384 pp., 61/8 x 91/4, 12 illus., 4 charts, appends.,
notes, bibl., index
$45.00 cloth
ISBN 0-8078-2592-1
$21.95 paper
ISBN 0-8078-4908-1
Published: Spring 2001
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Much More
Than a
Game
Players, Owners,
and American Baseball since 1921
by Robert F.
Burk
Copyright
(c) 2001 by the University of North Carolina Press. All
rights reserved.
Chapter 1. A New Era, 1921-1929
In the decade following World War I, the United States entered a new era as a confident, maturing nation. A majority of its citizens now lived in urban areas and served as both producers and purchasers of the bounty of a revolutionary new society of mass consumption. It was in most respects a prosperous society. But it was also one in which wage inequalities and wealth maldistribution were growing. Even the most enlightened companies offered but modest "welfare-capitalism" benefits. Larger and larger firms and combinations dominated the business landscape, and they used their size and trade association networks to control industry decision making, neutralize unionization efforts, and influence politicians and the courts. Their predecessors having struggled through boom-and-bust cycles, labor militancy, and trade wars, the New Era's titans were determined not to permit a return to the old instability or to allow new threats to their dominance to emerge.
Virtually any history textbook offers such a description of the U.S. economy of the 1920s. Every part of it applied equally to professional baseball in the United States. For if the 1920s were a new era in the nation's economic life, the decade was also known, not coincidentally, as the golden age of sports. In the postwar decade, spectator sports became clearly recognizable as major entertainment businesses, and none more so than Organized Baseball. Save for a brief trough in the early 1920s, baseball enjoyed impressive customer growth and rising profits. To be sure not all clubs, whether owing to smaller markets, weaker talent, or both, shared equally in the bounty. At one end the New York Yankees generated $2.6 million in the baseball "bull market" of 1923-30. In contrast, paying a heavy price for handing over Babe Ruth to their Bronx rivals, the Boston Red Sox lost over $300,000 in the same stretch. But on average, each major league club made a $115,000 yearly profit in the 1920s. Throughout Organized Baseball, which included the white minor leagues, 1925 offered a typical gate receipt figure of $50 million.[1]
As in other industries, extraordinary productivity gains propelled baseball's growing popularity and prosperity. But what made baseball dramatically different was that its productivity and profit gains did not come from replacing workers with machines. In baseball such mechanization could not happen, since the on-field workers' labor was the entertainment product. Spurred by one noteworthy "technological improvement"--the "lively ball"--and by rules requiring replacement of dirty baseballs and prohibition of the spitball, hitting production soared to record levels. Batting averages, approximately .250 in the major leagues in 1919, jumped to .285 in 1921 and stayed in the .280s all decade. Home runs, the signature mark of the lusty-hitting batter, climbed from 338 in the 1917 season to 1,167 in 1925.[2]
In the New Era, however, such productivity gains and rising profits did not inevitably translate into wage boosts. Management, whether in baseball or more broadly, utilized a wide array of tactics to restrain employee power and therefore the benefits derived from it. The methods ranged from antiunion employer associations, blacklistings, firings, on-the-job harassment, "yellow-dog" contracts, injunctions, industrial espionage, strikebreaking, and police crackdowns to company unions, management-run grievance procedures, and limited types of welfare capitalism. In the decades before World War I, baseball players had mirrored workers in other enterprises in challenging management's hegemony over their industry. On several occasions they had formed unions and, in one instance, even a rival league, seeking greater leverage. Even though baseball trade wars usually had not been instigated by players, their periodic occurrence had offered players temporary clout with the opportunity to play off rival suitors. But the latest attempt at collective association, the Players' Fraternity, had collapsed after the failure of the Federal League challenge to the majors. By the start of the postwar decade, the performers lacked the means or circumstances to combat Organized Baseball's drive for comprehensive labor control.
Although in defeat their resistance largely has been forgotten, players of the early 1920s did not simply go down quietly. In 1921 Johnny Evers urged comrades to mobilize on "ethical" lines for procedural rights, pensions, and health coverage. Sensitive to traditional player hostility to anything that smacked of wage scales, Evers insisted his proposed fraternity would not "regulate salaries in any way." Specific incidents at the end of 1921 provoked still more player grumbling about eroding rights and inadequate benefits. On September 30 the New York Giants squad put on an exhibition game to raise over $30,000 for its disabled prewar star Christy Mathewson. When slugger Babe Ruth defied Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis's ban on postseason barnstorming and drew the threat of suspension without pay, other players rallied in support of "the Bambino" and called for a union to "obtain rights." Reflecting management fears of an emerging round of postwar player militancy, the Sporting News cheered Landis's assertion of "law and order" on Ruth for causing "some ball players with Bolshevik tendencies [to] hesitate." As a recession reached its bottom, fears of an attendance dip in 1922 led to widespread talk among owners of salary cutbacks and release of veteran players that also promised to provoke defiance.[3]
In the spring of 1922 increasingly disgruntled major leaguers formed the National Baseball Players' Association of the United States. The membership tabbed Raymond J. Cannon, a former semipro pitcher turned attorney-agent for prizefighter Jack Dempsey and blacklisted "Black Soxer" Happy Felsch, as its leader. Setting annual dues at $20, the association drew up a constitution, chose an eleven-member board of directors, and demanded the right to voting representation in industry councils. Even Samuel Gompers, head of the American Federation of Labor (AFL), extended his public blessing to the new organization. But Organized Baseball soon counterattacked. The Sporting News's Francis Richter insisted that the only real grievances the association cited were the reserve clause and the owners' prerogative to release players with only ten days' notice. Even in these matters, "the experiences of half a century prove that both are absolutely essential." "Ball players' unions are impractical," Richter concluded, "for the simple reason that the players' tenure of professional life is limited to fifteen or twenty years at most; and unnecessary because the income from playing is variable. . . . Why spend time, labor or money on a useless player organization?"[4]
Undissuaded by such arguments, the association proceeded to recruit members throughout the season. Gains proved especially strong among the poorer-paid squads of the National League. By the fall of 1922 one press account claimed that 60 percent of the senior circuit's players and 40 percent of American Leaguers had signed up. Signaling management's expectations of a hard fight, penurious Brooklyn owner Charles Ebbets vowed he would not be "black-jacked into meeting unreasonable demands by my players" and insisted that if his men attempted to strike next spring, he would "fight them with every means at my command" and "clean house" of all malcontents. Ironically, the owners themselves almost triggered a preliminary strike during the 1922 World Series by unilaterally opting to award all game receipts from a suspended game two to charity rather than add them to the player shares pool. Union organizers conducted "fraternity sessions" the next night and found receptivity for a walkout before game three. A strike was not called, but players "went into the third game scowling," and rumors of the near-stoppage publicly surfaced. Giants field boss John McGraw counterattacked by citing the players' "fabulous salaries," and he called association members "nothing less than ingrates." National League president John Heydler, in turn, embarrassed by his earlier sympathetic comments toward the union ("I don't think the organization will hurt the game; the previous one did not, and I don't see how this one will"), seized the new opportunity to amend them and to insist no union of ballplayers was needed, since under Judge Landis, "every player knows he can always get a square deal."[5]
Using the stage of the World Series, Cannon publicly issued the union's demands: abolition of the unilateral ten-day notice of player releases, creation of an impartial arbitration board to hear contract disputes, prohibitions on waiver-rule manipulations involuntarily demoting players to lower leagues, and representation on the commissioner's advisory council of owners and league presidents. Responding to slurs in the press, Cannon insisted he had been sought out to lead the association and was not motivated by the selfish desire to secure more clients. Defending the association's reputation as well as his own, he maintained that it would not enlist crooked ballplayers. Some writers grudgingly conceded merit in Cannon's agenda and even endorsed abolition of the ten-day rule and creation of a pension fund for disabled and indigent veterans. But on the core issue of the need for the union, writers echoed management assertions that all legitimate concerns could be addressed paternalistically by the owners alone.[6]
In the 1922 postseason, owners successfully employed a carrot-and-stick strategy that eroded association support. Joining the chorus of sympathy on the need for pensions, American League owners in December indicated willingness to create a $50,000 fund for disabled players and their dependents and a pension for players who retired prematurely due to sickness. Funding, however, would come from annual World Series receipts, effectively reducing actives' series shares to pay for the plan. John McGraw backed a similar idea for a fund for a home for retired veterans, with its revenues to come from levies on current players' pay. But while major league officials talked pension, at the same time they threatened pay cuts, widespread player releases, and blacklisting of association activists. Unwittingly the union aided the management counteroffensive by clumsily floating the idea of a 10 percent strike-fund levy to be assessed on top of members' annual dues.[7]
By mid-February 1923, prospects dueled between a normal spring training and a player strike. The owners prepared for the contingency of full-scale labor war, but their fears proved overblown. Despite Cannon's public bravado in first claiming 80 percent support from National Leaguers and then a membership of 225 stalwarts (a figure that even if true only represented a little over a third of the major league playing force), his union was melting away. Only 136 men voted in the association's next election, and president-elect George Burns abruptly turned down the office. Cannon's personal credibility sustained further damage from bribery accusations against him in a nonbaseball case initiated by a Milwaukee civil court clerk. By the time Cannon won exoneration from the jury-fixing charge by a special prosecutor, the damage had been done. As association membership evaporated, veteran players retired, owner confidence in the underlying economy bounced back, and selected stars received pay boosts, the number of 1923 salary disputes and holdouts fell sharply. Abandoning the association effort, a defeated Cannon returned full time to his private practice of player clients. As "Black Sox" star Joe Jackson's attorney in a suit for back pay, however, he won his case before a jury only to have the verdict overturned by the presiding judge.[8]
