BALL
AND CHAIN
As baseball's pennant races approach their dramatic climax, we
can all look forward to that furious, no-holds-barred competition
that marks nearly every season of our national pastime. I'm referring,
of course, to the battle between owners and players over the game's
general agreement.
The
history of baseball's labor struggles is one that has always stood
the traditional roles of labor and management on their heads.
The main goal of the union has simply been to secure for its members
what has always been guaranteed to every other American, this
side of slavery and indentured servitude—that is, the right
to sell their services in the marketplace. In response, the baseball
owners have adamantly demanded socialism—at least for themselves.
There
seems to be something about the business of baseball that turns
otherwise agile minds to mush. In 1922, Oliver Wendell Holmes,
Jr., ruled that baseball was beyond the writ of the nation's interstate
commerce and anti-trust laws because baseball was a sport and
not a business, and because "exhibitions of baseball are purely
state affairs." These judgements must have come as a surprise
to, say, fans plunking down their money to see Boston play St.
Louis.
And
no less an advocate of the free market than George Will has insisted
that professional baseball cannot survive without salary caps,
revenue-sharing, and new strategems to ensure that the public
subsidize still glistening, new stadia, complete with luxury boxes.
Apparently the invisible hand no longer works when it is yielded
by the employees.
For
all of Mr. Will's rhetoric, the players have been riding a 30-year
winning streak in their battles against management, and we shouldn't
expect anything to change very soon. For one thing, the owners'
contention that they cannot possibly make money and that "small-market
teams" (an infinitely fungible definition) cannot survive without
salary caps, has been sadly battered of late. The 2000 season
was the most competitive in 130 years of major-league play-the
only year, ever, in which no team won as much as 60 percent or
less than 40 percent of its games. Attendance, broadcast revenues,
and franchise values continue to spiral merrily upward-as they
have in pretty much every other season, ever since baseball was
first forced, kicking and screaming, into the free market.
Yet
the primary reason that the players will probably win again is,
ironically enough, the same reason why baseball's owners had things
pretty much their own way for almost a century. That is, the root
cause of all this strife, the infamous "reserve clause."
The
reserve clause dates back to 1879, only the fourth year of the
fledgling National League, and only eight years after the founding
of the first professional baseball league—and the first professional
sports league, period—in American history.
"Like
everything else American it came with a rush," John Montgomery
Ward, the man who would lead the first great challenge to the
owners, wrote of baseball. "The game is suited to the national
temperament. It requires strength, courage and skill; it is full
of dash and excitement and though a most difficult game in which
to excel, it is yet extremely simple in its first principles and
easily understood by everyone."
First
principles for the eight National League owners was that they
must keep salaries down. To save themselves from competitive bidding,
they came up with a secret agreement, under which they would each
"reserve" the rights to five players. That is, it didn't matter
when the signed contracts these players had expired. The teams
still owned the "rights" to them for the following season. And
the season after that. And the season after that, until kingdom
come, unless the teams deigned to release them. Or to swap, or
sell them to another team for money—of which the players
in question would see none.
Soon,
the reserve clause was expanded to every player in the National
League. Then to every player in the National League's new "rival,"
the American Association—and then to all minor leagues, everywhere,
in what was now dubbed organized baseball (as in, organized crime).
Baseball players could sign over the rights to their labor, in
perpetuity, to a nationwide cartel—or they could find another
planet to play on.
The
great champion of the reserve clause was Albert Spalding, owner
of the National League's Chicago franchise, and one of the game's
early star pitchers. Spalding was a visionary, and a fierce proponent
of his game, who took a boatload of star players on a world tour
following the 1888 season. The Americans ended up playing a game
in the sands before the Sphinx (and later, seeing who could hit
that venerable monument in the eye with a baseball), and tried
to play one in the Coliseum.
Alas,
those savages in London and Paris proved too unsophisticated to
appreciate our national game. Spalding was disappointed-not least
because he was already well on his way to turning a single sporting
goods store into a multi-million dollar empire. Already, Spalding
supplied all baseball equipment to the National League, and even
published its bestselling annual, Spalding's Official Base Ball
Guide—a publication that never failed to extoll the contributions
of one Albert J. Spalding to the game of baseball.
