Baseball fan or not, why everyone should support MLB players
Part 4 of "Towards a Better Baseball"
During MLB’s 2023-24 offseason, I am posting a series of essays titled “Toward a Better Baseball.” The goal of the series is to articulate a vision for the sport for when MLB loses its monopoly power. This is Part 4. Read the preceding installments here.
In a lawsuit bankrolled by the Major League Baseball Players Association, St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood challenged MLB’s reserve clause in 1970 and took the case all the way to the Supreme Court. Flood argued that the clause, invented almost 100 years prior, unconstitutionally depressed wages and violated worker rights. Team owners claimed what capitalists always do—that a business is only viable when it exploits labor.
While legal interpretations of the reserve clause diverged, everyone agreed on its real-world impact: teams controlled players’ employment in perpetuity by being able to invoke the right to renew a contract every offseason. The Court ultimately deferred to MLB’s antitrust exemption, but Flood cracked open a door that the union smashed through.
In 1975, the so-called Seitz decision in a salary arbitration case nullified the reserve clause and finally granted free agency to players. In the 80s, the players won millions after proving the owners colluded to not sign those free agents, and in the 90s the players beat back repeated attempts to institute a salary cap. Then in 1998, Congress passed the Curt Flood Act, which reapplied antitrust laws in matters relating to employment in the major leagues. These union victories resulted in the average player salary increasing from $413,000 in 1986 to $4.9 million in 2023, a 1,086 percent raise against inflation of 178 percent. Force your child to be a left-handed pitcher and you too can get in on this action.
By any metric, players are richer than ever, and by any metric MLB is more popular than ever. Flood helped prove that better compensating players results in better baseball. That is what’s so frustrating about today’s game. The players are criminally underpaid and still lack agency over their careers. We have a worse sport for it.
As reported in The Lords of the Realm, John Heylar’s classic history of the business of baseball, team owners through the 20th century agreed that they must protect the reserve clause at all costs. They agreed on nothing else—on strategies and tactics to prevent free agency, on other league goals and priorities, on technology, relocation, expansion. They hated White Sox owner Bill Veeck for staging wacky game promotions, and they resented Atlanta Braves owner Ted Turner for trying to sell baseball as entertainment to a general audience. “Gentlemen,” Turner once said to his colleagues, “we have the only legal monopoly in the country and we’re fucking it up.”
For their part, the players had fought for generations against the reserve clause until they brought on labor economist Marvin Miller in 1966 to help found the MLBPA. Miller quickly unified the membership behind a multi-front campaign.
The vote to authorize the MLBPA’s first strike, in 1972, was 47-0. Players won larger pensions within two weeks. It’s an example of how the players’ solidarity forced the owners into a strategy of appeasement. Backed into a corner, huddled nervously around the reserve clause, management offered one seemingly minor concession after the other. In any given labor dispute, then, both sides were able to declare victory: the players were better compensated and the owners staved off free agency. It made the MLBPA one of the most successful, powerful, and visible labor unions in the country, but over time labor and management created a collectively bargained Frankenstein.
Players are bound for six years to the teams that sign them out of amateur baseball. They earn the league’s minimum salary for the first three years, then their pay for the next three is negotiated or, failing an agreement, determined by an arbiter. (It was in this arbitration process, another byproduct of the 1972 strike, that the reserve clause met its demise.) Only then are players granted unrestricted free agency. Each collective bargaining agreement has amended this system to the point of incoherency, but the impacts on a player’s earning potential are clear and enduring—their wages are more or less capped no matter how much value they bring to their team.
What fans care about, though, is winning, and the six years of “team control”—an Orwellian concept if there ever was one—creates a perverse incentive to keep some of the best ball players out of MLB. A player’s six-year clock only ticks when they’re in the major leagues, in part because the Curt Flood Act doesn’t apply to minor leaguers, so teams use every excuse to delay a player’s promotion to the bigs. This suppresses labor costs and allows teams to be bad on purpose to attain higher draft picks (i.e. more cheap and talented labor).
This “service time manipulation” is so routine former Seattle Mariners president Kevin Mather thought nothing of telling a Rotary Club over Zoom his philosophy on the matter:
The risk was, if our major league team had had a COVID outbreak, or injuries, and we had to call people up from the taxi squad, we were a little short on players. Because there was no chance you were going to see these young players at T-Mobile Park. We weren’t going to put them on the 40-man roster, we weren’t going to start the service time clock. There were all kinds of reasons that, if we had an injury problem or COVID outbreak, you might’ve seen my big tummy out there in left field. You would not have seen our prospects playing in T-Mobile Park.
