It’s Now Past Time for a New Pastime

It’s time to end this baseball war. The players ought to say, “Hey, Bud. Hey, Jerry. You guys win.”

Then the players should do what players did 107 years ago.

They quit.

And they formed their own league.

Yes, once upon a time, major league baseball was in a real mess. The players’ rebellion in 1889 so infuriated the Establishment that a bought-and-paid-for sportswriter wrote, “Not one professional baseball player out of 10 is to be trusted to keep his word or even his bond where there is any pecuniary temptation.”

By pecuniary, he meant money.

“A more ungrateful set of people than the majority of professional ballplayers it would be hard to find,” another sportswriter wrote. “Low drunken knaves have too long been allowed to hold positions on professional teams.”

Leaders of the Brotherhood, a high-sounding name for what was in fact a players union, were described in print as “a few porcine professionals who, in their selfishness and love of gold, tried to destroy the reserve rule.”

By porcine, he meant hog-fat.

By the reserve rule, he meant the owners’ rule that made players their property forever--or, as John Montgomery Ward, president of the Brotherhood, put it: “Like a fugitive slave law, the reserve rule denies (a player) a harbor or a livelihood, and carries him back, bound and shackled, to the club from which he attempted to escape. He goes where he is sent, takes what is given him, and thanks the Lord for life.”

Which is pretty much what owner Frederick Stearns said when a player quit his club to play in another town: “Deacon White may have been elected president of the Buffalo club or president of the United States, but that won’t enable him to play ball in Buffalo. He’ll play in Pittsburgh or he’ll get off the Earth.”

One player asked for $3,200 a season, $1,200 above the owners’ unilaterally imposed salary cap. (Yes, in 1889, Bud Selig and Jerry Reinsdorf’s dream: a salary cap.) “That’s $40 a game,” a sportswriter screamed in print. “That’s $20 an hour. He’s no hog, but he wants the club to pay him more than it can make. Why, they offered Paul Hines $9 an hour to stand in center field and catch a fly occasionally.”

Well, one thing led to another.

Although owners agreed under the players’ pressure and threat of strike to re-think the reserve rule, here’s the way they re-thought it: They created the Brush Classification Rule. As devised by the owner John T. Brush, the system rated players from “A” to “E” with salaries descending from $2,500 to $1,500.

Players at $1,500 were expected to earn a portion of their largess by doing chores at the ballpark, such as sweeping bleachers after games. Boston Owner Arthur Soden used marginal players as turnstile attendants.

In rebellion, the Brotherhood announced on November 6, 1889, the formation of a new league, the Players National League. Said John Ward, “There was a time when the league stood for integrity and fair dealing; today it stands for dollars and cents.”

The Players League went head-to-head with the National League in New York, Brooklyn, Boston, Philadelphia, Chicago, Pittsburgh and Cleveland. Nearly every star signed up with the Players League, including catcher Cornelius McGillicuddy, whose box score name was Connie Mack. He invested $500 in the Buffalo club.

But as earlier attempts at rebellion failed, so would this one. “The players and their backers claimed it would be different this time,” historian Robert Smith has written. “They thought they had right and riches on their side. They would learn instead how ruthlessly the baseball monopoly, barely a decade old, would deal with its adversaries.”

The Players League made it through one season. With losses of $3 million, league backers sold their franchises to the old-liners, who claimed total victory.

But the players learned from that failure. They learned they had power as a group. They had the courts on their side against owners/monopolists. They learned owners would never yield a penny more than could be forced from them.

As valid as those lessons were in 1890, they have been confirmed a hundredfold in the century since.

Which brings us to this: As long as today’s players have gone this far, why not go all the way?

Why don’t they do the Brotherhood thing?

Quit their teams. Create their own league. They could become owners of themselves, masters of their fate.

Certainly, a players’ rebellion would render the landscape chaotic with lawsuits flying in all directions.

To which the sensible response is: So what?

Baseball now is a disgrace at every level, legally, ethically, morally and financially. From such disgrace, chaos is an improvement.

At least the chaos would have a purpose. The purpose would be a revolution.

Let Brewers Owner/acting Commissioner Bud Selig and

White Sox Owner Jerry Reinsdorf have their victory earned with the blood of baseball fans. Let owners tell fans they have defeated players yet again. And then let today’s baseball owners try to play the game without today’s players.

Let them try again with “replacement players.” Let them suit up minor league talent when today’s fans have reason to believe that even current major leaguers are pale facsimiles of quality players.

And they’d do it, too. They’d do it because right now baseball’s only direction is suicidal. The proof is in an owner’s comment about Randy Levine, the $600,000-a-year negotiator who agreed to a deal with the baseball players last month. “We should put him against a wall, blindfold him and shoot him,” the owner said.

To which ESPN commentator Keith Olbermann said with a sneer, “Considering all the owners have done in the past, they’d miss.”