As 1888 drew to a close, John Montgomery Ward stood atop the
world of professional baseball. The star
shortstop had just led the New York Giants to the National League pennant, followed
by a triumph over the St. Louis Browns of the rival American Association in
what even then went by the inflated title of baseball’s “World Series.” A dominating pitcher early in his career (he
threw the second perfect game in major league history), an arm injury forced
Ward to recreate himself as an infielder, where he became one of the best
fielders and hitters of his era. He was
lauded in the press as a ballplayer with “few equals and no superiors,” and “by
long odds the most popular player in the profession.” These accomplishments would eventually earn Ward
a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Ward’s skills on the ball field were only a part of what
made him such a remarkable figure. Contemporaries
and historians alike have struggled to describe him. One adjective-happy biographer took the
saturation approach: he was a “jug-eared, willowy, peach-fuzzed, overreaching
punk” as well as “honorable, smart, and tenacious.” More admired than liked seems to have been the
consensus view of Ward contemporaries.
In a profession not known for intellectualism, he stood out. Although Ward left school at the age of thirteen
in order to pursue his baseball career, he eventually earned, in his spare time,
degrees in political science and law from Columbia. He was said to speak five languages. A regular contributor to newspapers and
periodicals, in 1888 he published Baseball:
How to Become a Player, which he described as a “handbook of the game, a
picture of the play as seen by a player.”
Ward was also a pioneering labor leader. In 1885 he
established America’s first sports union, the Brotherhood of Professional Base
Ball Players. Initially designed to help
sick, injured, or hard-up ballplayers and promote professional standards, the
Brotherhood quickly evolved into something approaching a craft union for
ballplayers. Ward had forward-looking
attitudes on race as well. At a time
when the color line was hardening in American society, and organized baseball had
become a whites-only affair, Ward urged the Giants to sign an African American pitcher.
If all this wasn’t enough, Ward’s social life was also
noteworthy. In 1887 he married a New
York actress and socialite, Helen Dauvray, who also happened to be a passionate
baseball fan. “Her tiny hands beat each
other rapturously at every victory of the Giants and her dark eyes were bedewed
at every defeat,” reported the New York
Times. “But the thousands of
spectators who observed Miss Dauvray’s emotions little suspected that one of
the Giants had any precedence over the others so far as her affections were
concerned.” She had donated the Tiffany
trophy that went to the World Series champion; it was the “Dauvray Cup” that her
husband brought home at the end of the 1888 season. In How
to Become a Player, the ever gallant Ward included a chapter explaining the
basics of the game “for the benefit of those ladies whose escorts either
cannot, or will not, answer their questions.”
He also offered advice for his gentleman readers: “Whoever has not
experienced the pleasure of taking a young lady to her first game of ball
should seize the first opportunity to do so.”
Life was not all three-hit games and celebrity life for the
great Monte Ward, however. His
relationship with Helen Dauvray was strained almost from the start. He was carrying on an affair, and she knew it;
she wanted to return to the stage, and he didn’t want her to. They lived together for only a year and soon divorced.
His baseball career too was about to veer off in some unexpected
directions. Following his World Series triumph,
Ward captained a team of National League all-stars that traveled around the globe
between October 1888 and April 1889 in an effort to promote the game overseas. It was a grand gesture, fitting for an
emerging era of American nationalism and confidence on the international scene.
But the world tour also helped set motion
one of the most significant upheavals in baseball’s history. The man who organized and led the tour around
the globe was Albert Goodwill Spalding. Soon
after they returned home, he and Ward would face off in an epic struggle for
the future of the game.
Spalding, a star pitcher in his younger years, now owned the
Chicago White Stockings of the National League in addition to a burgeoning sporting
goods empire. The game never had a more
effective and more passionate salesman.
Baseball, he once wrote, captured the nation because “it is the exponent
of American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness; American Dash, Discipline,
Determination; American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm; American Pluck,
Persistency, Performance; American Spirit, Sagacity, Success; American Vim,
Vigor, Virility.” (Spalding also
basically created baseball’s all-American birth myth, which conveniently featured
a future Civil War hero, Abner Doubleday, in 1839 dreaming up the game in
bucolic Cooperstown, New York. In fact, baseball
had largely evolved from various children’s games; if it ever had a proper
birth moment, it was among young professionals in 1840s New York City.) Spalding envisioned the world tour as an
opportunity to sell two things he loved above all: the game of baseball and the
equipment that bore his name. Despite
his background as a player, and despite his overwrought romanticism about the
national pastime, Spalding approached his role as a team owner from the
perspective of the captain of industry that he had become: the players were employees,
and comfortably paid ones at that; and it was the owner’s job to control costs
and ensure a compliant workforce.
Needless to say, he didn’t think much of Ward’s efforts with the
Brotherhood.
The world tour had just reach Cairo, Egypt, in February 1889
when the players received news that, at their winter meetings in New York, the
National League owners had adopted a major reform designed to reign in player
salaries. They created a player
classification system under which “Class A” players earned $2,500, “Class B”
players $2,250, and so on, down to “Class E” players who earned $1,500. The classifications scheme took into account
not only player ability, but also “conduct, both on and off the field.”
Ward, who had already established himself as his
generation’s most outspoken critic of baseball’s distinctive labor practices, saw
the plan as an affront to the players.
