With the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) locked out and mired in a protracted negotiation process with a group of billionaire owners, it might be instructive to look back at one of the sport’s first organized labor struggles to fire valuable lessons about work, solidarity, inclusion and class consciousness.
During the first weeks of the 1889 National League season, baseball’s biggest stars spoke openly in the press about a possible work stoppage. Future Hall of Famer pitcher-turned-shortstop John Ward said The New York Clipper which requires [will] be made on the tycoons during the championship season, when, if necessary, a strike might be made effective. Ward had just met the Brotherhood of Professional Base-Ball Players, the sport’s premier union, which included nearly every player in the league, including Ward, who was its president. “When the players came together,” Ward later wrote, “their outrage was extreme.” They discussed the July 4 strike, when each team would play a double-header in front of expected sold-out crowds.
It had taken several years for the National League since its inception in 1876 to reach a point of profitability. But by the late 1880s, the league held monopoly power over most of the nation’s largest markets and over the contracts of most of the nation’s top players. Baseball had become hugely popular and the National League was cashing in.
While National League owners saw profits rise for most of its franchises throughout the 1880s, player salaries in the league remained relatively stagnant. A “reserve rule” prevented players from moving from one team to another and therefore from negotiating better contracts. Players were tied to their club for life unless they were sold, often against their will, to another club.
The straw that broke the camel’s back in 1889 was a scheme developed by Indianapolis owner John Brush that assigned one of five ratings to each player based on both their level of play and their “habits. , seriousness and special qualifications”. A-tier players would earn no more than $2,500 (about $75,000 in 2022), while E-tier players would earn $1,500 and would also be required to work as ticket takers or in the field.
But the Brotherhood did not strike on July 4 or any other day of the 1889 season. Instead, he embarked on something more ambitious – he secretly planned to start a new league, called the “ Players League”.
The Players League would feature teams owned cooperatively by seemingly friendly players and investors. Located in seven of the same eight cities and playing an almost identical schedule, the new league was in direct economic competition with the National League. Unlike the National League, however, the Players League offered players an equal voice in the governance of the league and the majority of its profits. The new league did not include the reserve rule.
The vast majority of National League players in 1889, including several who would later be inducted into the Hall of Fame, played for the Players League in 1890. Equipped with better players and new, more attractive stadiums, the Players League attracted many more fans. to its matches than the National League.
The Players’ League presented itself as a labor league, a league that would appeal to skilled craftsmen as well as the middle-class gentlemen that the National League had long attracted. In a climate of heightened industrial worker unrest, the Players’ League found favor with the unions. The American Federation of Commerce and Labor Unions endorsed the proposed league at its December 1889 annual meeting. Several other local and national labor organizations also offered their solidarity.
Ward told a reporter from Sports life in 1889, “We have the sympathy of the labor organizations. the [Players League] is an experiment on our part to involve the men who do the work in the benefits of the hobby. If we succeed, it will be a demonstration that such a principle can succeed. That we receive higher wages and our working hours are shorter does not make them less workers.
But who were the people “who did the work” of producing professional baseball? For Ward and his Players League brethren, only the men in uniform on the pitch did the work that generated value for the sport. It was therefore the players, and the players alone, who had to “share in the profits of the pastime”.
While a baseball game has always depended on the hard work of baseball players, they aren’t the only ones who “do the work” to make it happen, whether in the 19th century or the 21st. The Players League needed to hire carpenters, masons, and other workers to build and maintain a new ballpark for each team. Players depended on workers to make their uniforms, bats, balls and gloves. Music groups had to be hired to entertain the crowds during breaks in the action. Someone had to sell fruit, tobacco and scorecards to fans. And a cadre of sportswriters relayed details of the game to newspaper readers across the country.
This workforce has expanded in the modern age, as baseball diamonds are larger and more complex, the range of food and merchandise is more plentiful, and the media needs a much more complicated infrastructure. to broadcast matches. In other words, thousands of workers “do the work” of producing professional baseball. And most of these people are, to varying degrees, then and now, exploited and underpaid.
While the Players’ League has welcomed the solidarity offered by off-field workers, it hasn’t provided much solidarity in return. In Chicago, the Players League hired scabs to finish building their ballpark in a citywide strike for better pay and an eight-hour workday. “I went to [Players League Secretary, Frank] Brunell, and kicked, hard kicked,” said TG Howard, secretary of the United Carpenters’ Council of Chicago. But the Players League continued to hire non-union workers for the job, even offering them police protection after a group of unionized carpenters stormed the site to intimidate scabs into stopping work. to work.
Additionally, the Players’ League upheld baseball’s racist “color line,” refusing to even consider admitting black players to its ranks, even though there were many players of color who were, from l everyone thinks, as talented as anyone in sport. Nor did the Players League program include the hundreds of professional baseball players who worked in the sport’s many other lesser leagues.
The Players League may have presented itself as a progressive working-class league, but it failed to develop a more inclusive class consciousness. He did not see how the fate of his members was, literally at times, of the same order as that of other workers.
Rather, the Players League expected the handful of investors who helped sustain the league to act in the best interests of the players. They foolishly thought that these rich men, who had all made their fortunes by exploiting workers in other industries, would abandon their capitalist class consciousness and work in solidarity with the players.
It was a big mistake. Just after the end of the 1890 season, when Boston was awarded the championship pennant, the league’s non-gaming capitalists announced that they would partner with the owners of the National League to consolidate the two leagues into one. While many players were co-owners of their clubs, they did not own a large enough share of any of the teams to prevent their non-player investors from jumping ship. In January 1891, the Players’ League officially folded. Most players have returned to the National League. The reserve rule has been reinstated. Salaries quickly fell to their pre-1890 figures. Baseball’s reserve rule remained in place until 1975, when the MLBPA, led by Marvin Miller and Curt Flood, forced Major League Baseball to abolish the rule and usher in a new era of free will.
As today’s clash between baseball owners and players escalates, many workers and progressives are expressing their solidarity with the MLBPA, as they should. UNITE HERE, the union that represents thousands of baseball stadium workers, for example, recently wrote a declaration of solidarity with the players’ union: “Our industries may differ, but our fight for a level playing field between owners and the workers who generate owners’ wealth is the same.”
While such gestures of solidarity are important, players and their colleagues on and off the pitch should heed the lessons of The Players League – solidarity must work both ways and across racial and industrial divides. And workers need to identify with each other, not their bosses. MLBPA retweeted statement from UNITE HERE and free agent pitcher Sean Doolittle tweeted in response, “Solidarity! Baseball wouldn’t be the same without stadium workers, transportation, hospitality and apparel. But time will tell to what extent this solidarity will materialize on a larger scale.
The Players Alliance has spoken out for racial justice and worked to make baseball at all levels more racially inclusive since George Floyd was murdered by Minneapolis police. But as the 150 African-American gamers who make up the Players Alliance will be the first to tell you, there’s still a lot of work to be done in this regard.
Several Major League players have pledged to support Advocates for Minor Leaguers, which seeks economic justice for the sport’s underpaid minor league players. Without union representation, however, these players are largely dependent on the generosity of MLB’s billionaire owners, which has not come forward.
While the MLBPA deserves all it seeks, more needs to be done beyond the current collective bargaining process to ensure that everyone “who does the work can share in the benefits of the hobby.”
