The owners of professional baseball teams have acted in unison since the very beginning. They conspired to hold down the salaries of players with a secret reserve agreement in This created a monopsony whereby a player could only bargain with the team that originally signed him.
This stranglehold on the labor market would last a century. The baseball labor market is one of extremes. Baseball players began their labor history as amateurs whose skills quickly became highly demanded. For some, this translated into a career. Ultimately, all players became victims of a well-organized and obstinate cartel.
Players lost their ability to bargain and offer their services competitively for a century. Despite several attempts to organize and a few attempts to create additional demand for their services from outside sources, they failed to win the right to sell their labor to the employer of their choice. The first team of baseball players to be openly paid was the Redstockings of Cincinnati. Prior to that, teams were organized as amateur squads who played for the pride of their hometown, club or college.
The stakes in these games were bragging rights, often a trophy or loving cup, and occasionally a cash prize put up by a benefactor, or as a wager between the teams. It was inevitable that professional players would soon follow. The first known professional players were paid under the table. The desire to win had eclipsed the desire to observe good sportsmanship, and the first step down the slope toward full professionalization of the sport had been taken.
Just a few years later, in , the first professional team was established. The Redstockings are as famous for being the first professional team as they are for their record and barnstorming accomplishments. The team was openly professional, and thus served as a worthy goal for other teams, amateur, semi-professional, and professional alike. The Cincinnati squad spent the next year barnstorming across America, taking on, and defeating, all challengers.
In the process they drew attention to the game of baseball, and played a key part in its growing popularity. Just two years later, the first entirely professional baseball league would be established. The formation of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players in created a different level of competition for baseball players. The professional organization, which originally included nine teams, broke away from the National Association of Base Ball Players, which used amateur players.
The amateur league folded three years after the split. The league was reorganized and renamed the National League in This system, however, proved to be problematic.
It was not uncommon for players to jump from one team to another during the season for a pay increase. This not only cost team owners money, but also created havoc with the integrity of the game, as players moved among teams, causing dramatic mid-season swings in the quality of teams.
During the winter of , team owners gathered to discuss the problem of player roster jumping. Furthermore, they agreed to restrain themselves during the off-season as well.
Each owner would circulate to the other owners a list of five players he intended to keep on his roster the following season. Hence, the reserve clause was born. It would take nearly a century before this was struck down.
In the meantime, it went from five players about half the team to the entire team and to a formal contract clause agreed to by the players. Owners would ultimately make such a convincing case for the necessity of the reserve clause, that players themselves testified to its necessity in the Celler Anti-monopoly Hearings in In the minor league teams agreed to a system that allowed the National League teams to draft players from their teams.
This agreement was in response to their failure to get the NL to honor their reserve clause. In other words, what was good for the goose, was not good for the gander. While NL owners agreed to honor their reserve lists among one another, they paid no such honor to the reserve lists of teams in other organized, professional leagues.
They believed they were at the top of the pyramid, where all the best players should be, and therefore they would get those players when they wanted them.
As part of the draft agreement, the minor league teams allowed the NL teams to select players from their roster for fixed payments. The NL sacrificed some money, but restored a bit of order to the process, not to mention eliminated expensive bidding wars among teams for the services of players from the minor league teams. The first revolt by the players came in , when they formed their own league, called the Players League, to compete with the National League and its rival, the American Association AA , founded in The Players League was the first and only example of a cooperative league.
The league featured profit sharing with players, an abolition of unilateral contract transfers, and no reserve clause. The competing league caused a bidding war for talent, leading to salary increases for the best players.
This proved to be an unwieldy league arrangement however, and some of the franchises proved financially unstable. In order to preserve the structure of the league and avoid bankruptcy of some teams, syndicate ownership evolved, in which owners purchased a controlling interest in two teams.
This did not help the stability of the league. Instead, it became a situation in which the syndicates used one team to train young players and feed the best of them to the other team. This period in league history exhibits some of the greatest examples of disparity between the best and worst teams in the league. In the Cleveland Spiders, the poor stepsister in the Cleveland-St.
Louis syndicate, would lose a record out of games, a level of futility that has never been equaled. Syndicate ownership was ended in as the final part of the reorganization of the NL.
It also sparked the minor Western League to declare major league status, and move some teams into NL markets for direct competition Chicago, Boston, St. Louis, Philadelphia and Manhattan. All out competition followed in , complete with roster raiding, salary increases, and team jumping, much to the benefit of the players.
Syndicate ownership appeared again in when the owners of the Pittsburgh franchise purchased an interest in the Philadelphia club. Owners briefly entertained the idea of turning the entire league into a syndicate, transferring players to the market where they might be most valuable.
