Effectively Wild: A FanGraphs Baseball Podcast - Effectively Wild Episode 1800: All of This Has Happened Before

Episode Date: January 21, 2022

Ben Lindbergh and Meg Rowley lean into the lockout by exploring two antecedents to today’s MLB labor stalemate. First, they banter with Emma Baccellieri of Sports Illustrated about whether the Hall of Fame Vote Tracker has helped or hurt Hall of Fame conversations, then talk to Emma about the Players’ League, a short-lived but groundbreaking […]

Such a great responsibility to make it fair And there must be some reparations too And don't forget the oil Today I'm carried by a league of notions By a league of notions I don't think I understand I only know from this compulsion There's a chance that we could turn the world In the palm of our hands.

A parrot by a league of notions by a league of nations, I don't think I quite understand. I only know from this commotion there's a chance we could turn the world in the palm of our hands. Hello and welcome to episode 1800 of Effectively Wild, a FanGraphs baseball podcast brought to you by our Patreon supporters. I'm Meg Rowley of FanGraphs, and I'm joined as always by Ben Lindberg of The Ringer. Ben, how are you? I am just swell. I'm so glad. Just swell. Not a bit above or below, but just. Just swell. Right. Yes.

And we are joined today by a guest, one of our two interview segments for this piece, Emma Batchelieri of Sports Illustrated. Emma, how are you? I am also swell. Thank you for having me. Just swell? Yes, I'm just swell. I don't want to minimize how good it is to be swell. It's nice to be swell. It's swell, in fact. But yeah. Emma, how's the lockout been for you? Probably pretty similar to how it's been for you.

Very quiet in a way that is both somewhat relaxing in a strange way, and yet with like a sort of Damocles hanging over my head, knowing that like it's going to be a lot of work soon, but not right now. Yeah, well, I guess you've had your own round of labor bargaining going on in your other professional life, but we can probably ask you about that a little later on. We wanted to just lean into the lockout today. And while we're in a work stoppage, we figured we would just talk about some previous work stoppages, or I guess we can't even call what we're going to talk to you, Emma, about a work stoppage. It was more of a revolt. It was a secession. I don't know what to call it. It's the Players League. But later on in this episode, we will be talking to Dane Perry of CBS Sports about a recent exhaustive golden anniversary piece he did

on 1972 and the 50th anniversary of the first work stoppage and the first strike in MLB. But we're going to go back further than that with you. And I guess just before we get to the Players League, the most recent piece that you wrote was about the Hall of Fame tracker that Ryan Thibodeau has done and that we have often relied on for some of our conversations about the Hall of Fame on the show. And there's been this whole debate about is this bad or good, right? Is this improving the Hall of Fame on the show. And there's been this whole debate about, is this bad or good, right? Is this improving the Hall of Fame conversation or taking something away from it?

I guess, was it Buster only who started this sort of with a column? Yeah, where he sort of said that it's bad or that there are bad aspects of the fact that it's sort of spoiling our knowledge of who gets into the Hall of Fame, which we will learn officially next Tuesday. But you and some others have argued that no, in fact, it is good or it is mostly good.

And I think I'm on your side there. But what's your argument for why it's good to know? I think most of it comes from just thinking about what it was like before the Hall of Fame tracker, which, you know, it hasn't been that long. It's been, you know, this is the ninth year that Ryan has done it, which seems crazy to me, because I feel like it's been part of my Hall of Fame experience forever now. Yeah. But just this ability to a have the transparency that comes with this of not only it kind of, I think, incentivizes more voters to make it public. And obviously, there's been a separate push by the BBWA to make that easier. And that's kind of coincided with the public recording and tracking that Ryan has done with the Hall of Fame tracker. But yeah, the transparency that you get from these ballots,

not only being made public in columns, which people have done forever, but just collected in one place where you see all of them together. but also just the kind of experience of the way that it plays out which it is kind of a double edged sword because it obviously it can get very tiresome for hall of fame season to feel like it lasts two and a half months and not you know a week extremely tiresome but i think even as uh annoying as it can be to feel like we're having the same arguments all the time, I'd rather have that discussion exist than not. Yeah. upon a time where maybe just, okay, you'd put your ballot in a column, maybe before the results are announced, maybe not until after, and just send it out. And that was it, this idea that it's being recorded step by step, that people are talking about it. Like, yes, this can make it

a pretty exhausting, frustrating process, but it makes it a real process that I think people engage with in a different way. It creates kind of a better record for accountability and transparency. And I think all of that is a good thing. And also, I think a big part of this that I hadn't even really realized before I sat down to do this column and talk to Ryan for it was that, you know, he says their goal is 50% of ballots before the announcement, and then as many as possible afterward. And that seems to make sense for me that, you know, you're not after 100% of the ballots before the announcement, there's still some element of surprise, there's still a question of you can extrapolate from 50%, but you can't do it perfectly, that there's still plenty of space in this for some element of surprise, and creating new pockets of surprise in the way that you're tracking every day and making it a daily endeavor, even as you're collecting all of this. So that's kind of where I came out on it.

