Michael Arria
One of the most important labor struggles in MLB history involved Saint Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood, who famously challenged Major League Baseball’s “reserve clause” barring players from changing teams. With no free agency, players were essentially the property of teams. In the 1960s, Flood joined with labor leader Marvin Miller, the head of the players’ union, to fight the clause. Flood was blacklisted from baseball for his efforts, but Miller and the players’ union ultimately overturned the reserve clause in 1975.
In Major League Rebels, you write about how players have resisted labor exploitation over the decades. Some of the instances you cite are from almost one hundred years before Flood’s case. There’s a lot of information in the book, but I was wondering if you could mention a couple examples that you think people should know about.
Peter Dreier
The first union was started back in the 1880s by a guy named John Montgomery Ward, one of the best players of his era. There were lots of strikes happening throughout the country at the time, and the players absorbed that culture. They viewed themselves as talented craftsmen who deserved better treatment. They were being forced to pay for their own food, their own uniforms, and they could be traded at any time against their will.
In 1890 Ward and other players started the Players’ League. About two-thirds of the players from the two major leagues, the National League and the American Association, jumped to the Players’ League during its one season. The league did away with the reserve clause, raised salaries, and improved working conditions.
But the players didn’t have enough money to run the teams themselves, so they had to find outside investors. The investors obviously wanted to make a profit. The two major leagues of the time offered those investors their own teams if they would withdraw from the Players’ League teams. So that helped kill the Players’ League after just a season.
A lot of the players in the 1940s and 1950s were anti-union, apolitical, or afraid to get fired. However, by the late 1950s, it became clear that the owners were corporate moguls making a lot of money and the players were making about what the average schoolteacher made, or less. They knew they weren’t getting their fair share, and so in 1966 they hired Marvin Miller, a former official with the United Steelworkers union, who the owners tried to red-bait. He negotiated the first collective bargaining contract in professional sports history. He educated the players about labor history and solidarity. He beat the owners on every issue.