Peter Dreier / Research & Analysis / Players
Playing
Hardball: Baseball’s
Gilded Age Labor Wars
By
Peter Dreier and Robert Elias
American
History
Fall 2022
https://www.historynet.com/baseball-team-owners-vs-players-unions/
In
1892, Andrew Carnegie’s steel
plant at Homestead,
Pennsylvania, across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, was booming
while
thousands of steelworkers were toiling there seven days a week 12 hours
a day
and enduring unsafe conditions and a 22 percent pay cut. The Homestead
workers
went on strike,
leading to a 12-hour gun fight with 300 armed Pinkerton agents
that killed nine workers and three guards.
On
Strike, Shut It Down. Steelworkers
at Homestead,
Pennsylvania, took up arms as they tried to close the Carnegie works.
(Bettmann/Getty Images)
Shortly
after the Homestead battle,
the Brooklyn Grooms baseball team arrived to play the Pittsburgh
Pirates. Led
by John Montgomery Ward, charismatic leader of the sport’s first
players union,
the Grooms were visiting Homestead to show solidarity with the
strikers. Their
escort was Pirate star pitcher Mark Baldwin. City and state authorities
arrested strike leaders, charging them with conspiracy, riot, and
murder.
Alleging similar crimes, officials soon rounded up another 160
individuals,
including Baldwin, who admitted having been present during the
steelworks violence
but only as a spectator. The Pittsburgh Dispatch printed rumors that
Baldwin
had “furnished his fellow citizens with two Winchester rifles on the
memorable
morning of the battle.” For lack of evidence, Baldwin avoided trial. A
week
later, Pennsylvania Governor Robert Pattison declared Homestead under
martial
law, and 8,000 state militiamen arrived to back Carnegie, who staffed
his
factory with non-union workers and broke the strike.
The
Homestead strike showcased a
new class of worker activist amid the labor turmoil of the Gilded Age:
professional baseball players. Baldwin’s roots were in Homestead, where
he grew
up a steelworker’s son and steadfast labor supporter. At Pennsylvania
State
University and then with amateur teams, he pitched and played
shortstop. In
1886 he signed with the Chicago White Stockings of the National League,
becoming a star until he demanded a raise and owner Albert Spalding
fired him.
Blackballed by every team in the league, Baldwin joined the Columbus
Solons of
the rival American Association. He bolted again in 1890, when
ballplayers
themselves formed the Players League, made up of teams jointly owned by
its
athletes and at least one investor. Baldwin became the key recruiter
for the
Chicago Pirates, encouraging fellow players to jump from other leagues.
In
1890, he led the Players League in wins (33) and strikeouts (206).
To
the Victors, the Spoils. John
Montgomery Ward, right,
presents a championship cup to Roger Bresnahan as New York NL players
look on.
(FAY 2018/Alamy Stock Photo)
Throwing
Hard. Player-activist
Mark Baldwin, son of a
steelworker, grew up in Homestead and embraced the union cause from an
early
age, putting him in diametric opposition to team owner Spalding.
(Library of
Congress)
Baldwin
was among players who recognized
the exploitation in professional baseball, which emerged in the Gilded
Age, an
era marked by the rise of corporate monopolies, the concentration of
wealth and
power in elites, and the proliferation of urban factory work. Those on
the
well-upholstered side of that divide regarded the imbalance between
industrialist and wage earner as “social Darwinism,” with survival
going to the
fittest. Steel titan Carnegie and fellow robber barons felt entitled to
use
force against those who resisted. Control over baseball players would
follow
but in a more legalistic guise. A handful of players, sensitive to
labor
struggles, fought back.
FROM
RAILROADS TO BASEBALL
In
1866 the National
Labor Union (NLU) became
the first large-scale
organization to reach across industries and unite skilled and unskilled
laborers, farmers, and factory workers. Against blacklists, lockouts,
goon
squads, and yellow-dog contracts that required workers, on penalty of
dismissal, to promise not to join a union, the National Labor Union
fought for
higher wages, shorter hours, better conditions, and pro-labor
legislation.
Another union, the Knights of Labor, organized workers across lines of
race,
ethnicity, gender, and occupation. The Knights campaigned for an
eight-hour
day, restrictions on child labor, and worker-run cooperatives.