Well, and selfishly, and I am not yet a voter because I haven't been in the association long enough yet, but we don't have a perfect understanding, as you just said, of who's going to be in in advance. And I like that we maintain some element of suspense. But I think just selfishly as a future voter, as long as we have a limited ballot and are only able to dole out 10 spaces in years where we might end up with more than 10 candidates who are worthy, I think having some sense of the margins for some of these guys is actually really useful, particularly on the cases that are going to be close, because it helps to inform your strategic voting more precisely than just having to have a sense of the ballots that are out there based on columns. So, you know, as someone who hopes that

I don't face the same conundrums with my first ballot that Ben did with his and hopes to be able to just enthusiastically vote. I appreciate that we have a better sense of like who's on the edge, who really needs to have a final push because we've, you know, for better or worse, the hall has committed to strategic voting being part of this process, at least as it's currently understood. And I'd like to be an informed strategic voter when the time comes. And I think efforts like this really help to move the needle on that stuff so yeah it seems like there's probably only one candidate who has a realistic shot of getting in next week according

to the latest projections I saw it seems like David Ortiz will likely get in but there's still some uncertainty there and then everyone else is just out entirely which I guess if we didn't have the tracker and I didn't know that there there would still be some suspense about that, although it would just culminate in disappointment, I guess, because probably no one else would get in. So it is that question about whether it's better to know and have that potential foresight. It's kind of like we were talking to Sam about last time with projections in general when it comes to baseball teams and baseball seasons. I think it's helpful to know in some ways, and sometimes you just wish that you forget it. You feel like you know too

much and you just want to experience it with some ignorance or just ignore what the projections are saying because you have a rooting interest. So I can see why some people would say it saps their excitement for it, but really it was only ever going to be like one brief little glimmer of excitement when you find out or not. And because we have the tracker, you can get weeks and months of informed discussion about this stuff, which, as you said, can be a good thing sometimes and can be a bad thing at other times. But I like it. I like data. I like that this exists. And one of my disappointments about ending up not voting this year was that I didn't get to share my ballot with Ryan. And I did get a understanding,

but sad DM from him that he wasn't going to get a ballot for me to share. So that was a little bit of a letdown. Well, I did want to ask you something about current contemporary baseball coverage, because it seems like we often have you on to talk about something about current contemporary baseball coverage, because it seems like we often have you on to talk about something that happened centuries ago, which I don't mean to imply that I don't enjoy your coverage of current baseball subjects too. And of course, your coverage of things that happened a long, long time ago is coverage of what is happening today, because you reflect on what's happening now by looking back at something similar that happened in the past. But there aren't as many people doing super deep dives about things from the early 20th or late 19th century. So it sort of stands out, I guess. So last year we had you on

when there was a rash of no-hitters to talk about the rash of no-hitters in 1917, which is not something that a lot of people had brought up at that time, I don't think. And you had to top that by going even further back in history. So you've gone back to the 19th century now to talk about the Players League, which is just fascinating. It's like the sports lost city of Atlantis or something, where you can't believe it existed, although this actually did, and you wonder what would have happened if it had continued to exist. And it seems like too good to be true and that it couldn't have happened at that point in history or any point in history.

And I guess it was too good to be true because it didn't last all that long. But even when it was around, it really made a mark. And it's kind of an incredible story. So what drove you to go back during this lockout to look at another time when there was a labor dispute and the players handled it completely differently and very boldly yeah first of all that was a very nice way of saying that not that many people have a newspaper archive subscription and tendency to fall down very deep rabbit holes yep yeah sometimes it leads you to like like Joe Torrey's recipe for healthy eating in 1971, which I

saw you tweet recently. That came from the Hall of Fame piece because I was looking at, I was, I realized I had no idea what it was, not to go on a tangent too much. Please do. I brought this up to encourage the tangent. I realized I had no idea what Hall of Fame discussion was like before the internet. You know, like I remember it from before the Hall of Fame tracker, but that was still a very internet based way of doing it. And so I was genuinely curious.