Once the threat of a player union faded, the major league magnates cruelly abandoned their promises of pensions. It fell to twelve veterans of the Pacific Coast League (PCL), gathered at a Dinty Moore's diner in Los Angeles in October 1924 to collect for a destitute colleague's funeral, to take the first steps toward a modest pension program for indigent retirees. Their initial act of remembrance led to the Association of Professional Ball Players of America, which collected $5.00 membership fees primarily from ballplayers in the major and minor leagues and additional voluntary contributions from select owners. Within two years the group claimed nearly 2,000 members, and over the next forty years, receipts of roughly $240,000 provided stipends to some 5,000 needy former players. However, the yearly aggregate revenues of $6,000 represented a sum equal only to the season salary of one active major leaguer. In the first half-decade of the organization's existence its benefits accordingly remained limited to those needy members who had retired since the association's starting date. In 1930 eligibility was made retroactive, but even so, by 1933 only about 150 individuals drew modest one-time payments and 45 others received small monthly allotments.[9]
Given the fundamental insecurity of a baseball livelihood, professional players clearly needed a real pension fund. Absent that, they needed collective leverage capable of securing them basic wages high enough to enable personal saving for the exigencies of injury, sickness, and retirement. Given the failure of the association on the heels of earlier efforts, players were left with the hope that exposure of their plight might draw sympathetic political intervention. But given the dominant probusiness conservatism of the decade, it came as no surprise that players found little support in statehouses or on Capitol Hill. A few legislators with working-class roots or constituencies did attack the high sale prices owners pocketed for moving their employees without their consent or a share of the proceeds. A Massachusetts proposal in 1923 called for state regulation of baseball's workplace conditions and rights on the grounds that those who toiled in the "national pastime" constituted a category of public employees. The argument fell on deaf ears. In 1925 New York congressman Fiorella La Guardia introduced a bill to tax every club 90 percent of all contract sales over $5,000 unless the player sold received at least half of the sale price. But even though La Guardia lowered the proposed percentage to 75 in a forlorn effort to generate more support, the legislation still died.[10]
During baseball's early professional decades, the absence of a strong union or prominent political allies had not left players completely powerless. In fact, their most reliable source of temporary leverage had been neither of these circumstances but the outbursts of trade war between rival circuits and the bidding wars they triggered. The early 1920s, however, also proved less propitious for the emergence of a serious challenge to the major leagues. At the end of 1920 the Continental League, an eight-team northeastern circuit with clubs named after and ostensibly representing state markets (including Massachusetts, New York, and New Jersey), was chartered in Massachusetts. Its promoter, George Herman "Andy" Lawson, promised players no salary caps, and he even flirted with the idea of including the black Chicago American Giants team. But after Toronto replaced the Pennsylvania entry and the circuit's 1921 start was delayed from May 1 to May 20, the league folded without playing a single game.[11]
The lack of a successful trade war challenge during the rest of the decade, despite urban America's rapid population growth, owed mainly to the U.S. Supreme Court's 1922 Baltimore Federal League ruling. The lawsuit had grown out of the exclusion of the defunct Baltimore club's owners from a 1915 "peace agreement" with Organized Baseball and had produced a 1919 District of Columbia Supreme Court judgment for $240,000 that had been overturned by the U.S. Court of Appeals. George Wharton Pepper, attorney for the major leagues, maintained before the Supreme Court that baseball games were a "spontaneous output of human activity" that was "not in its nature commerce." Pepper admitted that ballplayers crossed state boundaries to ply their craft, but he maintained that the specific games themselves were local events and therefore not forms of interstate commerce. On May 22, 1922, the Supreme Court agreed. Writing for the majority, Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes Jr. maintained that "the players . . . travel from place to place in interstate commerce, but they are not the game"; that ballplaying did not constitute a production-related activity; and that professional baseball was therefore not a form of interstate commerce subject to antitrust regulation. With Organized Baseball's power, including the reserve clause, to maintain its monopolies over territory and playing labor now exempted from federal antitrust law, the Federal League ruling dealt a severe blow to any trade war challenges to the majors, and to the prospects for player economic gains from them.[12]
Without the leverage provided by a strong union, supportive political or judicial intervention, or trade war, professional players in the 1920s were left almost completely dependent on the fairness of the industry's own, unilaterally imposed administrative rules and processes. In particular, players could only look to the newly created office of commissioner and its occupant, fifty-three-year-old Kenesaw Mountain Landis, for any hint of disinterested authority. Both looking and sounding like a latter-day Andrew Jackson, the federal judge turned baseball chief executive cultivated an image of fearless championship of the common ballplayer. Like Old Hickory, Landis did much to translate his office's potential into precedents. But also like Jackson, his rise to power owed as much to powerful patrons as to his own struggles, and his concern for the "common man" proved frequently tempered by the need to preserve his personal authority over political rivals.[13]
Landis, the Ohio-born son of a Union army surgeon, spent his prebaseball life bouncing from place to place and sponsor to sponsor. After moving to Indiana at age eight, he dropped out of school only to secure a court reporter's job in South Bend. After finishing high school at night, he enrolled in YMCA law courses in Cincinnati and then matriculated to Union Law School in Chicago. Two years later he accompanied his father's old commanding officer, Judge Walter Q. Gresham, to Washington, D.C., as his secretary when Grover Cleveland named the patron secretary of state. After Gresham's death two years later, Landis returned to Chicago to practice law and soon acquired a new political mentor, Frank Lowden. The young attorney served as Lowden's gubernatorial campaign manager, and when Lowden lost and then declined appointment to a federal judgeship, Landis stepped into the post.
As judge and, later, baseball commissioner, Landis was an opinionated, arbitrary, vindictive, and egotistical man. Reporter Heywood Broun wrote of him, "His career typifies the heights to which dramatic talent may carry a man in America if only he has the foresight not to go on the stage." As a jurist he often utterly lacked judicial temperament, but while often wrong, he never projected doubt. Although he never fought any duels while a sitting judge, "King Kenesaw" was known to order persons dragged before him without subpoena and held without warrants, plunge into prejudicial harangues from the bench and expunge them from the record afterward, and render shaky verdicts frequently overturned on appeal. In the latter category his 1907 fine of $29 million on Standard Oil for antitrust violations stood as the most famous example. Ford Frick, a successor of Landis as commissioner, offered an accurate picture of the judge as "intolerant of opposition, suspicious of reform and reformers, and skeptical of compromise."[14]
Landis loved to crusade against anything that could be depicted as radicalism, un-Americanism, or moral decay, and he saw himself a superpatriot upholding traditional American values and institutions. When a German submarine sank the Lusitania in 1915, he issued a legal summons on Kaiser Wilhelm demanding he answer for war crimes. Declaring that in war free speech "ceases," he presided over the trial and conviction of over 100 members of the Industrial Workers of the World rounded up in "Palmer raids" and sentenced them to pay $2.3 million in fines and issued jail sentences ranging from one to twenty years. When he similarly dispatched socialist leader Victor Berger to twenty years in prison, his only regret was not possessing the option of ordering the prisoner shot. As these examples show, Landis all too often equated labor union militancy with foreign radicalism and un-Americanism. In a 1921 building trades dispute, he slashed wages by up to 50 percent, a greater level than management had even sought. But it had been his role in delaying the 1915 Federal League lawsuit and thereby giving the magnates time to buy out their rivals that had drawn them to him as a commissioner candidate amidst the "Black Sox" scandal. It was similarly reassuring to baseball management to recall how during the Federal League trial he had railed at all courtroom references to ballplayers as "labor." Years later, when maverick owner Bill Veeck assailed baseball's reserve clause as both "morally and legally indefensible," Landis retorted, "Somebody once said a little knowledge is a dangerous thing, and your letter proves him to be a wizard."[15]
Landis's views on baseball's "political economy," like his temperament and his assertions of personal power, were reminiscent of Andrew Jackson. He clung to a nostalgic ideal of baseball as a decentralized association of separately owned businesses resembling Old Hickory's notions of the antebellum economic democracy and his hostility toward such aggregations as the Bank of the United States. Rather than permit the vertical integration of clubs into "Hydra-like" chains challenging power, Landis fought to prevent such "farm systems" and to preserve independent teams in independent leagues, linked instead only by draft processes facilitating players' reasonably paced and low-cost promotion. Baseball's proper system of labor relations--though Landis would have winced at the very phrase--was rooted in the reserve clause and its binding relationship between the individual club and player, with the commissioner serving as final adjudicator of disputes between them. He accordingly reserved for himself the supreme power to define and enforce Organized Baseball's "constitutional" relationships, and it was fitting that he insisted on having a single word emblazoned on his Chicago office door--baseball. From the standpoint of a ballplayer suitor, the commissioner's assertions of prerogatives held the possibility of greater economic disinterest than those of other management authorities. But they did not reflect an underlying philosophical sympathy toward players' claims of workplace rights, especially when such assertions challenged Landis's ideal of the sport or his power in it.