In
1877, during a depression, West
Virginia railroad workers, in response to wage cuts, struck. The West
Virginia
walkout spread to Maryland and Pennsylvania; strikes multiplied
nationwide. The
Great Railroad Strike—the first mass action involving so many different
workers—was
violently suppressed, but union membership grew. In 1886, Knights
membership
was 750,000 when a bomb thrown at a labor rally in Chicago’s Haymarket
Square
killed several workers and policemen. Labor’s reputation sank. Union
ranks
declined. A new organizing approach emerged with the American
Federation of
Labor (AFL). Led by Samuel Gompers, the AFL dropped the cooperative
party line
to focus on skilled, White, male craftsmen. For its fraction of
America’s
working class, the AFL won significant victories in pay, hours, and
working
conditions.
Albert
Spalding (GL
Archive/Alamy Stock Photo)
MEN
OF
INDUSTRY
First-generation
baseball owners viewed
themselves as
entrepreneurs exploiting an increasingly lucrative industry. Spalding
claimed
that between 1895 and 1889, the eight NL teams made a total of at least
$750,000. That translates into an annual $562,900 profit per team in
2022
dollars. Emulating the robber barons, baseball owners saw their profits
as
rooted in controlling wages set by skinflint contracts. Owners colluded
and
incorporated the reserve clause, which bound ballplayers to teams, into
every
contract. Pocketing triple their profits in the 1880s, owners in those
years
nevertheless skimped on salaries, required players to perform unpaid
duties
such as taking tickets, cleaning stadium seats, and grooming the field.
Teams
also charged players for meals. The leagues were no different from
other
industries, fighting attempts to organize ballplayers with penalties,
intimidation, blacklists, Pinkerton spies, and docking pay.
Players
initially went along. But,
realizing their worth and chafing at managerial mistreatment,
ballplayers,
galvanized by John Montgomery Ward, began to organize. Born in
Bellefonte,
Pennsylvania, in 1860, Ward attended Penn State and in 1875 helped that
school
develop its first baseball team. Pitching for semi-professional teams
in
Pennsylvania towns hot with pro-labor sentiment, Ward joined the
National
League’s Providence Grays in 1878. Immediately a star, Ward pitched
Providence
to the 1879 pennant, that year going 47–19 with 239 strikeouts and a
2.15
earned-run average. In 1880 he pitched a perfect game and in 1882 an
18-inning
complete game shutout. An arm injury took him off the active roster,
and in
1884 the Grays traded him to the New York Gothams. Throwing
left-handed, Ward
became the club’s starting centerfielder. In 1885, the Gothams, renamed
the
Giants, had Ward, right arm healed, starting at shortstop and batting
left-handed to be closer to first base. He was the only major league
player to
win more than 100 games as a pitcher and to get more than 2,000 hits.
He stole
540 bases and drove in nearly 1,000 runs. He managed the Giants, played
on two
more championship teams, and became a successful baseball executive.
Half
a World Away. Above,
Spalding, center in
suit, with the Chicago White Stockings in Melbourne, Australia, as
National
League teams were circling the globe in the off season. (Photo by Mark
Rucker/Transcendental Graphics/Getty Images)
Ward
also learned five languages,
wrote for newspapers and magazines, published a book, and completed a
B.A. and
a law degree at Columbia University—all while suiting up. His legal
training
alerted him to the standard baseball contract’s unfairness. The
American Association
set out to rival the National League, but by 1883 both leagues were
cutting
pay, imposing terrible working conditions, and undermining player value
and
mobility. In 1885, Ward organized the Brotherhood of Professional
Baseball
Players, the first athletes’ union. In his 1887 Lippincott’s article
“Is the Base-Ball Player a Chattel?”, he accused owners of “wage
slavery” and
likened players’ situation to the recent days of chattel bondage. The
reserve
clause in all player contracts was “an inherent wrong, for by it one
set of men
seized absolute control over the labor of another,” Ward wrote. “And
the
blacklist was waiting for any man who dared assert the contrary.”
John
Brush (
Library of Congress)
Following
the 1888 season, de facto
National League president Spalding organized a World Baseball Tour by a
team of
star players, including Ward, to spread “America’s game”—and expand
Spalding’s
sporting-goods empire. While Ward was barnstorming abroad, the league
imposed
the Brush Classification Plan, named for its creator, baseball team
owner John
T. Brush. The plan capped and lowered players’ wages, set salary
classes to
stir jealousy among players, ranked players by off-field conduct as
well as
abilities, and allowed their release on only 10 days’ notice. The Brush
plan
infuriated Ward. His rage grew when he learned the Giants had sold him
to the
Washington Nationals for a record $12,000. His threat to quit if he
wasn’t paid
a portion of the proceeds nullified the deal. Ward began organizing
fellow
players while leading the Giants to their second straight championship
in 1889.
