On July 31, 1981 a strike against Major League Baseball (MLB) ended after the loss of 713 games—38% of the regular season. Negotiations between the owners and the Major League
Baseball Players Association (MLBA) were so bitter that MLB negotiator Ray Grebey and Players Association representative Marvin Miller refused to shake hands
and pose with each other for a customary bury
the hatchet photograph. Each would
have rather buried a hatchet in the other’s skull.
The relationship of Baseball to its employees had been bitter almost from
the very beginning of the National
League. Owner regarded players as virtual chattel bound indefinitely by
iron-clad personal service contracts
that forbad players from seeking higher pay at other teams. The result was an abnormally low pay scale which kept all but a handful of stars in
virtual poverty and gave the stars not much more. Bitter players sporadically struck individual
teams without success, usually finding the so called ringleaders were banned
for life from the sport.
As a result the Players’ League was formed in 1890 with most of the National League’s top stars. Although the league had a successful season,
it was under-funded and collapsed sending most of its players back to the NL
with their tails between their legs and worse off than ever. Would-be rivals of the NL like the American
Association, American League, and Federal League took advantage of
player discontent to lure stars to their start-up challengers. Only the AL survived and was eventually accepted as a
peer by the NL and absorbed into the entity that became Major League Baseball.
A fall out of the Federal League collapse left the players in worse shape
than ever. The owners of the former
Federal League franchise in Baltimore
attempted to purchase an MLB franchise.
They were not only rebuffed, they were blackballed. They had the
same result when they tried to obtain a franchise in the International League, then the top level of the minor leagues which fed players into
the Bigs. The Baltimoreans sued in Federal Court charging that MLB
constituted an illegal Trust in restraint of trade. They one a big victory at the Circuit Court level which was over turned on appeal. Eventually the case found its way to the Supreme Court in 1922 where, in what
may have been the worst ruling since Dred
Scott, the Court held that that baseball “was not the kind of
commerce” that Federal law was intended to regulate. Alone of all American industries, Major League baseball was handed a golden exemption from the Sherman Anti-Trust Act.
While the case was winding its way slowly through the courts, members of
the stellar Chicago White Sox team
chaffing under the notoriously tightfisted rule of Charles Comiskey demonstrated how damaging to baseball could be the
players’ resentment. The team, or at
least key members of it, accepted a bribe
from gambler Arnold Rothstein to
throw the 1919 World Series against the Cincinnati Reds. The resulting Black Sox Scandal
nearly derailed thie game as the National Pastime.
To resurrect the tattered reputation of the game,
the owners appointed Federal Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis as the Tsar-like
Commissioner of Baseball. From the
owners point of view Landis was the perfect candidate. He had won national acclaim for heavily
fining Standard Oil of Indiana for attempting to fix freight rates,
and was a rabid opponent of unionism, Socialism and radicalism
in any form. He had presided over World
War I and Red Scare era trials of dissidents handing
out draconian sentences and frequently stretching the law to do it. He presided over the trial of 101 members of
the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) leadership for sedition,
sending all to prison for long terms. He
was also a devoted baseball fan who had maneuvered to avoid an earlier attempt
to challenge organized baseball on anti-trust ground in a 1914 suit brought by
the Federal League. Most significantly
he was the presiding judge at Federal trial of the disgraced White Sox
players.
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| Kennesaw Mountain Landis ruled with an iron hand. |
Although Landis theoretically represented the
interests of all baseball, including players and fans, in fact at least
on issues surrounding player salaries, working conditions, and ability offer
their services freely to any team, he was steadfastly the owners’ man. He ruled the game until his death in 1944
blocking all reform.
It wasn’t until Landis was dead and Ford Frick
was Commissioner that players tried to form their first organization since
Landis crushed the National Baseball Players Association back in
1922. In 1952 the MLBPA was formed with
highly respected Cleveland Indian pitcher Bob Feller as its first—and
as it turned out—only President.
Under Feller the MLBPA attempted to function as a
professional association advocating for improved conditions attempting
to set up programs for retired and destitute members. However the owners flatly refused to deal
with them or modify any of the terms of employment that bound players to the
whim of the teams that literally owned them.
In 1959 the organization decided it was time to
get more aggressive. I eliminated the
executive presidency and brought in a professional Executive Director to
lead it. They really took the plunge to
becoming a real labor union seven years later in 1966 when Marvin
Miller, a former United Steelworkers economist and lead negotiator
and business agent was brought on board.
Miller meant business and set about to make the
MPBLA one of the strongest unions in America.
Broadcaster Red Barber would later categorize him with Babe
Ruth and Jackie Robinson as one of the most important figures in modern
era baseball. Certainly he shook
things up.
In just two years Miller obtained the first collective
bargaining agreement with the owners which raised the minimum pay—usually
for rookies and journeymen utility players—for the first time in
twenty years from $6,000 per season to $10,000.
That won the players undying loyalty and built unshakeable solidarity.
Next, in 1970 Miller won arbitration. Previously when a player and his owner failed
to reach agreement on terms for a new contract, the dispute would be referred
to the Commissioner, the owner’s creature who naturally tended to always side
with them. Arbitration took it to an
independent arbiter who picked between the two sides final offers. Increasingly the arbitrators found for
underpaid veteran players. And the
owners seeing that they had a lot to lose in the winner-takes-all system became
more flexible in their negotiations.