Given the scandalous circumstances that had led to Landis's hiring, owners needed to show that they had given him effective authority to weed out player corruption. As a result, nowhere did he initially claim more power than in the punishment of players for violations of contract. Under the terms of his appointment and the majors-minors National Agreement of 1921, Landis became final arbiter of any appeals of monetary disputes exceeding $300 between owners or between players and owners, as well as any disputes involving a free-agency, or "liberty," issue for players. Under his newly bestowed "best interests of baseball" authority, he could suspend, fine, or banish for life any player for conduct judged detrimental to the game. Although Landis ostensibly also could discipline miscreant owners without right of appeal, the maximum possible sentence for management violations was a public reprimand and a $5,000 fine.[16]
Landis's crackdowns on player conduct, most prominent in the early years of his commissionership, concentrated on four areas of contract violations: (1) game-fixing and similar on-field corruption, (2) off-field morals misconduct, (3) unsanctioned barnstorming or other money-making activities, and (4) contract jumping. In all these areas the new commissioner's interventions enhanced rather than undermined management's monopsony power over the player work force. Crackdowns against player gambling and game-fixing not only helped cleanse the sport's tainted image from the "Black Sox" scandal; they undermined an alternative, illegitimate source of players' income and made them even more dependent on owners for economic survival. Enforcement of antibarnstorming rules and antijumping bans served the same purpose and therefore indirectly made performers less likely to risk jeopardizing their regular income through suspension or blacklist triggered by union activism. Tighter regulation of players' moral behavior, in turn, promised to boost employees' on-field productivity and images as matinee idols in the New Era's increased marketing of stars.[17]
While the new commissioner awaited the verdict of the courts before rendering his own decision on the "Black Sox," he meted out harsh punishment to another player accused of consorting with gamblers. Landis blacklisted Eugene Paulette in March 1921 for past associations with St. Louis gamblers. The main event, however, followed five months later. After a bizarre sequence of events that included the disappearance of sworn confessions from the Chicago district attorney's office, the switching of three prosecutors to the defense team, and the dropping and then re-indictment of seven White Sox players and ten gamblers for the 1919 World Series fix, on August 2, 1921, all seven "Black Sox" were acquitted in court. Nonetheless, the next day Landis banished all seven permanently from Organized Baseball and added an eighth player not previously re-indicted. In November Landis also put Joe Gedeon of the St. Louis Browns on the ineligible list for having sat in on a meeting with the gamblers, even though he had not participated in the actual fix. Over the next quarter-century the commissioner never relented on his lifetime sentences. Demonstrating the selective nature of his justice, several other players with "guilty knowledge" of the plot received no punishment at all, nor did the longtime player/fixer Hal Chase. Landis also refused to discipline White Sox owner Charles Comiskey, likely guilty at least of jury-tampering and obstruction of justice by hiding the stolen player confessions.[18]
Given the proximity of the New York Giants to the Gotham gambling interests that had corrupted the 1919 series, it should have come as no surprise that they generated a new game-fixing controversy for the commissioner. Barely a year after the "Black Sox" sanctions, Landis banished Giants pitcher Phil Douglas, an alcoholic who had been fined for going AWOL, for a threat of baseball "treachery." Angry at being docked nearly $325, Douglas foolishly had attempted revenge by writing St. Louis outfielder Leslie Mann of his willingness to hurt New York's pennant chances by disappearing again if the Giants' rivals would "make it good" for him. Mann turned over the note to club officials, who relayed it to Landis, and the latter quickly blacklisted the hurler. As with the "Black Sox," when a sportswriter a decade later petitioned Landis to lift the banishment on the grounds of new evidence, he refused--although in a humanitarian concession he sent a personal check to the destitute Douglas.[19]
The commissioner's crusade to restore the game's integrity through his game-fixing crackdown remained selective and one-sided. Given his self-interest in limiting similar confrontations with those who had hired him, along with the more limited powers he possessed to punish them, Landis's reticence was understandable, if unfair. He refused to demand the divestiture by Detroit's Frank Navin of his financial interest in racing stables, and although he did direct Giants owner Charles Stoneham and manager McGraw to relinquish holdings in the Oriental Park racetrack and casino near Havana, Cuba, gambling kingpin and 1919 fix-orchestrator Arnold Rothstein continued to frequent Stoneham's private box at the Polo Grounds. The Giants' magnate retained his baseball position even after he was indicted by separate grand juries for perjury and mail fraud connected to the collapse of two Wall Street securities firms.[20]
In addition to the continued one-sided nature of his anticorruption campaign, another pattern quickly emerged in Landis's handling of such issues. After the initial flurry of action on scandals predating his commissionership, he showed a disturbing eagerness to sweep under the rug new charges or continuing evidence of an unredeemed industry. To admit otherwise brought his own integrity or competence into question and clouded the sport's improving image and profit picture. For both Landis and the magnates, it was a highly useful fiction to claim that the industry's evils had predated the creation of the commissioner's office and that with it corruption had now been effectively banished from the game. For similar reasons it made sense not to reopen past cases, whether in response to new appeals, new evidence, or flaws in Landis's original verdicts. By 1924, with fifty-three players already on the permanent ineligibility list, the emphasis shifted from additional reactive banishments to the preemption of new cases through covert management investigations and interventions. Landis maintained his own force of private detectives to supplement each major league club's own spies. Players who had committed preliminary or minor violations now found themselves summoned before the commissioner and warned to desist, or risk more severe punishment.[21]
Despite Landis's efforts to preempt them, new scandals continued to percolate. When Philadelphia's Heinie Sand reported that he had been offered $500 by Giants outfielder Jimmy O'Connell to "take it easy" for the sake of the latter's pennant chances, the player admitted the bribe and further implicated coach Cozy Dolan and teammates Frank Frisch, Ross Youngs, and George Kelly. When questioned by Landis, Dolan exhibited an extremely faulty memory, and the commissioner blacklisted him with O'Connell. But despite evidence of the other players' prior knowledge of the bribe, they received no punishment. Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss, whose club had finished third behind the Giants, pointed out that neither O'Connell nor Dolan by themselves could have put up the $500--a fact suggesting a team pool or subsidization by Giants higher-ups. Adding another hint of cover-up to the whole affair, when Dolan sued Landis for defamation of character, Arnold Rothstein's lawyer represented the coach, and John McGraw paid the retainer. A furious Landis, justified in feeling that he had "gone easy" on the Giants, "conveyed his displeasure" and got the Dolan suit abruptly quashed. The how and why only surfaced later. According to subsequent revelations by baseball publisher and Landis confidant Taylor Spink, Dolan's sudden willingness to drop his suit was part of a deal in which the commissioner in turn helped scuttle a New York district attorney's criminal investigation. If the Giants had not agreed to drop their action against the commissioner, Landis had been prepared to let the full scandal break wide open and bring down Giants management en masse.[22]
Landis's handling of the O'Connell-Dolan affair demonstrated his newfound distaste for exposing player game-tampering on his watch. An even clearer indication of his desire to declare a statute of limitations on such allegations--and to insulate the game from further public taint--came in late 1926. In November the Detroit Tigers released Ty Cobb as player-manager, and a month later Tris Speaker similarly "resigned" from Cleveland. Shortly before Christmas, press reports quoted Landis as saying the two baseball giants had been "permitted" to resign in the face of long-standing game-fixing allegations dating back to the 1919 AL pennant race. Publication of the charge, however, unleashed other game-fixing claims from 1917 and 1919 against Cobb by "Black Sox" exiles Swede Risberg and Chick Gandil. The revelations in turn unraveled the commissioner's undercover resignation deal with Cobb and Speaker, who now backed out and retained attorneys. On January 5, 1927, Landis invited forty White Sox and Tiger players to hearings in the presence of fifty reporters, and he concluded that the pot of money the Chicagoans had collected for their Detroit adversaries had been a retroactive "reward" for beating Boston rather than a bribe soliciting the Tigers to lay down.[23]
Revealing his true feelings toward the entire situation, Landis complained, "Won't these God-damn things that happened before I came into baseball ever stop coming up?" A week later he issued a blanket exoneration on the Chicago charges and called for a five-year "statute of limitations" on past gambling transgressions--a step National League president Heydler admitted owed primarily to the reality that baseball could not afford to blacklist at least thirty more players. In early February Landis infuriated American League president Ban Johnson by issuing a similarly forgiving verdict on the original Cobb-Speaker allegations, rather than endure an ugly public confrontation with the two stars. Both men's old clubs reinstated and then released them, making them free agents. With the National League maintaining its ban on their entry, Cobb signed with the Philadelphia Athletics and Speaker joined the Washington Senators for 1927.[24]
The magnates finally reached the limits of their patience with both the continuing problem of game-fixing and the arbitrariness and confusion of Landis's responses. League presidents and a steering committee of three owners from each circuit drafted formal guidelines and penalties. At the 1927 winter meetings, Landis tried to preempt the effort by proposing a one-year ban as standard punishment for offering or accepting illicit gifts. But the committee upped the ante by urging a three-year suspension to anyone found guilty of giving or accepting a bribe or "going easy" on an opponent. Any attempt to improperly influence an umpire, in turn, would result in permanent blacklisting of both the offerer and the taker of a bribe. Players also would draw permanent banishment for betting on games with a direct connection, and a one-year suspension would follow bets on other contests. On December 15, 1927, the owners approved the new guidelines.[25]
The codification of formal rules and punishments on baseball game-fixing, bribery, and betting represented the forced withdrawal of Landis from his initial celebrated role as baseball's public policeman. Club officials and owners now pondered additional measures to inhibit interclub game-fixing conspiracies and the broader "problem" of cross-club player fraternization. Giants coach Hughie Jennings proposed eliminating player visitation rights to opposing clubhouses, returning to the tradition of dressing at the hotels for games, and transporting teams to the parks only at game time to avoid precontest mingling. Clubs also continued to shadow players in an effort to secure early warning of any illicit associations. But neither the formal rules nor the covert surveillance eliminated the problem. Stars such as Rogers Hornsby and Babe Ruth continued to frequent racetracks and consort with questionable characters. When Yankee manager Miller Huggins tried to curb the gambling habit by limiting clubhouse poker bets to 25 cents a hand, the Bambino simply switched to bridge at 50 cents a point and dropped $350 in minutes. If the frequency or visibility of players' associations with gamblers diminished as the 1920s wore on, it probably owed more to the belated rise in salaries and other legitimate opportunities than to management's efforts at policing.[26]
Besides the campaigns against game-fixing in the New Era's early years, Landis and fellow officials also sought to regulate other forms of player conduct that threatened the productivity of the player or his economic dependence on his club. One form that this concern took was the increasing resort to off-season or twelve-month contracts that prohibited winter ball. In the uniform contract, management required players to maintain good physical condition, exhibit "sufficient" on-field skill, and "conform to high standards" of personal conduct on and off the diamond or risk fine and suspension for violating employment terms. Clubs also required players to gain written consent for any public appearances, newspaper or magazine article deals, commercial sponsorships, radio appearances, or participation in any other sporting activities.