The idea was dropped, however, for fear that the game would lose credibility and result in a decrease in attendance. In syndicate ownership was formally banned, though it did occur again in , when the Montreal franchise was purchased by the other 29 MLB franchises as part of a three way franchise swap involving Boston, Miami and Montreal. MLB is currently looking to sell the franchise and move it to a more profitable market.
Once more the labor wars were ended, this time in an agreement that would establish the major leagues as an organization of two cooperating leagues: the National League and the American League, each with eight teams, located in the largest cities east of the Mississippi with the exception of St. Louis , and each league honoring the reserved rosters of teams in the other. This structure would prove remarkably stable, with no changes until when the Boston Braves became the first team to relocate in half a century when they moved to Milwaukee.
The location and number of franchises has been a tightly controlled issue for teams since leagues were first organized. Though franchise movements were not rare in the early days of the league, they have always been under the control of the league, not the individual franchise owners.
An owner is accepted into the league, but may not change the location of his or her franchise without the approval of the other members of the league. In addition, moving the location of a franchise within the vicinity of another franchise requires the permission of the affected franchise.
As a result, MLB franchises have been very stable over time in regard to location. The size of the league has also been stable. From the merger of the AL and NL in until , the league retained the same sixteen teams. Since that time, expansion has occurred fairly regularly, increasing to its present size of 30 teams with the latest round of expansion in In , the league proposed going in the other direction, suggesting that it would contract by two teams in response to an alleged fiscal crisis and breakdown in competitive balance.
Those plans were postponed at least four years by the labor agreement signed in Separate professional leagues for African Americans existed, since they were excluded from participating in MLB until when Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier. The first was formed in , and the last survived until , though their future was doomed by the integration of the major and minor leagues.
As revenues dried up or new markets beckoned due to shifts in population and the decreasing cost of trans-continental transportation, franchises began relocating in the second half of the twentieth century. The period from saw a spate of franchise relocation: teams moved to Kansas City, Minneapolis, Baltimore, Los Angeles, Oakland, Dallas and San Francisco in pursuit of new markets. Most of these moves involved one team moving out of a market it shared with another team.
The last team to relocate was the Washington D. The original franchise, a charter member of the American League, had moved to Minneapolis in While there have been no relocations since then, there have been plenty of examples of threats to relocate. The threat to relocate has frequently been used by a team trying to get a new stadium built with public financing.
There were still a couple of challenges to the reserve clause. Until the s, these came in the form of rival leagues creating competition for players, not a challenge to the legality of the reserve clause. In the Federal League debuted. The new league did not recognize the reserve clause of the existing leagues, and raided their rosters, successfully luring some of the best players to the rival league with huge salary increases.
Other players benefited from the new competition, and were able to win handsome raises from their NL and AL employers in return for not jumping leagues. The Federal League folded after two seasons when some of the franchise owners were granted access to the major leagues.
No new teams were added, but a few owners were allowed to purchase existing NL and AL teams. The first attack on the organizational structure of the major leagues to reach the US Supreme Court occurred when the shunned owner of the Baltimore club of the Federal League sued major league baseball for violation of antitrust law.
Federal Baseball Club of Baltimore v the National League eventually reached the Supreme Court, where in the famous decision that baseball was not interstate commerce, and therefore was exempt from antitrust laws was rendered.
The first player strike actually occurred in The Detroit Tigers, in a show of unison for their embattled star Ty Cobb, refused to play in protest of what they regarded as an unfair suspension of Cobb, refusing to take the field unless the suspension was lifted. The results were not surprising: a victory for the visiting Philadelphia Athletics. This was not an organized strike against the system per se, but it was indicative of the problems existent in the labor relations between players and owners.
The owner was in total control, and could mete out whatever punishment for whatever length he deemed appropriate. The next competing league appeared in from an unusual source: Mexico. Again, as in previous league wars, the competition benefited the players.
In this case the players who benefited most were those players who were able to use Mexican League offers as leverage to gain better contracts from their major league teams. Those players who accepted offers from Mexican League teams would ultimately regret it. The league was under-financed, the playing and travel conditions far below major league standards, and the wrath of the major leagues deep.
When the first paychecks were missed, the players began to head back to the U. However, they found no jobs waiting for them. This led to a lawsuit, Gardella v MLB. The case was eventually settled out of court after a Federal Appeals court sided with Danny Gardella in Gardella was one of the blacklisted players who sued MLB for restraint of trade after being prevented from returning to the league after accepting a Mexican League offer for the season.
While many of the players ultimately returned to the major leagues, they lost several years of their careers in the process. The first organization of baseball players came in , in part a response to the reserve clause enacted by owners. In fact, just two years later, the players agreed to the reserve clause, and it became a part of the standard players contract for the next 90 years. In another player organization was founded, the Players Protective Association.
