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Players Owners and American Baseball to 1920 by Robert F Burk |
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| America's national pastime has been
marked from its inception by bitter struggles between owners and players
over profit, power, and prestige. In this book, the first installment of
a highly readable, comprehensive labor history of baseball, Robert Burk
describes the evolution of the ballplaying work force: its ethnocultural
makeup, its economic position, and its battles for a place at the table
in baseball's decision-making structure.
In the late nineteenth and early
twentieth centuries, the growing popularity of baseball as a spectator
sport and the dramatic upsurge of America's urban population created conditions
that led to franchise competition, the development of rival leagues, and
trade wars, in turn triggering boom-and-bust cycles, franchise bankruptcies,
and league mergers. According to Burk, players repeatedly tried to use
these circumstances to better their economic positions by playing one team
off against another. Their successes proved short-lived, however, because
their own internal divisions, exploited by management, undercut attempts
to create collective-bargaining institutions. By 1920, owners still held
the upper hand in the labor-management battle, but as today's sports pages
show, owners did not secure a long-term solution to their labor problems.
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Never Just a Game by Robert F. Burk. University of North Carolina Press, 2001. Order a copy. |
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