These various conduct prohibitions proved far easier to enforce upon the vast majority of journeyman players than upon the game's stars. The latter not only enjoyed far more outside offers but greater marketplace leverage stemming from their fan appeal. No star of the New Era demonstrated more dramatically the industry's dilemma in establishing behavior boundaries than Babe Ruth. On one hand, Ruth and the Yankees both profited from his playing exploits and his off-field visibility. With the help of press agent Christy Walsh, Ruth's product endorsements, hospital visits, and movie appearances were orchestrated for maximum public relations benefit. But the Bambino's "unauthorized activities," including visits to speakeasies and whorehouses, put his image and potentially his life at risk. Yet baseball officialdom could not afford to punish him so severely as to lose his value as the sport's most famous attraction. It was a measure of the Yankees' estimation of his worth, and their need to protect themselves from its loss through his own recklessness, that they took out a $300,000 insurance policy on him. Throughout the 1920s, Ruth's behavior provided a barometer of how much malfeasance the magnates had to tolerate at a given time.[27]
Once he achieved stardom, Ruth wasted no time testing baseball's disciplinary boundaries. After the 1920 season, he earned $40,000 playing winter ball in Cuba only to blow it on racetrack gambling. Following the 1921 World Series, despite Landis's specific orders against postseason barnstorming by series participants, the slugger and his teammate Bob Meusel garnered $30,000 and $10,000, respectively, on $1,500 and $500 an exhibition tilt. Ruth's defiance of the commissioner sparked player rumblings of solidarity and calls for a player movement that led to Cannon's short-lived players' association. Ruth, in short, unintentionally managed to become a symbol of player freedom and a momentary rallying point for union activity, and it was both those facts, along with the blatant nature of his defiance, that led to an unusually sharp retaliation. When Ruth moved on to a vaudeville tour at $300 a week, Landis suspended both Yankees for the first six weeks of the 1922 season, fined them their series shares, and ordered their 1922 regular-season pay docked proportionally to the length of their suspensions. To gain his reactivation Ruth eventually submitted to the humiliation of an apology that included a denial of any intent of "becoming an outlaw or lending any aid to an outlaw movement." Less publicized was the fact that the commissioner also was forced to step back as a price for securing Ruth's return by shrinking the length of future bans on postseason barnstorming to only the remainder of the calendar year of each World Series. By August 1922 Ruth had earned two more fines and shorter suspensions of four and five days for run-ins with abusive fans and an umpire, but Landis eased his barnstorming regulations even more by permitting tours of three players per exhibition squad after October 31 with club permission.[28]
Organized Baseball's leaders frowned on the Bambino's accumulation of outside income as a dangerous example of player financial independence tantamount to off-season contract jumping. But having helped create him as the brightest star of their new, lusty-hitting postwar game, they could hardly "throw out the Babe with the bathwater." By 1924 Ruth's contract with the Yankees already called for $156,000 over its remaining three years, which he supplemented with more than $100,000 earned through barnstorming and vaudeville appearances. A subpar 1925 season, punctuated by another showdown with manager Miller Huggins, a four-day suspension, and a $5,000 fine led to another forced apology and fresh rumors that Ruth's yearly salary would be cut to $30,000 in his next contract. But when Ruth rebounded with sixty home runs in 1927, his pay followed suit to $70,000 and then $80,000 by 1930, and his external income soared again. Following Huggins's death, the Yankees in 1929 even refunded the 1925 disciplinary fine in yet another display of Ruthian clout in action.[29]
As illustrated by baseball officials' balancing act toward Ruth, the baseball industry had become a big entertainment business in which every major personnel decision required dispassionate, hardheaded professional consideration and an appreciation of the requirements of the star system. One enduring structural outgrowth of this necessity was the rise of the general manager--the man who, whatever his formal title within the club's organizational chart, exercised the duties of a personnel director. Increasingly he not only decided roster cuts, trades, sales, and salary offers but also set and enforced the club's disciplinary sanctions. While the general manager's duties increased and his importance grew, those of the field manager, save for game strategy, diminished. "Old-school" managers complained that their postwar charges were more undisciplined, more pampered, and less respectful. Ty Cobb lamented that the new breed of ballplayer not only played solely "for the money that's in it--not for the love of it," but because it was "good business for them." According to Cobb, they also avoided injury by "not taking too many chances" on the field.[30]
The old-fashioned dictatorial manager, who could arbitrarily suspend or fine players on the spot for real or imagined transgressions and know his edicts would stick, became scarcer. The salary relationship between the field manager and his star players also represented a clear indication of, and acted to drive down further, the former's diminishing status. Early in the decade the sport's most famous skipper, John McGraw, earned a $65,000 salary that exceeded the wages of even his highest-paid players. As stars' pay began to rise significantly by the mid-1920s, payroll-conscious clubs anxious not to pay high salaries to both managers and players then improvised in the short term by choosing to combine the roles. By 1926 seven of sixteen big league field bosses performed as both players and managers, including Cobb, Speaker, and Hornsby. But within only a year's time, however, five of the seven were replaced by full-time managers. By the end of the decade, skippers consistently made less money than the star players of the teams they nominally ran. As the manager's autocracy waned, more clubs also hired an additional nonplaying coach to improve players' performance and provide a less threatening field-level monitor of their behavior.[31]
Umpires, who traditionally had suffered from lack of respect, now perceived a further erosion of their status as well. With only two umpires per game the norm in the 1920s, save for critical games or World Series tilts, the overworked "men in blue" found their salary relationship to those they supervised deteriorating. Major league arbiters generally earned about the same as an average player, while the highest-paid among them earned about $10,000. As the visibility and gate revenues of the fall classic grew, umpires demanded a raise in their series pay from the fixed $2,000 to an escalating stipend equal to the average player share. They also lamented the escalation of on-field violence and player threats as their pay in relation to that of the latter had fallen. Umpire discontent even led to rumbles of unionization. In November 1922 an International League fracas between an arbiter and two players resulted in the umpire's permanent release but the reinstatement of the players after a written apology. Outraged umpires began holding informal gatherings, and by the following May a dozen of them from major and minor leagues in the New York area had met to consider the formation of a protective association. Aware of their own vulnerability to management retaliation, the participants discussed retaining a retired veteran arbiter to head their organization. While group discussions "here and there" and formation of local "associations for mutual improvement" continued, Landis and league owners engaged in their own tug-of-war over control of the umpires. It was another sign of the growing owner defiance of the commissioner by mid-decade that the American League and the National League refused to relinquish their independent control of arbiters. After his reelection to another term in 1927, Landis did try to give the umpires some additional backing by announcing a ninety-day minimum penalty to anyone who struck one of them. The minors' National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues followed suit.[32]
If their on-field behavior actually had become more rowdy and less respectful, players in the New Era were more compliant than their predecessors in the area of contract and reserve jumping to other clubs. In the secure, monopolistic environment the major leagues essentially enjoyed in the 1920s, there were few opportunities for successful player defiance. The established majors had crushed their most recent trade war challenger, and the Supreme Court's 1922 antitrust exemption decision went far to insure that new contenders for equal status would be few and far between. The owners designated Landis as enforcer of the cartel's internal rules against contract jumping and player raiding, authorizing him to utilize the blacklist against anyone who sought refuge in an "outlaw" circuit. This primarily entailed, however, not new cases but cleaning up the backlog of 300 Federal League-era contract jumpers. Owners preferred that Landis exercise relative leniency toward those players now petitioning for reinstatement into Organized Baseball--especially those with productive years likely remaining--and crack down but selectively on the worst miscreants to deter what was a shrinking likelihood of more jumping.