Although Mather is former Seattle Mariners president because he was forced to resign after this, it’s not the most egregious example.
Kris Bryant entered pro baseball as the No. 2 pick in the 2013 draft and immediately proved to be the best young player in the sport. The Chicago Cubs shuffled him through various minor league levels in the 2014 season supposedly to hone his defense, as if that matters when someone hits .325 and 43 home runs. As Bryant was on his way to winning the Minor League Player of the Year award, the big league team was busy finishing last in the National League Central.
Bryant finally made his major league debut the following season, but not on opening day or any day in the first three weeks of the season. He was promoted on April 17, the first date in 2015 that would delay his eventual free agency by a full year. Bryant would go on to win a Rookie of the Year Award and an MVP and make the last out in the Cubs’ iconic 2016 World Series victory. He was also as marketable as a movie star. Being 6’5” and beautiful will do that. This is someone MLB did not want in its league, and as Fangraphs’ Michael Baumann noted it’s a practice that amounts to wage theft.
Another failure of team control is it limits player movement. MLB sells this as a good thing; familiar rosters breed fan loyalty. But so does winning, and not being able to sign good or undervalued young players in the free market hampers a team’s ability to compete. Owners would whine about their own talent being signed away and to that I say: too bad. It’s competition. Try harder, develop better, spend more. Sell your team if you can’t.
When free agent signings slow to a trickle, as they have now, fans grouse and aim “do something” memes at their teams. That “something” is trying to win, for trying is exciting and winning is fun. Ted Turner was right. Professional baseball is entertainment, or at least it should be. Shohei Ohtani signing with the Dodgers was so engrossing his contract caught the attention of the California State Controller. Team executives “monitoring the market” is lame and garners no attention from the authorities.
No other sports league has such an employment system, and applying it to other industries reveals its absurdities. Should a cook be confined to a fast food restaurant if they are good enough for and want to work in a Michelin star restaurant? Should they be beholden to that Michelin star restaurant for six years and be forced to make below-market wages?
This scenario is unrealistic, of course, because line cooks don’t have souls and there is more than one company in the restaurant industry. Under antitrust laws, those companies cannot collude to suppress wages. There is only one company in baseball: MLB. In theory, the league’s antitrust exemption hasn’t impacted labor issues in decades, as they are governed mostly by collective bargaining. The owners’ collusion in the 80s, for example, was punished under the CBA, not antitrust laws.
In reality, the league can sustain its employment model because of that very exemption. The best professional baseball players have nowhere else to go, so there is no leverage to negotiate it away. The model would fall the moment it becomes legal for other major leagues to exist, since no talented or marketable player would sign for a team in a league that mandates low pay and no free agency for six years. And the moment the model falls is the moment we would have better baseball.
The players had a clear professional interest in challenging the reserve clause. They could make more money elsewhere or play somewhere they preferred or both. Curt Flood so adamantly litigated the clause in part because, as a Black man, he refused to play for the Philadelphia Phillies, to whom he’d been traded after the 1969 season. The franchise had a reputation for being racist, probably because it was. The Phillies were the last National League team to sign a Black player, star slugger Dick Allen was treated horribly in Philly, and in one of the ugliest on-field episodes in baseball history then-manager Ben Chapman instigated a barrage of slurs toward a rookie Jackie Robinson.
New York Yankees catcher Elston Howard was also a Black star player active in the union, and his wife joined him. In a story recounted by Heylar, the MLBPA invited Arlene Howard to a bargaining session in the late-1960s. She excoriated the owners for holding spring training in Florida, which was clinging to Jim Crow. Black players had difficulties finding housing, restaurants, and businesses willing to serve them. They had to travel farther and pay more for such services. Therefore, Black players should be paid higher allowances. (The owners did not agree to this.)
Hall of Famer Reggie Jackson, the son of a Negro leagues ball player, was another union leader and was as brash at the negotiating table as he was on the field. His supersized ego drove his activism, but so did his lived experience.
After being drafted in 1966, Jackson was assigned to a minor league affiliate in Birmingham, Alabama. He couchsurfed with white teammates until their landlord threatened to evict them and neighbors threatened to burn down the apartment complex. He moved into a hotel downtown. On the road, teammates would have to order food inside a restaurant and bring it to Jackson outside.