By
1889, Spalding and his fellow owners had decided to go even further
in containing labor costs. All players would now be classified
from "A" to "E," with none to receive a salary of more than $2,500,
or less than $1,500—and with all classifications to be decided
exclusively by the owners.
This brought the players to a boil. Then as now, fans and sportswriters
tended to be less than sympathetic to the players, envying them
both their lifestyles and their salaries. It was true that $1,500
was several times what the average American working man or woman
made at the time. But players were regularly charged for everything
from the drinking water on their benches to the laundry bills
for their uniforms, and owners had got into the habit of leveling
fines for all sorts of "infractions," such as dropping a flyball
or striking out.
In
disgust, the players turned to John M. Ward. Like Spalding, Ward
was a self-made man. Orphaned as a teenager, he had broken into
the majors at the age of 18, and became one of the stars of the
nineteenth century. Handsome and debonair, with a bristling moustache,
Ward was something of a rake—as Bryan Di Salvatore recounts
in his entertaining biography, A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life
and Times of John Montgomery Ward—marrying one popular Broadway
actress, while carrying on an affair with another.
Ward's
professional life was more admirable; during the off-season, he
took degrees in both law and philosophy at Columbia. On the diamond
he won 158 decisions and pitched a perfect game; then, when his
arm gave out, he switched to shortstop and racked up over 2,000
hits. He was always a canny, daring, and opportunistic player—both
on and off the field.
From
the 1885 season onward, Ward had been organizing his fellow "base-ballists"
into a union—the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players.
Following the institution of the "classification" system, Ward
and his brothers made their move. They announced their intention—not
to strike, but to form their own, third major league in 1890,
the Players' League.
The
owners scoffed at the idea that the players could run their own
league. Then, in the first homestand of the new season, the Players'
League outdrew the National League by 3-1, going head to head
in one city after another.
After
that, both sides used attendance figures as propaganda, but all
sources indicate that the players had the better of it. Spalding
gave away tickets right and left, and threw money at any star
who would stay in his National League. Even so, by the end of
the season the owners were reeling. The American Association was
mortally wounded, the National League little better off. The crucial
New York franchise was saved only when Spalding himself poured
money into it, and got his fellow owners—along with some
known gamblers—to do the same.
This
was war, though, and Spalding was determined to win. As craftily
as he had once picked runners off base, the old pitcher now picked
off the players' financial backers one by one, bluffing them into
selling out. The players, meanwhile, were lured back by the promise
to suspend the reserve clause—just this once. It was all
over before the Players League could even take the field again.
In a remarkably convivial surrender over the winter, Ward and
his backers spent an afternoon drinking and singing with Spalding
in a Manhattan saloon. "Pass the wine around," Ward stood to say
in eulogy. "The League is dead, long live the League." Ward would
return to play and manage in the National League, before embarking
on a successful career as a lawyer. He and Spalding would both
end up in the Baseball Hall of Fame, in Cooperstown.
The
reserve clause, though, would live on and on—and the effect,
meanwhile, was just what the players had feared. Within two years
of the demise of the Players' League, the average salary was cut
in almost in half, and even as late as 1966, it was a mere $19,000.
That
year, a revived players' association decided to hire on an obscure,
steel union economist named Marvin Miller as executive director.
Miller had never played in the major leagues—but he proved
every bit as determined and a good deal shrewder than John Ward.
Under his direction, the players would use strikes, lockouts,
court cases, and arbitration to grab a real piece of baseball's
ever-mushrooming action. Today, ballplayers can become free agents,
with full rights to themselves, after six years of major league
service. This is still longer than most careers, but combined
with binding arbitration and minimum salary provisions it has
pushed the average big league salary up over $1 million—evoking
more howls from those fans and sportswriters who, in the same
position, would certainly turn away all that lucre for the love
of the game.
And
the reserve clause—still lives. There's the rub. For even
if the owners were to crush the union, by doing so they would
dissolve the very agreement that preserves the clause. Any individual
player would be free to sue, and his chances of winning would
be very good—thereby ushering in the very last thing the
owners want, a full, free market. After all, is there anyone in
America, even a judge, who still believes that baseball is just
a game, and not a business?
©
2000 Copyright Forbes Inc.