It was cold comfort to those few players made early examples by the commissioner that the need for such deterrence faded as the decade wore on. In the case of Benny Kauff, the combination of his past leap to the Federal League and charges of off-field malfeasance made him a convenient example for official retribution. Hired back by the Giants after the trade war, Kauff left to enter the service in World War I. When he returned to play in 1920, authorities arrested him on charges of auto theft and receipt of stolen property. Kauff then sought the right to play while out on bail; Landis not only refused but maintained the ban even after the player was acquitted. More typical of the arbitrary selection of players subjected to harsh punishment, however, was Ray Fisher. Fisher, a thirty-three-year-old veteran whose salary for 1921 had already been cut by $1,000, refused to report to the Cincinnati Reds. He traveled to Ann Arbor to interview for a coaching position at the University of Michigan instead--with, he claimed, his manager's permission. When he was offered the job, Fisher returned to the Reds to secure his release from his major league reserve contract. Team management refused and offered instead to reduce the size of his pay cut in order to keep him. However, they still denied his demand for a two-year deal. Fisher then accepted the Michigan offer, but out of fear of being blacklisted for contract jumping he went straight to the commissioner to explain his circumstances. Landis at first remained noncommittal but then ominously put off a second request from Fisher for clarification of his status. When the ruling did come down, Landis concluded that since Cincinnati had never actually granted Fisher permission to talk to Michigan, the player had been guilty of abrogating his obligations to the Reds. Worst of all, he had also carried on covert negotiations with an "outlaw" Franklin club in Pennsylvania full of other contract jumpers. Landis then blacklisted Fisher for life.[33]
In the absence of trade war and unionization, one of the most important consequences of management's monopsony power over the playing force of the 1920s was the widening of a two-tier (or three-tier, if Ruth was considered his own category) wage system in the major leagues. While a few stars parlayed their fame and marketplace value into high salaries from mid-decade on, most players at both the major and minor league levels shared a very different reality (see Appendix, Fig. 2). Although player wages rose as owners' recession-based fears faded, they did not come close to equaling the rate of increase in industry profits. Payroll as a percentage of the clubs' operating expenses continued its decline. Players rarely received the sympathy of the average fan, since they stood among the top 5 percent of American wage earners. Nonetheless, hitters in particular rankled at the disparity between their soaring statistics and their lagging pay increases. As a Detroit beat writer noted, "Ball players have long regarded batting averages as their gauge for salaries." Owners kept a tight rein on pay through 1923, then loosened their constraints for two years, only to adopt minor drags on offense in 1926 to moderate the wage pressures. Rumors of a less lively ball surfaced throughout Organized Baseball even before the end of the 1925 campaign, and in 1926 the magnates fixed minimum fence distances at 250 feet and approved pitchers' use of resin to improve their grip.[34]
At the top of the major league pay pyramid stood Babe Ruth. The Bambino's salary, $20,000 at the start of the 1920s, climbed fourfold by the beginning of the next decade. At the end of the 1920s he earned about seventy-five times the $1,400 annual pay of the average American worker. Even Ruth, however, could claim to be underpaid. His presence on the Bronx Bombers generated for his team at least an additional $200,000 a year in direct revenue. In contrast his own 1930 after-tax pay, estimated at approximately $68,500, represented barely a third that sum. Except for Ty Cobb, however, who garnered $65,000 as a player/manager in his farewell season of 1927, the closest-paid performers of the late 1920s were fortunate to earn half as much as the Sultan of Swat. On the "Murderers Row" itself, the second-highest-paid Yankee received but $15,000, while the team mean--inflated by Ruth's pay--stood at $10,000; the median income was only $7,000.[35]
Even the stars of the 1920s versions of "small-market" clubs but belatedly received significant pay increases. Pitcher Walter Johnson still earned $12,000 as late as the 1924 season, although his salary jumped to $20,000 the next year. In 1921 only ten to twelve players made as much as $7,500 a year. Ten years later, six players claimed pay of $25,000 or more. At the start of the period, major league payrolls ranged from $75,000 to $150,000, and a decade later, $100,000 to $375,000. The major league mean salary, about $4,500 in 1920, stagnated in the mid-$5,000 area for the next three years, then climbed by roughly $500 yearly increments with pauses in 1927 and 1929. By 1930 it stood at $8,000. But because of the distorted impression left by stars' pay, most fans did not recognize that the average major leaguer, albeit a rich man by comparison with his minor league counterpart, made only a little over five times the income of the average American laborer. More to the point, the ballplayer's income each year fell further behind his employer's productivity gains and profits. In 1924 the majors took in $10 million at the turnstiles, made an estimated $4.6 million in profits, and paid out only $3 million in salaries. By 1929 payrolls had climbed modestly to $3.75 million, but they still constituted only about 35 percent of club expenditures, one of the lowest ratios of labor cost to overall expenses in American business in spite of baseball's "labor-intensive" nature. By contrast, when the National League had been in its infancy in 1878, payroll costs had been over two-thirds of total club expenditures.[36]
Given player demands for pay increases commensurate with their newly soaring performances, the New Era's early years were marked by a proliferation of holdouts. Adding to players' outrage at low pay was their frequent sale without consent for values many times greater than their salary demands. Following the initial surge in offense of 1920, the next off-season Landis's secretary Leslie O'Connor found it necessary to issue a special edict warning players that clubs would fine them and deduct the money from their current or future salaries if they refused to report for spring training exhibition games or practices. If they still failed to show up within ten days, they would be placed on the ineligible list and would have to apply to Landis for reinstatement. Undeterred, the ranks of 1921 holdouts included the White Sox' Dickie Kerr, Cincinnati's Edd Roush and Heinie Groh, Brooklyn's Zach Wheat and Burleigh Grimes, the Cardinals' Milton Stock, and the Red Sox' John "Stuffy" McInnis. Despite his club's pointed reminders of past $100-a-month wages in the Western Association, Roush initially held firm to his $20,000 demand. But after drawing a two-day suspension for violating the ten-day edict, he returned to the Reds for $15,000. Groh held out longer only to sign for $10,000 upon getting the club's promise to trade him. Even after his return, though, he continued to press for $3,000 in deducted back pay. Wheat, who demanded a $7,000 raise to $15,500, caved in for just $800 more, then brushed off his earlier demands as a "joke." McInnis, held under a reserve contract at $5,000 but denied an additional bonus for the second year, returned after being sued by owner Harry Frazee for nonperformance of services.[37]
Despite the general failure of the 1921 holdouts, salary squabbles carried over into 1922, and many involved the same personalities. Roush now demanded a $3,000 raise to $18,000 and a three-year pact. Grimes, who had held out the previous year for $12,500 only to accept $9,000, again withdrew his threat for an additional $1,000. Even Babe Ruth got into the act, demanding that Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert "double" his salary to $75,000. When reporters questioned the Bambino's arithmetic, he maintained that his figure factored in a $500-per-homer secret bonus he claimed had been paid him in 1921. According to baseball scribe Francis Richter, some forty major league stars held out that spring, with the big-market Yankees and Giants contributing thirteen to the total. Only one AL team, Cleveland, had no holdouts, while the National League had three clubs--Boston, Chicago, and Philadelphia--in similar positions. The next year, 1923, outfielder Jack Bentley unsuccessfully demanded a $5,000 share of his $70,000 sale price from Baltimore of the International League to the Giants, and Zach Wheat made his regular appearance in the ranks of salary holdouts. Spitballer Burleigh Grimes followed suit in 1924. Although the frequency of holdouts dropped by mid-decade with steadier pay raises, some keen observers still maintained that management abuses and pay disparities demanded a less confrontational, less one-sided arbitration process. Contributor Franklin W. Wilson even argued in the Sporting News that players deserved salaries commensurate with the gate moneys they generated. He insisted that Ruth merited every penny of his hefty pay and lamented that too many stars received inadequate incomes because they performed for poorer clubs. As a solution he called for the creation of a baseball "court of appeals" to hear salary and promotion disputes from all levels of Organized Baseball. Evidence of the lingering relevance of the issue could be found in Baseball Magazine in January 1926, which also devoted a feature article to salary arbitration mechanisms. But Commissioner Landis and management figures at all levels vigilantly opposed such suggestions as unnecessary challenges to their prerogatives.[38]
