Baseball players have identified as workers before. In 1885, John Montgomery Ward, an outstanding pitcher, organized the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players (BPBP), the first labor union in sports. Taking their cues from the robber barons of the age, baseball’s owners maintained their profits by controlling players’ wages, their primary costs. They colluded with each other, especially through the reserve clause, which bound ballplayers contractually to their teams so they could be traded or even released without pay and prohibited them from negotiating with other teams. In an 1887 article, “Is the Base-Ball Player a Chattel?” Ward compared the reserve clause to “a fugitive-slave law.”
In 1889, after the owners refused to negotiate with the union, Ward and other players founded the Players’ League (PL) based on the revolutionary idea that workers could run their own workplaces without the bosses. Players would own and run their teams (with some financing from outside investors), trades would occur only with players’ consent, and investors would divide profits equally with the players. League revenue would be split evenly among the clubs. There would be no reserve clause.
The idea was so popular that three-quarters of all National League and American Association players jumped to the PL. After moving from the NL’s Boston Beaneaters to the PL’s Boston Reds, Mike “King” Kelley, a major star, was offered a blank check to return to the Beaneaters, but he refused, explaining: “My mother and father would never look at me again if I proved to be a traitor to the boys.”
Samuel Gompers, president of the American Federation of Labor, supported the new league. Some unions fined members caught attending non-union games. But the PL lasted only for the 1890 season. The National League owners bribed reporters to inundate the media with anti-union propaganda accusing players of being “hot-headed anarchists,” “socialists,” “ultra-radicals,” “overpaid players,” and even “terrorists.” They also wooed the PL’s investors—who were dismayed at the PL’s falling profits—with the promise that they would be awarded new teams and more money in a reconfigured NL. They capitulated, and Ward’s revolution was over.
In 1953, players formed the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), primarily to push the owners to provide decent pensions, but the union had no full-time employees, no office, and no way to collect dues or to communicate with the players during the off-season.
By 1966, star pitchers Robin Roberts and Jim Bunning (later a Republican Senator from Kentucky) convinced their fellow players that the union needed a full-time director. They picked Marvin Miller, a former steelworkers’ union official. In 1968, he negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports. In 1970, the MLBPA established players’ rights to binding arbitration over salaries and grievances and to hire agents.