Jackson worked for the notoriously stingy Charles Finley after he was promoted to the Oakland A’s, and ahead of the 1970 season (and at the same time Flood filed his suit) Jackson held out for a raise. In 1972, he rallied the union’s support for its first strike. At that season’s World Series between Jackson’s Athletics and the Cincinnati Reds, MLB commemorated the 25th anniversary of Jackie Robinson breaking baseball’s color barrier.
“I am extremely proud and pleased to be here this afternoon,” Robinson told the crowd before first pitch, “but I must admit I am going to be tremendously more pleased and more proud when I look at that third base coaching line one day and see a Black face managing in baseball.”
Despite what MLB sells the public, it is not the league that is an engine of equality. It is baseball players, and their progress was not and is not inevitable. In the 19th century, several players of color played on mixed-race pro teams, and all-Black and all-white teams regularly played each other, but then Jim Crow closed the major leagues to Black America for decades. In this context, there’s no wonder why it was Black players who most doggedly challenged the reserve clause and who advocated aggressive labor action.
That project is not complete. Only 6.1 percent of MLB players on opening day rosters last season were Black, the smallest percentage since 1955. There are two Black managers. There is just one Black general manager. There are no Black majority team owners and there never has been. As The League documented, MLB realized by the 1940s that it did not feature all the best players nor did it offer the most entertaining baseball. The Negro leagues did. It tried to solve this by signing away the best Black players, rather than absorbing Negro league teams and their Black owners into MLB or recognizing the Negro leagues as an independent major league. Jackson had aspired to own a team after his playing days, but was sidelined by incumbent owners. “It’s painful enough,” he said in an eponymous 2023 documentary, “when you’re my age, and know that it hasn’t changed that much.”
The MLBPA is still at the vanguard. It has invested millions in The Players Alliance, which works to improve representation of Black Americans in all levels of baseball, and in the Youth Development Foundation, which hosts the Hank Aaron Invitational and the HBCU Swingman Classic. As for its core bargaining duties, wages had stagnated in the 2010s despite record league revenue, and that became a central issue for a union that, across all races, is now over 40 percent non-white.
The MLBPA wasn’t just focused on increasing wages overall, but they were also steadfast in ensuring younger players were paid more. The players made such progress in the 2021-22 lockout. New rules incentivize teams to promote good, young players to the majors, and the league’s minimum salary jumped nearly 25 percent to $700,000, with $20,000 raises each year through 2026.
Pitcher Max Scherzer, a crazy white dude from Missouri, led the negotiations for the players and was adamant about this point. “I’m willing to fight for those guys,” he told The New York Times. “[I’m] willing to sacrifice my salary to make sure that they can make the most that they can.” Scherzer wasn’t supported by many fans, if the Times comment section is any indication. Admittedly, that quote rings a bit hollow with his having arrived at bargaining sessions in a Porsche, “sacrificing” a salary set by a three-year, $130 million contract.
Conspicuous consumption aside, it’s disappointing reading criticisms of the players because we, the players and most fans, are the same in an economic sense. We each have little choice but to sell our labor power to an employer, who then owns and reaps the benefits of the product and services our labor creates. This makes our labor power worth more than what we are paid for it, and you can test this theory by asking an MLB team owner how much profit they’d make without players. We fight each other in the gap between our labor power and the surplus value it creates, when we should be working together to close it.
Viewed through this lens, the relatively high wages in MLB are irrelevant, and so are the differences in our personal politics. As long as there exists a system that allows one type of worker to be exploited—in this case, a baseball player—then there exists the capacity for all workers to be exploited.
The shut-up-and-pitch contingent is in effect rooting against its own interests and for a lesser product, for economic and racial injustice often means exclusion. MLB has proven this over and over, and it’s no coincidence that, in the course of baseball history, Black players fighting for and winning fairer treatment has led to the fairer treatment of all players, which has led to a better game. It’s almost as if baseball is a metaphor for life.
Baseball is a metaphor for life within American capitalism. Of its many valuable insights, the highest value of this piece is in connecting baseball to the moral imperatives of Black civil rights. Blind as we are to this fact, we all benefited economically from Flood, Jackson et al. And exactly how and when is the absurd anti-trust protection for MLB ending?