The End of Baseball As We Knew It
Reviewed by Derek Catsam, Department of History, University of Texas of the Permian Basin
OCTOBER 16, 2004 archive
The Transformation of a Sport
Charles P. Korr, a professor of history at the University of Missouri at St. Louis, has produced one of the most significant works of scholarship on American sports in The End of Baseball as We Knew It. Charting the history of the Players Union from its emergence as a force willing seriously to challenge the stranglehold the ownership held over the game starting in the mid-1960s through the players' strike of 1981, Korr elucidates the issues involved in this transformation of our Nation's Pastime.
For serious fans and students of baseball, the story of the control management held over players from the emergence of professionalization in the late-19th century through the 1950s is well known. Brandishing the 'reserve clause" that bound players to clubs for as long as the team desired, owners and general managers controlled a player's destiny from the day of his signing until their use for him was done. If a team chose to cut a player's salary, to trade him to another franchise, or to keep him buried in the minor leagues, it could do so with no fear of repercussions. When a player's contract was up, he did not have the right to offer his services to the highest bidder because the reserve clause bound him to the team of his original contract. The reserve clause was hardly the only source of contention between management and players, but it was the most onerous, restrictive, visible and symbolically potent.
The remarkable aspect of this is that, for decades, players simply accepted the control owners had over them. They were, after all, relatively well compensated to play a game that they loved and by temperament they were disinclined to confront the front office. Politically and socially conservative, most players in the first half of the century would have looked awry at any player inclined to try to make a stink or organize collectively to challenge the reserve clause or nearly any other aspect of the game which had a power dynamic that was manifest.
This acquiescence began to change gradually in the 1960s, and once it did, within a relatively brief period of fifteen or so years, the power dynamic had shifted dramatically. Through a newly empowered union headed by the brilliant and combative leader of the Major League Baseball Player's Association (MLBPA), Marvin Miller, and some timely victories in court and in a process of arbitration that the players won through Miller's and their own tenacity, players killed the reserve clause, gained rights to free agency and saw a skyrocketing in salaries. One baseball executive had proclaimed in 1967 that bargaining with the MLBPA would mark "the end of baseball as we knew it," and he may well have been right. But all evidence points to the fact that after 1981 and the consolidation of player gains, Major League Baseball was more prosperous, popular, and competitive than ever. What had changed was that the ones responsible for the product on the field, the players themselves, were finally able to share in the bounties of the game that would not have existed without their talents.
From nearly the moment he took over as the MLBPA's first full-time executive director in April 1967, Marvin Miller's name became one that inspired great admiration among his supporters and bitter resentment from his detractors. Miller came from a successful career as an executive with the Steelworkers Union and he brought the same approach to baseball that he did to that industry. He was an ardent advocate for the players, did not buy into baseball's self-serving conception of itself as an idyllic, romantic pastime immune from labor strife, believed in getting the most for the employees he represented, and was not afraid to challenge the owners frontally through ridicule, sarcasm, and ruthlessness if necessary. It is no wonder then that most of the players spoke very highly of him while most of those on the other side of the table did not. If nothing else, this seems pretty good circumstantial evidence that Miller was good at his job.
While Korr effectively shows the importance of Miller and his role in helping the MLBPA undertake a virtual revolution, he does not do so at the expense of the players. He does not, in other words, buy into the mythic Miller, who in most tellings serves as either savior of the players union or else its Svengali. For while Korr understands Miller to be a central actor in these proceedings, maybe the single-most important individual, he also does a better job than any other previous student of the economics of baseball of taking the players seriously. It was, after all, the players whose careers were on the line. The players stood to lose the most in a showdown with management if it failed. The players stood to gain the most from standing their ground and winning a showdown. And the players knew this. They were not naifs. They were not stupid. Korr interviewed dozens of participants, including more than 25 former players, and one is constantly impressed by their grasp of the issues, their ability to articulate them, their clear assertion that they were the driving force behind union actions, and that they resented the patronizing tone that management consistently took when dealing with them. As much as anything, this is a book about how management, particularly the owners, damned their own cause by underestimating the resolve, intelligence, and self-awareness of the young men they treated like chattel and quite clearly believed to be dumb jocks.