Rather than considering outside arbitration mechanisms, major league owners selectively tried to placate stars through special awards and incentive bonuses. Such forms of discriminative additional pay were more easily manipulated or negated through managers' actions, and therefore full payout was less certain than if stars' base salaries were simply raised. As for industrywide prizes, the American League revived the Chalmers trophy for the most valuable player (MVP) in 1922, and the senior circuit followed suit two years later. Besides Ruth's publicized homer bonus, Rogers Hornsby's 1922 three-year pact included extra pay based on his team's record, and Burleigh Grimes garnered the promise of an extra $1,000 based on the number of his pitching victories. Owners lacking deep pockets complained that while such largesse reduced the rich clubs' holdout problems, it drove up pay pressures on the rest. Under lobbying from the small-market majority, the National League in 1924 opted to ban most incentive clauses but still allowed "good behavior" bonuses. In contrast the American League, driven by its wealthier clubs, continued to utilize wider incentives to placate its stars. On the 1927 Yankee squad, for example, Waite Hoyt's contract included a $1,000 bonus for twenty wins; Tony Lazzeri's, the promise of travel by Pullman car to and from the West Coast for himself and his wife at the start and finish of the season; Wilcy Moore's, a $500 payment if he stuck with the team all year; Herb Pennock's, an extra $1,000 for a twenty-five-win campaign; and Walter Ruether's, $1,000 for fifteen victories.[39]
For the upper-division squads in both circuits, World Series shares constituted another extremely valuable source of supplementary income. The pool of available moneys grew impressively in the 1920s as gate receipts for the fall classic swelled. Helping to spread the wealth was the fact that first- through fourth-place finishers in each league shared in diminishing degrees in the bounty. For World Series participants, per-player winner and loser shares stood at $5,322.72 and $3,734.60, respectively, by 1925. But mitigating the salutary effect of these salary supplements, which amounted to as much as a typical player's entire season pay, was the continuing disparity in performance between the big- and small-market clubs in each league. Very rarely did many of the teams ever finish high enough for their players to earn an end-of-season bonus. In contrast, the Yankees, a big-market club able to pay its players top dollar regardless, failed only once between 1921 and 1946 to achieve a first-division finish, and they played in the World Series twenty-one times. Mike Gazella, a fringe player on the Bronx Bombers' 1926 squad, demonstrated the importance of postseason shares to nonstars when he formally protested his teammates voting him only a one-fourth share for having appeared in sixty-six games. Even after general manager Ed Barrow persuaded the club to up the share to one-half, Gazella pressed his full claim all the way to the commissioner, and he got it.[40]
In the New Era's star system, the emerging compensation pattern boosted star players' pay increases from mid-decade, but disparities widened between them and other performers, between the payrolls of rich and poor clubs, and between industry profits and the share of income devoted to payroll. Nevertheless, by comparison minor leaguers faced a far bleaker salary picture, save a few at the top draft-exempt levels. Even there, the circumstances that in the short run contributed to a major league style, two-tier pay pattern evaporated by the decade's end. Minor leaguers' statistical performances soared as highly as those of their major league counterparts, but their wages lagged far behind. Players in the high minors, given the draft exemption maintained by AA leagues, also found that while they made considerably more than teammates below them, their relative costliness to prospective big league buyers hindered their advance to the latter higher level of compensation. The hoarding of talent in the high minors, in turn, created logjams for the advance of players farther down the industry ladder, unless a prospect's talent shone so brightly at a tender age that an AL or NL club reached down several levels to draft him.
Then as now, minor leaguers made up most of the industry's playing talent, and major leaguers represented just the tip of the player pyramid. In 1921, despite the lingering economic woes from postwar reconversion and the loss of playing talent to industrial circuits and the military, 27 minor leagues with 151 clubs and about 2,800 players started the year. By comparison, the majors' 16 teams contributed only 400 playing jobs. Although the AA circuits (the American Association, the International League, and the PCL) did not publish team payroll limits and thereby make their salary averages known, season pay at levels D to A ranged from $790 to slightly over $1,400. The low-end D circuits employed nearly one-third of Organized Baseball's player force, despite their clubs' smaller rosters. At this bottom level, clubs seeking players advertised local tryouts in the newspapers and brought in twenty to forty hopefuls at a time at a typical net cost of $1,500. The blue-collar wage level of the local labor market, in turn, effectively set the industry's wage floor. When recession and small markets squeezed minor league revenues in the early 1920s, owners responded by lowering team payroll limits and cutting the size of rosters. The stratagem offered the advantage of not undermining a club's competitive salary position with particular players vis-…-vis outside employers, since an individual's pay could more easily be maintained within shrunken rosters. Referring to the National Association, the governing body of the minor leagues, in November 1921 the Sporting News observed, "Last year at Kansas City they said, <'We must raise salaries to get players, otherwise they will stick to their jobs in mills and factories.' Now in Buffalo, <'We must cut salaries or collapse.'" Minor league spokesmen justified their economies in the early 1920s by insisting that even with cuts, pay remained "better than major league salaries of 1914 in the minors now."[41]
In the early years of the decade, both roster cuts and replacement of veterans with low-priced youngsters became commonplace. Classes B (in 1922) and D (in 1923) each reduced their active rosters by one player per team for a year. Still, individual salaries rose and fell in tandem with the roster sizes and the number of minor league leagues and clubs; they gained some traction in mid-decade only to slip back at a return to hard times in the late 1920s. In Class A, individual salary averages rose to $1,720 in 1923, fell sharply in 1924, rebounded in 1925, continued the modest climb to $1,815 in 1927, and then fell off. Class B wages fluctuated in the early 1920s, jumped to a two-year plateau of $1,145 in 1924-25, peaked in 1929 at $1,440, then tumbled. Class C salaries progressed more steadily, albeit modestly, from 1921 to 1929, from $900 to $1,105, only to slump also. In the D leagues, pay seesawed, with peaks of $835 in 1925 and $860 in 1928.[42]
Over the longer term, however, the search for minor league labor economies and better bottom lines translated into a drive to locate in low-cost environments. More and more clubs and circuits, particularly those at the lower levels with the least margin for error, gravitated to the low-wage, nonunion towns of the Old Confederacy. Although none of the larger AA markets lay below the Mason-Dixon line as of 1925, thirteen of the National Association's twenty-five total circuits operated entirely or in part in the southern states. By the same token, the low-cost but small-market southern leagues were still among the most susceptible to financial collapse at the first sign of recession, despite their low labor outlays. By 1930, as the Great Depression began to exact a greater economic toll, the number of D circuits fell to six, with four in the South. Of twenty-two leagues hanging on at the start of that campaign, nine were southern-based.[43]
Despite its advantages, Organized Baseball in the New Era fell short of a management utopia. Compared with the relative chaos of the preceding fifty years, the 1920s did present a more pleasing visage, and years later, when labor strife and soaring salaries set in, owners would look back with nostalgia at the post-World War I era. But even with the decade's generally bright picture of labor docility and industry growth, magnates spent considerable time griping about the health of their businesses. Much of their discontent centered on the limited availability and high cost of acquiring talent from the minors under the 1921 National Agreement. Under that pact a player draft had been reinstated, but leagues could exempt their clubs' talent if they reciprocally surrendered their rights to draft players from lower circuits. Draft prices ranged from $1,000 for Class D ballplayers to $5,000 for AA performers. Only one player per year could be plucked from any particular A or AA club, but no restrictions existed on the number of B- through D-level draftees. Each major league club had the right to "option out" up to 8 players to minor league teams for up to two years, and they could be recalled within the option period without becoming subject to redrafting. Clubs in lesser circuit secured similar control over smaller numbers of men, with AA and A teams able to farm out 6 players each; B clubs, 5; and C squads, 3. Major league clubs gained the right to raise their total reserve lists from 35 to 40 players. The reserve clause, which enabled clubs to renew perpetually their claims on unsigned players, became a formal part of the standard contract. If a club wished to waive its rights to a player, the new agreement set the claiming price at $7,500.[44]
Almost immediately the majors resented the draft-exemption provisions of the agreement. Five minor league circuits, including the three at the AA level, chose exemption. Since the AA leagues were the most risk-free source of new talent for the majors, draft exemption meant that rather than routinely drafting the best minor league talent at low fixed prices, big league owners now had to negotiate far more costly sales prices from hard-bargaining AA owners. Although draft exemption for the high minors meant that they, too, had to negotiate the purchase of player acquisitions from below, they could recoup their higher procurement expenses from the prices they charged the majors. When criticized for their draft-exemption decisions, the AA circuits pointed out that under the 1921 draft rules they were provided only $5,000 a player in compensatory income, and therefore they had no choice but to operate outside the system.