Ward
reasoned that since players,
not owners, produced the game’s profits, players should share equally
in the
proceeds and control their destiny. Rather than strike, in July 1889 he
and
other players founded a league of their own. Codifying the Players
League’s
ethos, Ward issued “The Brotherhood Manifesto,” observing that owners’
eyes
“are upon the turnstile. Men have come into the business for no other
motive
than to exploit it for every dollar in sight . . . Players have been
bought,
sold and exchanged as though they were sheep, instead of American
citizens.”
In
Players League clubs, players
shared in managerial duties and profits. Eight-member boards comprised
of four
players and four investors ran the league’s eight teams, and a senate,
equally
representing players and investors, governed the league. Players owned
team
stock and clubs divided revenue evenly. Contracts included no reserve
clause;
there was no classification plan. Player contracts ran three years and
trades
required a player’s consent. Three-quarters of all National League
players and
the top stars in both leagues jumped to the Players League.
In
1890, the new league’s first
year, Congress enacted the Sherman Anti-Trust Act to restrain corporate
monopolization. The Sherman Act outlawed curbs on free competition and
commerce
across state lines—until a conservative U.S. Supreme Court voted to
exempt
corporations from trust busting and instead targeted unions.
Triple
Threat. Outfielder,
catcher, and
lawyer James “Orator” O’Rourke in 1894 after his Giants again won the
world
championship. (Photo by Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics/Getty
Images )
Though
corporations operated across
state lines, the Court claimed these enterprises to be engaged
primarily in
in-state manufacturing, putting them outside Congressional authority
over
interstate commerce. Unions, according to the Court, were
“combinations” whose
work protests limited production and limited goods crossing state
lines, thus
subjecting them to the Sherman Act.
Ward
ran the union,
recruited investors and players,
rented ballparks, created a league schedule, handled press relations,
and
battled the baseball establishment’s counterattack—all the while
serving as
player-manager for Ward’s Wonders, the Brooklyn Players League team. In
the
1890 season, he hit .335, stole 63 bases, led league shortstops in
assists, and
piloted his club to second place.
Ward
had crucial support. James
O’Rourke, son of Irish immigrants, had joined the Boston Red Stockings
in 1873.
After returning with the team from a European tour, owner Arthur Soden
charged
each player on the tour $100 to cover what Soden claimed were his
losses on the
trip. O’Rourke balked but paid—the last time he gave in to an
owner.
In
1876, the Red Stockings joined
the National League. O’Rourke would not sign the proffered contract,
protesting
a three-year freeze the deal would have imposed on his salary.
Prevailing
despite the risk of a blacklisting, he doubled his pay. When Soden
tried to dun
players for meals on the road, O’Rourke refused. Soden relented. In
1878,
O’Rourke protested Soden’s policy of housing the team in fleabag
hotels,
slashing meal allowances, making spouses pay to attend home games, and
charging
to wash uniforms. In September 1880, trying to avoid having to pay
October
salaries, Soden disbanded the team. O’Rourke sued and won a settlement.
O’Rourke’s
older brother John was
also a gifted baseball player. The brothers enjoyed playing together on
the Red
Caps, but John eventually dropped out of baseball to work as a railroad
baggage
handler. He continued the O’Rourke activism as an organizer with the
Brotherhood of Railway Trainmen, which represented 20,000 brakemen,
switchmen,
yardmasters, conductors, and baggage handlers, hundreds of whom died
each year
on the job. To reduce that human cost, John O’Rourke helped lobby
Congress to
mandate automatic brakes and couplers on freight trains. In 1910, the
brothers
joined a protest march by 800 rail union members through the streets of
Los
Angeles, California.
James
O’Rourke’s resonant
self-representation helped other players see that owners weren’t
deities. In
1885, O’Rourke agreed to join the New York Giants—if he were exempt
from the
reserve clause and if the team paid for his off-season legal education.
Enrolling in Yale Law School, he coached the Yale baseball team to a
winning
season. The eloquence that had gotten him dubbed “Orator” only
improved.
O’Rourke’s Yale studies intensified his activism. He helped Ward form
the
Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players in 1885 and took the lead
in
recruiting players and campaigning for the Players League through his
ties to
civic organizations.