Indeed, as Exhibit A to testify to the arrogance and self-delusion of the owners as a whole, this book would serve well. When the players won the right to have outside arbitrators settle grievances (a role that had been the traditional domain of the commissioner, a figure commonly believed to have been an independent force but who embodied instead the fiction of autonomy, since the commissioner was an employee of the owners), the owners consistently believed that they would win, if not before the arbitrator, then in subsequent court challenges. This reached its nadir (or perhaps its apogee) when independent arbitrator Peter Seitz was called in to deal with two of the most high-profile cases of the 1970s, involving the free agency of Jim "Catfish" Hunter, Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith. In the latter case, Seitz entreated the two sides to get together and hammer out an agreement, and he particularly beseeched the owners, all but telling them that their case was going to lose. The owners refused to allow John Gaherin, their lawyer for player-management issues (and a man who himself could be incredibly arrogant toward the players, the union, and Miller), to work out a deal that may not have saved for them all they wanted, but that certainly would have allowed the owners to gain some minor concessions as well as to save face. As Seitz had forewarned, he ruled in favor of the players. The era of free agency had begun, and as a result of the self-immolation from the owners, it began almost entirely on the terms of the MLBPA.
Korr carried his analysis through the narrowly averted strike that almost happened in1980 and to the resolution of the one that did in 1981. But while this ends his formal narrative, he closes with a conclusion and epilogue that explore some of the issues that continue to divide the players and owners today. The conclusion indeed stands on its own as an outstanding essay, assessing the period from the mid 1960s and the gains the players earned. The epilogue allows Korr to take an international perspective, comparing the state of labor relations in baseball with those in another sport dear to Korr's heart, international soccer, (Korr is also the author of a book on West Ham United of the British premier league) while letting him bring the story loosely up to the present.[1]
Even a book this good and important, however, has its flaws. One of the most perplexing questions comes from the subtitle of the book, which indicates that this book will cover the player's union from 1960 to 1981. By no reasonable measure does it do any such thing. The book most properly focuses on the period from 1965 or so to 1981 and the subtitle should reflect as much. This is a quibble, perhaps, but one worth noting. Korr also oddly leaves out extensive coverage of some of the most vital events pertaining to his story. It seemed as if details of Curt Flood's case, for example, received short shrift. Korr's analysis of that case and its larger significant is stellar, but he is remarkably short on detail. Perhaps ,he assumed that anyone reading his book would be up to speed on the ins and outs of the story. He probably ought not to have assumed any such thing.
Stylistically, while the book is readable, indeed elegant at times, Korr has a noisome quirk. Far too often, when giving quotations from various participants, he felt the need to put key phrases in italics and parenthetically to tell the reader that he had added the emphasis. Most of the time this was unnecessary, as any discerning reader would have been able to derive the gist of the citation and its most salient components readily. This might merely be a reviewer's ego at work, but most readers of scholarly works do not feel a need to be condescended to by the author.
Finally, while Korr explored in tremendous depth the extant literature, legal documents, minutes from meetings, newspapers, transcripts, and other sources, as well as his own extensive interviews with broadcasters, journalists, former players, executives and other club employees, union officials, and the like, there was one reasonably surprising omission. The first time many of us encountered some of the ways players confronted management, the internal struggles players had about sharing information such as salaries, as well as the difficulty in organizing players to fight for their own interests was in Jim Bouton's classic Ball Four.[2] While Korr may have found that his interviews and other sources covered this terrain well, he includes several substantially lesser memoirs in his bibliography and footnotes. The omission is a curious one to say the least given the importance and lingering legacy of Bouton's rollicking but insightful groundbreaking book.
These quibbles aside, The End of Baseball As We Knew It stands as one of the most important works of sports history in the last twenty years. More than that, I would recommend that any professor teaching a graduate course on the history of labor movements use Korr's book in her course. Historians of sports, Modern American legal, economic or cultural history, and labor will find this book to be invaluable. As importantly, baseball fans (who may be pulled in by the fact that Bob Costas contributes the foreword) will find much to value in a book that will help them demystify the battles that have been nearly as central to the National Pastime for the last four decades as pennant races and home run crowns.
Charles P. Korr. The End of Baseball As We Knew It: The Players Union, 1960-1981. With foreword by Bob Costas. Sport and Society Series, Editors Benjamin G. Rader and Randy Roberts. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2002. xvii + 336 pp. Illustrations, notes, bibliography, index. $34.95 (cloth) ISBN 0-252-02752-3.