In the early 1920s draft exemption by the high minors, combined with the majors' risk in plucking talent from still lower levels, caused the number of players actually drafted by the big leagues to plummet. In 1921 the American League claimed but 6 men and the National League, 7, at a total cost of $26,500. The next year the numbers were 21 and $36,500. In 1923, 16 major league draftees cost $49,000, and in 1924, the figures were 24 and $76,500. At the same time the cost of securing AA talent through negotiated purchases skyrocketed. In 1921 alone, the majors spent over $450,000 on minor league player sales, with 42 of the 141 men coming from the draft-exempt leagues. The final price tag also included contingency pledges of $250,000 more if the purchasees remained on major league rosters the next spring. To no surprise, many major league owners called for the end of draft exemption or at least a $25,000 ceiling on sale prices. Commissioner Landis, claiming to be motivated by concern for the upward mobility of the minor league ballplayer, also weighed in on the side of the majors.[45]
Draft exemption also cost big league clubs in indirect ways. Besides the higher cost of obtaining rookies, the bottlenecks created by exemption meant that clubs held on to veteran players longer than they otherwise might have, which in turn pushed up team payrolls. In addition, the shortage of hungry young job-seekers undercut club officials' ability to threaten veterans with job loss to induce greater on-field productivity, deter union talk, or coerce higher moral conduct. Not surprisingly clubs scrambled to find legal and illegal ways to bypass the high minors and secure more talent at lower cost. Major league organizations paid college and semipro players under the table while not listing them on reserve lists. As late as 1929 the Yankees' Jacob Ruppert admitted to the practice but insisted of his rivals, "They all do it. They are lying about it." Clubs tampered with one another's talent during the season in an effort to line up men for the next year. They manipulated the waiver rules, creating more room on the reserve list by "loaning" players to other clubs via "cover-up sales" and having the recipient teams "release" them back the following spring. They covertly negotiated "working agreements" with compliant minor league clubs to hide extra players in violation of forty-man limits. Here too, clubs with deeper pockets could better manipulate or bypass the system to gain an advantage in the player procurement game. These same organizations also bore the prime responsibility for driving up sale prices of the top AA talent. The wealthy Giants paid $75,000 to San Francisco of the PCL for Jimmy O'Connell and gave International League Baltimore $72,000 for Jack Bentley. Poorer clubs, by contrast, often had to cannibalize rosters by selling veteran major leaguers to generate revenue. The growing stakes of, and complexity of, talent acquisition only accelerated teams' development of player-personnel departments and the importance of the general manager in the baseball operation.[46]
In an effort to empower the Commissioner to protect themselves from their own manipulations, before the 1923 season major league owners moved the date at which they could no longer conduct in-season player sales from August 1 to June 15. They also authorized Landis to declare a unilateral increase in the number of players each club could option out to the minors from eight to fifteen, with the proviso that any such players optioned or released after January 10, 1923, even to a draft-exempt minor, would not be covered by draft exemption. The commissioner also discouraged the predraft purchasing of draft-eligible minor leaguers at high prices by ruling in October that a player conditionally sold during one season to a major league club had to report to the majors that same season or else reenter the postseason draft. Because of the campaign to curb the costly purchases of minor leaguers by the majors, the revenue transfer from such sales dropped by $200,000. In December 1923 the PCL and the American Association finally gave up and agreed to the modified draft, and the majors returned the yearly limit of optioned players covered by it to eight. With major league teams by 1924 now able to demote as "summer boarders" both optionees (whose rights they retained) and released players (open to redraft at the end of the season) to two rival AA circuits, the International League found itself isolated and deprived of the same talent. Accordingly, a year after the PCL and American Association actions the International League followed suit and accepted the modified draft. By 1925 draft exemption remained only for those players who had advanced to the high minors but had not yet been acquired or demoted by the majors.[47]
The imposition of the modified draft eased but did not eliminate the cost pressures from the high-priced purchase of minor league stars. Minor league stars still could become targets of bidding wars between clubs worried about losing out on the opportunity to sign them by waiting for the draft. Minor leaguers who had been bypassed earlier by the majors, only to blossom late at the AA level, still carried the draft-exempt label and the high sale prices that accompanied it. In 1925 San Francisco of the PCL still commanded $100,000 from Pittsburgh for stars Paul Waner and Hal Rhyme. Nor was the new modified draft arrangement stable. When the agreements expired at the end of the 1927 season, squabbling resumed between the majors and minors and between different levels of the latter. In the absence of a new agreement the old terms remained for the rest of the decade. But in 1929, in an effort to deter major league raids on their talent, the low minors tried unsuccessfully to impose their own draft-exemption scheme barring the majors from directly selecting players with less than two seasons of Organized Baseball experience.[48]
Despite the persistence of talent price and availability problems, the major leagues did little to broaden their sources. The magnates ignored National League president Heydler's call to create baseball academies for grooming their own men rather than depending on the minors. Partly owing to a compensatory rise in the direct signing of college players to the majors, the average educational level of the big leaguer continued to climb. According to one 1927 estimate, 107 men from 79 colleges made up nearly one-third of big league regulars. The need to find ways to bypass the supply bottlenecks in the minor leagues overrode the traditional fears that college-educated men were more likely to act as "clubhouse lawyers." But the continued overall reliance on the minors meant that the ethnic and regional composition of the major league playing force changed only modestly, and then mainly in response to the minors' shifting geographic locations (see Appendix, Fig. 4). According to data compiled by Hall of Fame librarian Lee Allen on major league rookies, the entry class of 1921 claimed less than a 3 percent share of its ethnic stock from Southern and Eastern Europe. By 1929 the figure still stood at merely 6 percent. In specific markets, clubs did try to acquire heroes for particular fan constituencies. The Giants, for example, purchased "$100,000 Jew" Moses Solomon from the Southwestern League. But by 1921 over 95 percent of the new entrants to the majors claimed British, Irish, or Northern or Western European heritage; the percentage remained high at 92 percent by the end of the decade.[49]
Not surprisingly, as Organized Baseball broadened its ethnic and regional composition only slightly, it kept its doors tightly closed to men of color. When the race issue occasionally surfaced, baseball management from the commissioner down cited the same litany of dangers: hostile white player and fan reaction, supposed inadequacies of blacks on the field, and seedy associations that popularly stereotyped the African American community. In truth, baseball's continued policies of racial exclusion stemmed, all too typically for industries of the day, from a mixture of personal and institutional racism and an instinctively conservative dread of change. For Organized Baseball to embrace integration required both a combination of acute economic crisis and an absence of any other plausible solutions. Despite the laments of major league executives about the price and quantity of entry-level talent, these complaints did not reach the magnitude of a deep systemic crisis for which racial integration was the only available remedy. As a result, only a handful of light-skinned Cubans gained entry to the majors in the 1920s.
Black professional baseball players instead toiled in their own separate and unequal world. Like the white industry, but on a smaller scale, their major leagues--the Negro National League and the Eastern Colored League--utilized a feeder system of semipro and minor circuits. Clubs at the bottom of the black baseball pyramid used the prevailing wages of African American workers in their local economies as their benchmarks. About 400 players performed in lower circuits such as the Negro Southern League and the Texas Negro League for half a year typically at $50 a month. At the major league level, pay for approximately 200 performers ranged from $135 to $175 a month, or $810 to $1,150 a regular campaign. Top stars might earn double that amount. Competition for playing talent between the two top circuits raised payroll pressures in the mid-1920s, causing the Eastern Colored League in 1927 to experiment with a $3,000-a-month team salary cap for its 15-member squads. But the circuit's collapse in 1928 undercut players' brief leverage while it underscored the value of winter ball employment in California, Cuba, and Mexico. The four-team Southern California Winter League, for example, paid $50 a month plus expenses. Play in Mexico offered $100 to $200 a month, and Cuba paid even better.[50]
The Negro majors were at least comparable to the white high minors in quality of play, if not compensation, and their stars were of major league caliber. But Organized Baseball's leadership discouraged contact with the black circuits by clubs or individual players, and the white press alternately derided and ignored "blackball." Baseball Magazine in 1921 claimed to favor integration but timidly added, "Through all the ages the effort to mix oil and water has failed." The Sporting News criticized a barnstorming St. Louis Cardinal squad for playing an exhibition with "colored players," asserting that it demeaned the former to be part of the "grand African show." By the late 1920s, Commissioner Landis, reflecting the view of Organized Baseball management that the Negro Leagues and their players were "outlaw" rivals to its teams and stars--and fearful of the embarrassment of defeat--barred the playing of exhibition games between major league and Negro League clubs. Reflecting the growing tone of official disapproval, white attendance at Negro League games plummeted. In Kansas City, where the white share of Negro League crowds was estimated at 50 percent in the early 1920s, the figure was but 10 percent by 1926.[51]
Instead of looking outside Organized Baseball to the Negro circuits for more talent, the white majors in the 1920s groped toward a relationship with their existing partners that would eliminate the latter's autonomy. Eventually independent minor league clubs and leagues were replaced by vertically integrated chains, with each run or owned outright by a major league organization free to manipulate talent up and down as it chose. In the past, sporadic attempts to create interlocking ownerships or "gentlemen's agreements" between major and minor league clubs had been resisted by the minors' National Association and struck down by the industry's ruling National Commission. But driven by the big leagues' unhappiness with draft exemption and high sale prices in the 1920s, many clubs demanded structural change. As smaller-market clubs saw it, their competitive salvation lay either in restoring a universal draft that would provide them with more equal and affordable access to talent, or in creating farm chains. Many of them preferred the former as keeping with tradition and placing less strain on their modest scouting and player assessment operations.
