Category: History

Major League Baseball players had few rights before the signing of the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports in 1968. They didn’t get all of their current rights all at once, either: the battle was, and is, an ongoing one. Before the Players Association, before Marvin Miller, there were other attempts to organize baseball players against the bosses. In this series, we’ll investigate each of those attempts, and suss out what went wrong. Here’s part 1 and part 2. 

The Players Protective Association had a promising start when the budding American League used its desires for better wages and protections to steal players from the reigning National League, but it didn’t end up working out in the long run. That’s because the AL, like the capitalists investing in the Players League before it, ended up partnering with the NL and eliminating themselves as competition in the process.

A little less than a decade later, in 1912, the Fraternity of Professional Baseball Players of America formed, with former player Dave Fultz at the head. Fultz, like John Ward of the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, had a background in law thanks to an education at Colombia, and was a practicing lawyer at the time of the formation of the Fraternity. He also kept in close contact with active players and their concerns, and those conversations — some about their continued gripes about the reserve clause, which no one had been able to permanently get rid of to that point — helped lead to the formation of the Fraternity.

Continue reading “The History of Baseball Unionization: When vaudeville ended a baseball strike”

This article is free for anyone to read, but please consider becoming a Patreon subscriber to allow me to keep writing posts like this one. Sign up to receive articles like this one in your inbox here.

Major League Baseball players had few rights before the signing of the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports in 1968. They didn’t get all of their current rights all at once, either: the battle was, and is, an ongoing one. Before the Players Association, before Marvin Miller, there were other attempts to organize baseball players against the bosses. In this series, we’ll investigate each of those attempts, and suss out what went wrong.

There was an attempt to organize professional baseball players years before there was ever a Major League Baseball. Back in 1885, the National League reigned supreme. The league was in its 10th season, and had thrived in ways previous major leagues had not — and had done so in part due to the reserve clause. The reserve clause, established in 1879, gave NL clubs unlimited control over its players, severely weakening their ability to negotiate for more money, while making it impossible to play for another team at all. This is the same reserve clause that was banished from MLB nearly 100 years later, thanks to the efforts of Curt Flood, Marvin Miller, Andy Messersmith, Dave McNally, and the rest of the Players Association that fought for the right for free agency, the clause that made a player the property of their team in perpetuity.

Continue reading “The History of Baseball Unionization: The Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players”