BASEBALL
‘ROBBERY’
Another
Ward lieutenant,
Tim Keefe, was born in 1857 to
Irish immigrants in Cambridge, Massachusetts. He followed his father
into
carpentry as an apprentice, in his spare time playing ball. He began
playing
professionally in 1878 and in 1880 joined the Troy Trojans. Keefe and
Ward met
playing winter ball in New Orleans, Louisiana, where they discussed
pitching
strategy and their ire at the reserve clause, which the Trojans invoked
against
Keefe for the 1881 season, forcing him to accept $1,500 for two seasons.
“I
was considered a robber because
I tried to hold out for $2,100,” Keefe recalled. He jumped in 1883 to
the New
York Metropolitans in the new American Association, which had not yet
adopted
the reserve clause. In time Keefe became one of baseball’s most
dominant
pitchers. He wrote two pitching manuals and, during the off-season,
mentored
pitchers at Harvard University, near his home, eventually doing
likewise for
teams at Amherst, Dartmouth, Williams, Princeton, and Tufts.
O
Say Can’t You See… Shut
out of the stadium
grandstands, masses of New York area baseball fans crowd the margins of
the
Polo Grounds during an 1890 Players League game. A man at right uses a
wagon to
gain an edge. (Photo by Mark Rucker/Transcendental Graphics/Getty
Images )
In
1888, Keefe led the National
League in victories, winning 19 games in a row, still a single-season
record.
He held out again for a raise for the 1889 season; the Giants finally
relented.
When owners capped salaries and refused to negotiate with the union,
Keefe
attacked “the arrogant despotism of these dictators,” insisting that
“the
players will revolt against the contemptuous disregard for their rights
as men
and laborers.”
Ward
and Keefe were earning large
salaries—$4,250 in 1889; today, $133,000—but as sons of the working
class both
men identified with the average player. Ward became Brotherhood
president.
Keefe served as the union’s secretary and treasurer, overseeing
recruitment. He
also drafted the 1890 Players League profit-sharing plan, coordinated
ballpark
building, and handled the press.
Timothy
Keefe (Library
of Congress)
The
union’s nemesis was White
Stockings owner Spalding. When the Players League recruited National
League
players and began outdrawing the establishment league, Spalding and
other
owners sued jumpers for breaking their contracts. Judges found the
contracts
unfair, whereupon Spalding formed a “War Committee” whose members
bribed
reporters and circulated anti-union propaganda. Owners labeled the
Players
League “hot-headed anarchists,” “socialists,” and “ultra-radicals.”
Renowned
sportswriter and Spalding employee Henry Chadwick called unionized
players
“terrorists” and condemned Ward as the mastermind of the
“secessionists,”
invoking the Confederacy’s treason.
Labor
leaders, including AFL
president Gompers, backed the league; some member unions fined workers
caught
attending nonunion games. Although the maverick league was outplaying
and
outdrawing the establishment leagues, owners had deep pockets. Spalding
appealed to Players League investor-directors’ avarice, promising them
outright
ownership of new teams in a reconfigured National League. Enough
investors went
for the bait that the Players League, overly dependent on outside
capital,
folded after one season.
Spalding
and other team owners
quickly killed off the American Association, effectively reinstating
the
National League’s monopoly.
Between
1891 and 1893, owners
slashed player salaries 40 percent, blacklisted labor agitators, broke
long-term contracts, reinforced the reserve clause, and commandeered
minor
league teams for replacement labor to intimidate players and discourage
activism. Debuting in 1901, the American League initially challenged
the
established order, but the two leagues soon joined forces to reinforce
the
reserve clause and other player restrictions.
Having
foiled the Players League
challenge,
baseball owners in 1922 tightened their grip, thanks to a
ruling by the U.S. Supreme Court that exempted professional baseball
from
anti-trust laws, characterizing the sport not as a business but as an
“amusement” that focused on “giving exhibitions of baseball,
which are
purely state affairs” outside of interstate commerce. As a legal
monopoly, the
leagues could and did block creation of new teams, increasing existing
clubs’
value and profits.
O’Rourke
returned to the Giants,
ending his ballplaying career in 1893 as the Washington Senators’
player-manager. He batted .311 over 21 seasons playing outfield and
catcher.
His 2,678 base hits rank second among all 19th-century players.
O’Rourke
returned to his hometown, where he created the minor-league Bridgeport
Victors,
as well as the Eastern Association (née Connecticut State League). He
was the
Bridgeport club’s player-manager for eight years while practicing law
and
overseeing his real estate interests. In 1895, he lost a close election
running
as a Democrat for the Connecticut state legislature.
