The Economic History of Baseball, Part 1: Nineteenth Century Baseball and the Plantation Mentality

 

Baseball’s not in great shape these days. TV ratings for post-season games have been in a steady decline for over a decade. Its overall popularity has been falling for longer to football. The racial divide in the game has also become clear: the most recent World Series was the first one since 1950 not to have any African-American players on either team.

The ownership knows this very well and has been making fixes to try and lure fans back. They have continued to expand the postseason to try and increase interest in teams that wouldn’t contend any other way, which continues to earn push back from purists. They have begun to move games from cable and network TV to streaming services, hoping to gain a new audience. Their attempted experiment at the ‘Field of Dreams’ game inspired some interest to a game of the week. But they have continued to make choice against their own history, continue to trade purists for economics. At this year’s All-Star Game, rather than players where their team uniforms, all players wore uniforms that were sponsored by Nike, which earned them more bad press than the economic boost could have provided.

All of these changes are basically cosmetic, which if you know the history of the game, is basically what ownership has done since the sport became a business. Baseball, you see, is arguably the most conservative sport in American history. I don’t necessarily mean in a social way – though given how troubled their history when race relations has always been, and their continuing resistance to women being anything other than customers, there’s a very good argument for that. I mean in a purely fiscal way. We shouldn’t be surprised by that: baseball is a business and we all know.

I actually planned to write this article in conjunction with the one I did about the state of Hollywood, because there are certain comparisons with the histories, the nostalgia and the propaganda factor. There is, however, a vital difference between the two. The nostalgia factor in baseball will lean towards the past in many ways and in a sense the participants to contribute to it. What is left out, however, is the underlying fact that has been a truth from the beginning: it is the fact that the players are always overpaid. I’m not talking about today when the weakest player is a millionaire; I’m talking back when they had to take jobs in the winter to make ends meet, when there was no pension once you left the game, and when ballplayers where essentially chattel and had no control of their own destiny.

When Curt Flood challenged the reserve clause in 1969, he referred to himself as a ‘well-paid slave’. He was castigated by the establishment and the press for stating what anyone who played baseball for a century knew was a simple fact.  Yet in so many documentaries about the sport in the past, they have overlooked this fact. HBO spent much of the nineties guilty of this particular conceit. They did a series referred to as Baseball When The Grass Was Real. It might just as well have been called: Baseball When The Players Worked The Fields.

And the thing is sportswriters are more than happy to let this conceit continue today. Whenever they write about the history of the game – such as they did this year when Aaron Judge broke the American League record for home runs – the New York press spent a lot of time doing what amounted to an apology tour for Roger Maris. Left out of the fact was that even when Maris broke the home run that year, it did him no good negotiate his contract the next year. Their was no bonus for him, and when he tried to get his salary doubled – he only made $37,500 that year – management balked. Doubling a player’s salary was not something the Yankees would do, no matter how legendary a season it was. They also had no problem trading him away to St. Louis when they thought he was used up as a player.

Sportswriters endlessly complain about how outrageous players salaries have become the last thirty years. But their blame is always cast as the players. An anonymous owner once said: “Free agency is the only system where I have to match what my dumbest competitor will pay.” And that’s been the truth since it began. Yet somehow, the players who create this revenue for their owners always get the brunt of the blame rather than management. It may be easier to do so when the clear cost is on the field every day, but management never seems to bear the brunt of it. Why should they? For over a century prior to this, they perfected the art of convincing the public that the players, who had no cards to negotiate with, were selfish for demanding to pay well below what they were truly worth.

I am not a believer in the idea of the ‘People’s History of America,’ but there’s a fairly good argument for certain parts of a people’s history of baseball. Because these days, the professional baseball player is the clearest example of the triumph of the union over capitalism. It was a century long struggle in which the owners were ‘plantation owners’ and the slaves had nowhere to escape from. The players spent a century struggling to earn their freedom, with even the most minor freedoms being snatched away from them for decades. And when they finally managed to win in the 1970s, the owners have never forgiven them for it, continue their horrible behavior, and are still essentially winning the PR war. There’s a good argument that every major scandal that has affected baseball happened purely because of the owners behavior – but the players are the ones who get worse PR for it to this day.

This series will do what amounts to an in-depth look at what baseball has been like from the beginning. Sports fans and leftists might well get equal enjoyment for it. Bill Veeck, an outlier for owners across all sports is famous for saying: “Baseball must be a great game because the owners haven’t figured out how to kill it.” This article will show the truth of this saying.

Part 1: Nineteenth Century Baseball

The National League was founded in 1876. The game had more or less had been a business for more than a few years, but this was the first true attempt to codify it. In 1871, a group of club owners led by William Hulbert established the first version of it, and included in their player’s contract what would become known as ‘the reserve clause’.