Competition broke out the next year, when the Western League declared itself a major league, and became the American League. The Players Protective Association faded into obscurity amid the brief period of increased competition and player salaries. Ultimately, the players voted not to form a union, and instead followed the encouragement of the owners, and formed their own committee of player representatives to bargain directly with the owners.
The outcome of the negotiations was changes in the standard labor contract. Up to this point, the contract had been pretty much dictated by the owners. It contained such features as the right to waive a player with only ten days notice, the right to unilaterally decrease salary from one year to the next by any amount, and of course the reserve clause. The players did not make major headway with the owners, but they did garner some concessions.
Until , players received only expense money for spring training, no salary. Why is that? Perhaps it is because we take a team to heart at a young age, when players and teams seem like Olympian heroes to be worshipped and admired.
We lose that child-like wonderment about everything, but not about our baseball teams. Or perhaps because the game is played every day for six months, and fortunes of the team become as much a part of our life as those of friends and family. Baseball, like life, is full of difficult day-to-day challenges, with regular disappointments to which we can all relate and occasional bursts of success we can celebrate.
What else explains rational people jumping for joy or crying in despair at the fortunes of a group of 25 men they don't know and who don't know them? Baseball teams are wrapped in the mythic personality of their accomplishments and histories. No matter their recent accomplishments, the Red Sox are the slow-footed gaggle of hulky right handed hitters looking to dent the Green Monster, while the Cardinals are a model of pitching and defense.
The Giants are a haven for sluggers and the Mets continually produce quality hurlers. The Cubs are the lovable losers with the grand ballpark and the Dodgers are always playing home-grown talent. And the Yankees — well, they are always the Yankees. Baseball Almanac pays tribute to the thirty teams of today and their predecessors — all of whom are the torch bearers of the game's history.
Their accomplishments can be found here, their championship seasons, and the great performances which define the personality and measure the success of a team. Each team also has its share of famous firsts, fabulous feats, record setters, and histories that need to be told. Baseball Almanac is dedicated to the preservation of each team's unique history and we hope you enjoy our look at the Major League franchises.
Frick, Crown Publishers, , Page Baltimore Orioles History - St. Louis Browns - Milwaukee Brewers - Arizona Diamondbacks History - Detroit Tigers History - Colorado Rockies History - Over most of the course of Major League Baseball, steroid testing was never a major issue. However, after the BALCO steroid scandal, which involved allegations that top baseball players had used illegal performance enhancing drugs, Major League Baseball has finally decided to issue harsher penalties for steroid users.
The new policy, which was accepted by Major League Baseball players and owners, was issued at the start of the season and goes as follows:. The 1st positive test will result in a suspension of up to 10 days. The 2nd positive test will result in a suspension of 30 days. The 3rd positive test will result in a suspension of 60 days. The 4th positive test will result in a suspension of one full year. Players will be tested at least once per year, with the chance that several players can be tested a numerous amount of times per year.
See: List of Major League Baseball players suspended for steroids. This program would replaces the previous steroid testing program under which, for example, no player was even suspended in Under the old policy, which was established in , a first time offense would only result in treatment for the player.
The new agreement makes sure that first time offenders are rightfully suspended. In recent news, Bud Selig , the former Commissioner of MLB, has proposed even tougher penalties for positive tests than the ones in place today.
The 1st positive test would result in a 50 game suspension. The 2nd positive test would result in a game suspension. Finally, the 3rd positive test would result in a lifetime suspension from MLB. The rule was put into effect before the season. Jerry Mejia was the first person suspended from the MLB before the season after the 3rd positive strike. These new penalties are much harsher, however they were accepted by MLB players and owners.
MLB's reluctance to take a hard line on drugs as many other sports feature far more strict testing and penalties is widely seen as one of the main reasons why baseball has been dropped from the Olympics with effect from In , the centennial of professional baseball, a commission chartered by Major League Baseball identified the following leagues as "major leagues". The list is sometimes disputed by baseball researchers. The MLB list included the following:.
Some researchers contend that the following leagues deserve consideration as major leagues due to the caliber of player and the level of play exhibited:. Conversely, some historians question whether the Union Association really qualifies as "major", because it really only had one major-league caliber team St.
Louis and its membership was a revolving door. The Union's chief claim to major status would rest on having had some direct impact on the other majors, due to roster-raiding. None of the three "non-major" groups listed above could make that claim. Louis Cardinals. Baseball Wiki Explore. Top Content. Recent blog posts. Explore Wikis Community Central. Register Don't have an account?
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