We
Are the Champions. The
1888 National League
champion New York Giants included Tim Keefe, Roger Connor, James
O’Rourke, Buck
Ewing, Monte Ward, and Mickey Welch. (Photo by Mark
Rucker/Transcendental
Graphics/Getty Images)
In
1902, O’Rourke helped found the
National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, formed to ward
off raids
on minor league rosters by the major leagues. In 1904, he returned at
54 to the
Giants to catch in a crucial, pennant-winning game. For many years,
O’Rourke
remained the oldest man to play in a major league game. In 1912, at age
62,
O’Rourke played in his last professional game, for the New Haven minor
league
club—his 51st season playing professionally. He was voted into the Hall
of Fame
in 1945; his plaque mentions none of his battles on behalf of players.
Keefe
ended his playing career with
342 wins, a 2.62 earned-run average, and 2,562 strikeouts. He was the
first
pitcher to log three seasons of 300-plus strikeouts and won games
in 47
major league ballparks—still the record. Yet in the first Cooperstown
election
for entry into the Baseball
Hall of Fame in
1936, Keefe got only one
vote. Long after his death in 1933, he was ushered into the Hall by a
Veteran’s
Committee vote in 1964.
With
the demise of the Players
League, Mark Baldwin joined his hometown Pittsburgh Pirates. He won 47
games
the next two seasons, but after the Homestead strike, the Pirates
released him,
ending his major league career in 1893.
EVEN
IN
DEATH WARD DREW THE OWNERS’ IRE, DENIED A SPOT IN THE HALL OF FAME
UNTIL 1964,
HIS LABOR ACTIVISM NOT GETTING A LICK OF ATTENTION.
Baldwin
played minor league ball
until 1896, when he enrolled in the University of Pennsylvania’s
medical
school, also coaching the university’s baseball team. He transferred to
New
York’s Bellevue Medical College to study dermatology and trained in
surgery at
Roosevelt Hospital. In fall 1898, he moved to Baltimore Medical
College, where
he played baseball and football, completing his medical degree in 1899.
Baldwin
opened a practice in
Homestead but also assisted a New York City coroner and studied
advanced
surgical techniques at Minnesota’s Mayo Clinic. In 1914 he joined the
Johns
Hopkins University Medical School faculty. Ballplayers were among his
surgical
patients. He died in Pittsburgh in 1929.
BACK
TO
PLAYER-MANAGER
John
Ward reluctantly returned to
the role of player-manager, now with the National League’s
Brooklyn
Grooms, leading that team to two second-place finishes. In 1893, he
managed the
New York Giants and played second base, hitting .328, scoring 129 runs,
and
stealing base 46 times. In 1894, he led the Giants to sweep the
Baltimore
Orioles in four games to win the postseason Temple Cup and, after 17
seasons,
retired to practice law. His first clients were players being sued by
owners.
In 1909 he pursued the National League presidency; the owners killed
his
candidacy. In 1911, Ward became part-owner and president of the Boston
Braves
and in 1914 business manager of the Brooklyn Tip-Tops, in the upstart
Federal
League, which revived the fight against the reserve clause. Ward
retired from
baseball in 1915 to farm, run businesses, and win several high-profile
golf
tournaments. He died in 1925. A seeming lock for the Baseball Hall of
Fame,
Ward was inducted only in 1964, seven decades after his final
professional game
and four decades after he died—his penance for challenging the baseball
establishment. Ward’s plaque at Cooperstown ignores his labor activism.
Two
years after Ward was inducted into the Hall of Fame, another players
union—the Major
League Baseball Players Association—hired
Marvin Miller as its first
full-time executive director. Though not a professional athlete, Miller
had
been an official with the United Steelworkers of America. He was
steeped in the
history of the Homestead strike and the labor movement as well the
Players
League and baseball’s early labor wars. Under him, the union in 1968
negotiated
the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports and in
1972
staged the first strike among pro ballplayers. In 1975, 88 years after
Ward
called the loathed reserve clause “wage slavery,” Miller helped the
union bring
an end to the clause, leading to dramatically better salaries, working
conditions, and benefits. Treating him as it had Ward, baseball’s
establishment, ignoring endorsements by Hank Aaron, Tom Seaver, and
other stars,
blacklisted Miller, keeping him out of the Hall of Fame until 2021, 39
years
after he retired and nine years after he died.
Peter Dreier is Clapp
Distinguished Professor of Politics and founding chair of the Urban and
Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College in Los Angeles,
California. Robert Elias is Dean’s
Scholar and Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at the University
of San
Francisco.