infamous reserve rule) and freewheeling industrial capitalism: blacklisting, fines, salary limits, and reductions, even the use of Pinkerton spies. The reserve clause, initiated in 1879 and inserted into every player’s contract, gave his employer the right to reserve his services for the following year, unless the player was traded, sold, or released from his contract. Players fought the reserve rule, most notably when the Brotherhood of Professional BaseBall Players launched its own Players’ League in 1890. When the players’ financial backers sold them out to the National League, baseball owners triumphed and ruled organized baseball virtually unchallenged for eighty-five years. They were aided by a series of bizarre Supreme Court rulings that baseball was not interstate commerce and therefore not bound by federal antitrust law. In 1975 and arbitrator ruled that the reserved clause applied for only one year and players, as “free agents,” regained their negotiating power; salaries quickly reached unheard-of levels. Owners retaliated in 1981 but were soundly defeated by a players’ strike. (Smith, 124)Then in the late 1980s they conspired (illegally, an arbitrator held) to limit salary offers to free agents. After a twenty-year period of franchise movement, league expansions, and the creation of divisions within leagues, baseball became organizationally stable again in the late 1970s. Attendance grew dramatically throughout the 1980s, more people attended major league baseball games (over 50 million per year at the end of the decade) than at any other time in the games history. Baseball has been America’s most popular sport for so long mainly because it has successfully straddled some of the nation’s most important cultural divisions. Though it was born among the respectable working class and sporting middle class, the games cultural antecedents lay in the boisterous street culture of saloon...