A few management minds, however, thought differently. More confident than their brethren in their ability to assess, sign, and promote talent from the bottom up, they did not want their superior professionalism neutralized by the leveling effect of a universal draft. As a result, not small-market clubs per se but only those few franchises with unusually shrewd and self-confident player-personnel directors were initially most likely to prefer the farm approach as ensuring survival of the "fittest" organizations. In the New Era, no rising club better fit that description than the St. Louis Cardinals, and no executive was more eager to take the industry down the farm system road than its personnel wizard Branch Rickey. Although baseball writers, borrowing a pattern from presidential scholars, have been prone to define eras by commissionerships, the dominant figure in Organized Baseball's structural evolution from the 1920s to the 1960s was not Kenesaw Landis but Branch Rickey. Although the former was commissioner for nearly a quarter-century, he enjoyed his greatest power at the outset, and by the end of his first term in 1927 his authority was already waning. It was Rickey who, if he did not invent the farm system concept, still shepherded it from its infancy to its peak of influence. It was also Rickey who, after World War II, stood first in line to recruit African Americans as the industry's new source of low-cost talent. In the 1950s it was again "the Mahatma" whose forays into Latin America presaged the ascendancy of that region's playing talent in modern times.[52]
Rickey's success as a baseball innovator in the acquisition and assessment of playing labor owed mainly to his personal knowledge of all levels of the industry. Abandoning an early career as a country schoolteacher at $35 a month, he matriculated at Ohio Wesleyan University as a combination student and athletic director, playing sports for extra money. Upon graduating in 1904, he joined the Dallas team of the North Texas League as a catcher. He was good enough to be signed by the Cincinnati Reds, but they soon released him because, according to Rickey, he refused to play on Sundays. After bouncing around for eight years in college teaching and coaching positions and playing brief stints with the St. Louis Browns and the New York Highlanders, the weak-armed backstop retired, only to contract tuberculosis. After he recovered, he entered law school and resumed his coaching career at the University of Michigan. After graduation he entered a law practice in Boise, Idaho, but when that failed, he returned to Michigan. In 1913 the Browns hired him for double duty as executive assistant and field manager. After two years as club skipper and a short stint in the military during World War I, Rickey began his career as a big league executive in earnest with the Cardinals. When Sam Breadon bought the club in 1920, Rickey stayed on as its vice-president, man in charge of daily operations, and even field manager until the end of 1925.
Rickey later claimed his championing of the farm system was a simple matter of "necessity being the mother of invention." In one respect this rare instance of modesty was justified, for he had not been the first to advance the idea. In 1913 Lee Hedges, the Browns' owner and Rickey's former boss, had propounded the multiple ownership of minor league teams. In a 1916 effort to counteract salary escalation driven by the Federal League, Cleveland's Charles Somers had actually secured minor league franchises in Eastern League Waterbury, Southern League New Orleans, and AA Toledo. When Somers had sold out, his successors had abandoned the farms. Working under the handicaps of the 1920s draft-exemption system, a number of big league clubs also had begun to build more sophisticated scouting and player assessment organizations to avoid costly talent misjudgments. What set Rickey's approach apart from that of his predecessors was his early grasp of the importance of integrating within the same parent club office the signing of entry-level talent, management of the player promotion process at all levels, and maintenance of a deliberate surplus of young talent to leverage down the major league payroll and make additional profits through sales of surplus players. In Rickey's new version of baseball "mercantilism" success lay in becoming a seller, rather than a buyer, of playing labor. He later stated that he based his system on the fundamental premise that a player initially signed by the parent organization always developed a subsequent "market value" that exceeded his minor league "production expense."[53]
As early as his first Cardinal contract in 1918, Rickey arranged for himself not only a base salary ($25,000 at first), but also a 10 percent share of the club's profits. As a result, when his farm system made the Cardinals into a talent seller, the transactions directly profited him as well as the club. After he purchased knuckleballer Jesse Haines in 1919, over the next twenty-seven years Rickey never bought a player from another organization. Between 1922 and 1942 the Cardinals, by contrast, earned over $2 million in player sales. Rickey built the Cardinals' farm empire brick by brick, beginning with the purchase of an 18 percent share in the Houston club of the Texas League. A 50 percent equity in the Western League's Ft. Smith, Arkansas, team followed in 1919, and then a quarter interest in the Syracuse AA franchise. As early as 1923 the Cardinals controlled over one hundred "farmhands." In 1925 Rickey added tryout camps in Danville, Illinois, and several other midwestern and southern towns. By 1926 the Cardinals had won their first National League pennant. Over the next twenty years, eight more followed, as well as six second-place finishes. By 1928, when the Cardinals moved their top minor league club to Rochester, they controlled dozens of grassroots tryout camps across rural America, owned seven clubs spanning all levels of the minors, and controlled 203 minor league players.[54]
Rickey's farm system was clearly the most advanced, and as other clubs launched their own forays, all drew the commissioner's wrath. In 1921 Landis "freed" a handful of players who had been demoted to minor league clubs with which the dispatching organizations held covert gentlemen's agreements. Because of these pacts the demoting clubs had illegally avoided having to secure waivers on the players or counting them toward option limits. But in the 1921 National Agreement Landis unaccountably failed to specifically bar outright major league ownership of minor league clubs as well as gentlemen's agreements, and in so doing he left an enormous loophole. As a result some owners chose to obey the letter, but not the spirit, of baseball law by substituting outright ownership for the more limited working agreements. Why the commissioner did not act swiftly to close the loophole remained a subject of speculation ever after. Rickey conceded that Landis had the administrative power at first to do so on his own, but he added tongue-in-cheek that because the commissioner had demurred, "regretfully that period of condonation left him with the disadvantage of estoppel." One theory held that Landis allies Barney Dreyfuss of Pittsburgh and Frank Navin of Detroit persuaded him that direct farm ownership would prove economically untenable anyway. Another explanation was the commissioner's hometown partiality toward the Chicago Cubs, whose owner William Wrigley had also purchased the Los Angeles PCL team but managed the clubs as separate investments. A final reason may have been that as major league differences with the high minors simmered over draft exemption, as a supporter of a restored universal draft Landis may not have wanted to prevent big league clubs from creating AA teams of reserves in order to force the high minors to cave in from the competition.[55]
Landis continued to liberate individual players bound by secret interlocking agreements. After Phil Todt was "released" by the Cardinals but refused to sign with either its Sherman or its Houston club, the commissioner upheld Todt's right to sign with the rival Browns. But whatever the commissioner's reasoning, he delayed a direct confrontation with the magnates over direct farm ownership until well into his second term. At majors-minors industry meetings in December 1928, prompted by the American Association's finger-in-the-dike effort to ban major league purchases of more teams, the commissioner demanded that magnates disclose their minor league holdings. They confessed to eighteen farms controlled by eleven of the big league organizations. Not all, however, apparently agreed that confession was good for the soul. The Browns' Phil Ball failed to disclose his, rather than his club's, purchases of two more minor league franchises. The Cardinals also had two additional purchases pending. Even the mighty Yankees, whose big league roster as late as 1926 included only one major league player--Lou Gehrig--that had not been acquired through purchase or trade from an unaffiliated organization, admitted that while they still lacked farms, they would soon have to follow Rickey's example.[56]
Undeterred by the commissioner's public scolding, by the spring of 1929 the major league organizations' acknowledged total of farms had reached twenty-seven. National Association president Mike Sexton prophetically lamented that before long the majors would effectively control enough of his organization to run it. Landis weakly counterattacked against the farms by freeing ten players hidden by Washington, Pittsburgh, Detroit, and the Philadelphia Athletics. Citing his concerns about the integrity of pennant races in circuits where more than one club was owned by the same big league patron, the commissioner "recommended" the Cardinals sell its Dayton club in the Central League if it intended to purchase the rival Ft. Wayne entity. When Landis directly confronted Sam Breadon on the matter, however, the Cardinals owner countered with a heated defense of farming's economic logic. The Yankees' Ruppert seconded, maintaining that in the absence of farms the magnates simply could not afford the prices being charged for minor leaguers. Since the 1928 winter meetings, New York had begun constructing its own farm system by buying the Chambersburg club in the Class D Blue Ridge League.[57]
By the time Landis next convened major and minor league executives in late 1929, Mike Sexton's fears had been realized. Within the commissioner's own sight, officers of minor league clubs packed the hotel lobby begging big league counterparts to buy up their operations. With the impetus of the Great Depression, the future nature of the relationship between Organized Baseball's highest-echelon franchises and their minor league labor suppliers belonged to Rickey, not Landis. Because of the threat posed by the deepening economic crisis to the solvency of undercapitalized minor league clubs, the majors did not even have to conquer the minors by force. Instead, the latter rushed to be absorbed, trading independence for greater financial security. As a result, more than ever before the livelihoods and the rights of thousands of professional players throughout Organized Baseball lay squarely in the hands of an oligopoly of sixteen vertically integrated companies and their officers. What little benefit they had drawn from the actions of a commissioner purportedly committed to their upward mobility, and from the rivalry of competing major and minor league industry interests, now seemed likely to vanish with the fortunes of Wall Street. A grim decade for American workers--including baseball players--was about to begin.
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