Essentially, it gave the club power to control the player for the next year. At first it was just for six years, eventually it lasted for the professional life of the player. Few players objected at the time: in their minds, it guaranteed employment the following season. Those who disagreed were fired, and then blacklisted.

None of the ballplayers foresaw what this meant. The owners interpreted the reserve clause to mean that they essentially owned the player. It meant that should they choose, they could release him when his productivity became negligible and that they could trade him – or sell him – to other clubs without his consent. And with the agreement between the owners to all abide by this clause, that meant the player had to accept the salary the club offered and if he didn’t like it, he had no leverage. No club would sign a player who refused to play for another team.

As a result salaries for every player, star or utility, were always artificially low. The salary cap for the remainder of the nineteenth century was $2,000 and most made much less. The players did not like this, but with no recourse they just swallowed it – in the nineteenth century the concept of the union was still one that no industry, much less one as new as baseball would have dared consider.

The game prospered financially for the next twenty years. In 1881, the American Association was founded as a rival league. The main distinctions between the league were based on a different kind of fan: ticket prices were lower, games were played on Sundays (baseball would not move to that point until early in the next century) and alcohol was served at the games, something the National League would not do. The two leagues co-existed for the next eight years, actually staging championship contests that were the earliest models for what would become the World Series. There were few conflicts, mainly because both leagues contained the reserve clause. This stasis might have been indefinite, were it not for the actions of a player named John Montgomery Ward.

In an era when few men where college educated, Ward was a college graduate. He was a superb pitcher and shortstop and he was openly contemptuous of the financial system that bound ball-players to the clubs for life. And he decided to do something about it.

If one were to consider baseball at the time little more than slavery, then John Montgomery Ward could be considered the sport’s equivalent of Nat Turner. He formed the first professional union – what was called the Brotherhood – in 1890. And after the latest contract not only led to a salary cap of $2500, but charged players rent for their uniforms, Ward staged what amount to a revolt. Working in concert with other owners and over seventy fellow major players, he helped found a league of his own: The Player’s League.

National League President A.G. Spaulding, the baseball equivalent of Vanderbilt and Carnegie, was infuriated and declared ‘war without quarter’. He waged costly law suits, threatened to blacklist anyone who joined the Player’s League and offered huge bonuses to those who would stay. His success was decidedly mixed. King Kelly, one of the biggest stars in baseball at the time, was offered $10,000 to rejoin his old National League team. He turned it down. “I need the money, but I can’t go back on the boys,” he told Spaulding. Spaulding was so impressed by his integrity that he not only backed down, he asked Kelly if he needed any money.

The problem was that three leagues were too many, and attendance suffered for all three leagues. By the end of the 1890 season, Spaulding himself knew how much financial trouble he was in, and decided to run a bluff. He demanded absolute surrender from Ward and his owners. Perhaps if they had known how precarious Major League Baseball’s situation was, history might have changed. But no one in the Players League was a position to gamble: the league had lost more than $300,000 and the investors could not support it.

The end result was that both the Player’s League and the American Association collapsed. Spalding claimed victory, but it would soon become hollow. Now swelled to twelve teams and with only two real contenders – the Boston Beaneaters and the Baltimore Orioles – attendance dwindled across the league. Other factors contributed – a depression in 1893 and the bad reputation baseball was getting. Brawling was prominent on the field, and it often spread among the fans itself. By the end of the 19th century, the game was in trouble.

I mentioned in  an earlier article about the founding of the American League, but here are some more details. Founder Ban Johnson went out of his way to recruit stars of the National League with promises of better pay and more freedom. When the National League eventually sued for peace in 1902, a new commission was founded, ostensibly with both leagues being equal but Johnson essentially was in charge. The moment he did, both leagues went back to business as usual, with salaries going back to even lower. And on the commission, the players had no representation.

It’s also worth noting that in order to found the League many former players were given ownership of teams. What I left out of that article was that several of these owners had in fact played for Ward’s Players League in 1890. But even the fact that they had played the game themselves did not change them from essentially becoming like any other owner when they took over. Mack might have been genial and kind to his players, but as I wrote in my article about the A’s, he had no problem at all trading them away or selling them outright when they had no value to him anymore.

Another player who participated in that revolt was Charles Comiskey, who took over the White Sox and became known as one of the most parsimonious owners in the game. It is in effect because of his stinginess that the most notorious scandal in baseball history took place. In the next article in the series, I will give context to this scandal: how the finances of baseball at the time led to players throwing games, how ownership ignored it until it became to big a problem, and how baseball’s ‘solution’ did nothing to address the underlying problem.