it would be his last because “50 years in scouting is enough.”
The lawsuit says that Miske planned to work for several more years. It also says after Miske’s firing, the Yankees hired five scouts — four of whom were under 40 and none had any professional scouting experience.
“The Yankees took a concerted approach to replace the older members of their scouting staff with younger members, individuals that the more youthful Cashman and Eppler felt more comfortable around due to their own relative inexperience in comparison to employees such as Mr Miske,” the lawsuit says.
Miske and his lawyers did not respond to a request for comment.
The Yankees also did not respond to a request for comment.