Salaries for veteran players started to rise.
Arbitration paid off in a big way in 1974 when Oakland
A’s owner Charles Finley refused to honor a contractual agreement
to pay a $50,000 insurance premium for his star pitcher Catfish
Hunter. The arbiter ruled that
Finley had thus voided the contract and allowed Hunter to become a free
agent. The pitcher then was able to
sign with the New York Yankees for a then astonishing 5-year, $3.5
million contract. That whetted the
appetite of plays for effective free agency.
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| Curt Flood and Players Association Executive Director Marvin Miller. |
Curt Flood had famously sued MLB
with the support of the players union claiming that the reserve clause which
kept the “owning team” in control of a player for a solid year after his
contract was up, meaning that the player could be kept from playing with any
team without the original team’s consent, was an anti-trust violation. The Supreme Court ultimately upheld the
admittedly shaky ground of the anti-trust provision.
After the victory with Hunter, Miller encouraged
two other players, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally to play out
the succeeding year without signing a contract. Then both players filed grievance
arbitration. The players won the arbitration with a ruling that both had
played out their obligations to their teams and were free agents. The notorious reserve clause was dead
and the era of free agency was ushered in.
With victory after victory under his belt, Miller
was cordially hated by the owners, but they seemed powerless against the
union. These years were punctuated with
short work stoppages—strikes in 1972 which lasted 13 days and in 1980 plus two spring training two lockouts, in 1973
and 1976.
So the table was set for an epic confrontation in
1981. The owners sought protections from
the effects of free agency. In
particular they sought compensation for losing a free agent player to
another team—a player selected from the signing team’s roster not including 12 protected
players. The union held that any form of compensation would undermine the
value of free agency.
With negotiations at an impasse the union Executive
Board set a May 31 strike deadline.
This was extended while a union complaint of unfair labor practices was
heard by the National Labor Relations Board (NLRB). Finally, on June 15 the players walked
out.
Owners were stunned when most of the sporting
press and fans seemed to take the side of the players. They could not believe that they were not
viewed as beloved community leaders instead of as flinty hearted
capitalists. A Sport Illustrated cover screamed
“Strike! The Walkout the Owners Provoked.”
But as the strike wore on, fans became
restless. And cities took a big economic
hit. An estimated $146 million was lost
in player salaries, ticket sales, broadcast revenues, and concession
revenues. The players lost $4 million a week in salaries while the owners
suffered a total loss of $72 million.
Faced with the possible loss of the entire season
a compromise, which most considered favorable to the players, was finally
reached. Teams that lost a premium free
agent could be compensated by drawing from a pool of players left
unprotected from all of the clubs rather than just the signing club and players
agree to restricting free agency to players with six or more years of major
league service. Miller had never really
wanted unlimited free agency anyway fearing that a glut of players
on the market would drive compensation down.
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| Pirate picher Luis Tiant reads about the end of the strike. |
Play resumed with the delayed All Star Game in
Cleveland on August 8. Because the game
was moved from its traditional mid-week slot to a Sunday, a record attendance
of 72,086 led owners to hope that fans would return to the game. They were wrong. Bitter fans stayed away in droves through the
rest of the season and TV and radio audiences shrank. Newspaper letter columns were filled
with fans declaring that they were done with the game. It took some years for the game to recover
from fan disillusion.
Some of that disillusion was stoked by the
slapped together play-off system used to determine teams for the World
Series. The leaders of the first
half of the season would face the leaders of the second half of the season in a
playoff. In case the same team won both
halves, it would face the team with the second best record. But the system produced anomalies. The Cincinnati Reds of the National
League West and St. Louis Cardinals of the National League East
each failed to make the playoffs despite having the two best full-season
records in the National League that season.
On the other hand, the Kansas City Royals made the postseason
despite owning the fourth-best full-season record in their division and
posting a losing record overall.
Miller retired in 1982 but the union he built remained
strong.
The MLBPA continued to frustrate the owners,
particularly when they successfully proved in court that the owners and
Commissioner of collusion in attempting to circumvent the free movement
of players under free agency. The
collusion may also have affected the outcome of both the regular season series
and World Series of 1985, ’86, and ’87.
Owners were fined a staggering $64.5 million and had to compensate
player for losses related to multi-year contracts and lost bonuses which
eventually cost them another $280 million.
There was a one day strike in August of ’85 and
owners locked out player for early spring training in 1990.
In 1994 players struck on August 12 wiping out
the rest of the season and the World Series.
The strike only ended the next spring when a U.S. District judge issued
an injunction restoring terms and conditions of the expired agreement. That
traumatic event did even more damage to baseball.
Since then contracts have been renewed without
strikes or lockouts, despite some bluster.
The union remains strong.
Baseball remains the only sport without an effective salary cap. Player incomes and team profits are at an
all-time high. Meanwhile the other major
American sports—Football, Basketball, and Hockey have all
had substantial labor turmoil—largely due to weak unions.
And what of Marvin Miller? Well baseball owners have successfully fought
back repeated efforts to have him elected to the Hall of Fame despite
his undisputed impact on the game. He
died on November 27, 2012 in New York City at the age of 95.
