BASEBALL PLAYERS, OWNERS, UNIONS, AND TRUSTS: THE ROOTS AND RISE OF THE MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL PLAYERS ASSOCIATION Ross E. Davies, George Mason University School of Law NYU Journal of Legislation & Public Policy, Forthcoming George Mason University Law and Economics Research Paper Series 13-10 ROUGH DRAFT -- comments welcome --
[email protected] BASEBALL PLAYERS, OWNERS, UNIONS, AND TRUSTS THE ROOTS AND RISE OF THE MAJOR LEAGUE BASEBALL PLAYERS ASSOCIATION Ross E. Davies† On April 24, 2012, Marvin Miller delivered a speech at New York University in which he reflected at length on the history of the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) and his role in the develop- ment of the labor union he led from 1966 to 1983. This article is an introduction in two parts to that speech and the panel discussion that followed it. Part I is a chronology of highlights of labor-management relations in major league baseball. Part II draws an inference or two about the MLBPA from events on that timeline. It is not the entire story of organized labor in major-league baseball, or even of Miller and the union he led. But it is enough, I hope, to put his recollections and the subsequent discussion in mature perspective. PART I: TIMELINE OF BASEBALL’S LABOR-MANAGEMENT HISTORY The history of labor-management relations in major-league baseball is very long, often complicated or ob- scure (in part because the documentary record is incomplete), and occasionally exciting. There is enough of it to fill volumes. It has. And some of them are very good, including Charles Korr’s The End of Baseball as We Knew It (2002), Lee Lowenfish’s The Imperfect Diamond (1980, 2010), Marvin Miller’s A Whole Different Ball Game (1991, 2004), and Brad Snyder’s A Well-Paid Slave (2006).