What made working as a professional ballplayer different from any other
occupation was the “reserve clause,” a provision
in player contracts under which an owner could “reserve” a number of players when
the term of their contracts ended. The clause
prohibited the player from negotiating with another team unless his team released
him. As professional baseball was
controlled by an agreement between the teams under which each team agreed to
respect the player contracts of other teams, the reserved player faced three
options: sign a new contract at the terms dictated by the owner; hold out and
hope for better terms; or stop playing baseball. Owners defended the reserve clause as
essential to ensuring the stability of the game. It did indeed further this goal. But there was another reason, one they didn’t
trumpet so proudly: it kept down player salaries. And here too it was effective. In the late 1880s, as club profits tripled,
player salaries grew by only 30%, a fact at least partly attributable to the
reserve system.
In 1887 Ward had a scathing attack on the reserve clause, titled
“Is the Base-Ball Player a Chattel?” He
compared the reserve clause to “a fugitive-slave law”: it “denies [the player] a
harbor or a livelihood, and carries him back, bound and shackled, to the club
from which he attempted to escape.”
The remedy, according to Ward, was simple: get rid of “base-ball
law” and allow “the business of base-ball to be made to rest on the ordinary
business basis.”
When he learned of the owners’ classification plan, Ward was
so incensed he threatened to abandon the world tour to come home and confront
the owners. (The news that the Giants were
trying to trade him only added to his frustration.) He suspected that Spalding
had planned the entire trip just to get him and some of his allies out of the
country in order to go forward with their plans. If this was indeed Spalding’s plan (and there
is no evidence it was), it backfired, as the tour ended up giving some of the
game’s top players long hours to share their grievances. The plan for the baseball revolution that
would upend the game in 1890 might very well have been hatched in quiet
conversation among the players while on Spalding’s world tour. Nearly all the players on the tour would join
Ward’s revolt against the National League.
During the 1889 season, Ward began preparations for the
creation of a rival major league, the Players League. Working in secret (he was, after all, still
on the enemy’s payroll), he found financial backing and convinced many of his
fellow players to commit to the new league.
Some aspects of the Players
League looked familiar. The players were
familiar—the new league lured many of the best National League players to its
rosters. And the cities in which they
played were familiar—the seven cities in which their eight teams played were all
cities that already had National League teams.
But the business model behind the Players League was radically different
from anything that had come before. Each
club was run by an eight-man board, consisting of four players and four
investors. The league was governed by a
senate-like organization, with two representatives from each team (one elected
by players, one by owners).
Players had three-year contracts,
and no reserve
clause. Investors were promised the
first $10,000 of each club’s net profit, with the rest to be divided among the
players.
Spalding and the National League attacked the Players
League. First, they turned to the
courts: the Giants sued Ward for breach of contract Ward had violated the terms of his reserve
clause, they claimed, and they asked a New York state court to issue an injunction
prohibiting Ward from playing for anyone else. The court denied the injunction. As the reserve clause failed to specify such
essentials as Ward’s salary and the terms of the renewed contract, the judge
concluded that it was too indefinite to be treated as a binding contract for
the 1890 season. The court also raised
the disturbing question of whether, assuming the reserve clause were read to
constitute a binding contract for the following season, the renewed contract
would also include a reserve clause. If
so, the player would be tied to his current team for as long as the team
desired, while the team could release a player with only ten-days’ notice. This
was rather absurd, according to the judge.
“We have the spectacle presented of a contract which binds one party for
a series of years and the other party for ten days, and of the party who is
itself bound for ten days coming into a court of equity to enforce its claims
against the party bound for years.” The
judge concluded that the reserve clause was unenforceable for “want of fairness
and of mutuality.”
With the courts refusing to help, Spalding turned to public
opinion. He pulled out all the
rhetorical stops. What the players were
doing was “secession,” a “revolt,” a “war”; the National League was confronting
“hot headed anarchists” who were leading a “revolutionary movement.”
But the fall of the Players League’s after just one season came
not from Spalding’s attacks in the press, nor from legal challenges. It came from the marketplace. The new league had the best players, but this
was not enough. With three major leagues
competing for a limited fan base, everyone suffered at the gate. At season’s end, when Spalding opened
negotiations with Players League investors, he pointedly excluded Ward and any
other players. “[T]he monied men met
with the monied men,” as Spalding put it. The National League owners simply bought out
their competition; several Players League clubs were integrated into a
reconfigured National League. Ward’s revolution
was over.
Ward
returned to the National League, where he played four more seasons. He was still one of the best players in the
league when he retired in 1894. He went on
to be a successful lawyer, a gentleman farmer, and a top amateur golfer. Although he mended fences with organized
baseball, his passion for the cause he had led never left him. In 1925, shortly before his death, he gave a
speech—at an event to celebrate the National League, of all places—recounting
the events of 1888-1890 in which he made clear that the war against the
National League, while doomed, was justified.
For a brief moment, the Players League presented a radical
alternative business model for professional sports, one in which the players
and owners shared control of the game as well as its profits. With the failure of Ward’s baseball
revolution, the owner-dominated system lived on. In the following decades, various teams would
go to court to have the reserve clause enforced against players who had jumped
their contracts (a relatively common occurrence any time there was a rival
league that refused to abide by the agreement that controlled the baseball
monopoly). Judges, with only the rarest
of exceptions, sided with the players, often citing Ward’s case as authority on
the matter. The reserve clause lived on,
however, and it did so because the baseball monopoly, while periodically
challenged, remained in place. As long
as owners respected their contracts of their on-the-field competitors, they did
not need the courts. For this reason,
the most significant legal challenges to baseball’s unique labor practices came
in the realm of antitrust, not contract law.
But baseball law survived this challenge too, as the United States Supreme
Court granted, and then twice reaffirmed, that federal antitrust law did not
apply to professional baseball.