I was like, what did they like? How did Sports Illustrated cover the Hall of Fame? And I just picked 50 years ago as a arbitrary look. And it was like, oh, yeah, they ran the ballot in the magazine in November. And then they had a column when it was announced and nothing in the two months in between. And I was like, wow. And but one of the things they did have in those two months in between, because I had to manually check the baseball in every issue to make sure there wasn't something uh that did reference the hall of fame one of the things was joe tory's like shockingly keto like diet but a very 70s version of it um how is anyone alive from that era of the world it's truly crazy no vegetables yeah just just lettuce no vegetables

and this was healthy i guess by the standards of the time in some ways. You can have steak. He trimmed the fat, so that's something. So you can have chopped steak or chicken, broiled or grilled, eggs poached or boiled, lettuce with only vinegar, and then some fresca or some other sugarless soft drink, coffee and tea, no sugar. So, you know, he trims the fat off the steak. He takes the sugar out of the coffee or the tea and no beer, no booze, no milk, fried foods, vegetables. I love, that's the best part. You can't have, he puts vegetables between fried foods and ice cream. It's the same food group, basically fried Fried foods, vegetables, ice cream. Just kind of cut all of those things out of your diet. And then butter, bread, potatoes, desserts, fruit. Drink at least 80 ounces of water a day. So he was on to some things here. I don't know how he ruled out

vegetables on that list of other things to exclude. I will say he also had great taste in soft drinks. I love Fresca. And I'm very surprised that that was in there. Again, not to spend too much time on Joe Torre's 1972 diet. Fresca was created in 1967, which I know because it's printed on the can. And I mean, this isn't that much later. I'm surprised that Fresca was that... Had the market penetration to make it onto his diet list exactly anyway i started out that question by asking about the players league and then i let us down a side road there but yeah was this something that you were always interested in and this was the time to fully explore it or was this something that you just developed a recent

appreciation for because of the current circumstances? Yeah, so I had never heard of the Players League until it was probably a year or two ago where I was on Baseball Reference. I'm not sure what I was doing, but it was something that involved some player pages from that late 19th century, early 20th century. late 19th century early 20th century and i i saw some stats from this league and i was kind of interested at like which leagues were considered major leagues and then when i clicked on players league i was totally fascinated at this idea that there was a league that had been started and run by the players just i mean super interesting idea and i really got into it and it's like oh my god someone should write a book about this and then i looked and someone had written really got into it and it's like oh my god someone should write a book about this and then I looked and someone had written a book about it and I ordered it and

kind of forgot all about it by the time the book came and didn't think about this at all for you know yeah about like a year until finally this winter I was looking for something to do and was like seems like a probably a pretty good time to return to a more interesting it's not as you said it's not a labor stoppage it's really kind of the just the opposite the idea of just like totally breaking the system and saying that you know working with owners isn't going to work with us we're just going to start our own league so help set the stage here what were the events that sort of precipitated this move on the part of the players because they didn't have a formal union as we would understand one today, but they

did have sort of a rough association of players. So what was the breaking point that sort of brought them to the place where they thought better to form our own league? Yeah. So important context for this, I think, is that this is, you're talking late 1880s into 1890. So the National League exists, the American Association, which is a different independent league, but also kind of a major league-ish exists. The American League doesn't exist yet. But there's just a lot of movement with teams being created and then going bankrupt or just going out of existence altogether. The whole landscape is a lot more fluid than it was now in terms of what it meant to start a team or for a team to go away, which I think probably laid the seeds for,

you could be a lot more creative in that environment, I think, rather than having this very firm establishment of like, these are the teams in these cities, and they've been there forever as institutions. But yeah, so you're still pretty early in the lifespan of professional baseball, and very early in the lifespan of thinking of baseball player as a career, which was kind of an important change that had happened in the lifetimes of these players. They'd seen this happen and they had been growing increasingly frustrated with working conditions as they'd come to think of this more as like, this is a career, this is something we'll do

every season, this means something, this is a job. So you had pay wasn't very high, lots of generally poor, frustrating conditions of like, you had to procure and launder your own uniform, and you couldn't get a free ticket for your wife to come to the ballpark and travel expenses, you know, a lot of those you were fronting yourself. So that was frustrating. And then the most frustrating thing was the reserve clause, which is was basically a very similar version of the same reserve clause that you had Kurt Fled trying to topple almost 100 years later, which had actually been seen by the players as a good thing when it was installed in the 1870s. That's really interesting. They kind of surgeon-horsed it in there. Right, because it was basically at the beginning when

they put it in, players had been so frustrated with a state of things where you didn't really have a multi-year contract so like where you would be playing how much money you'd be making was just totally left up in the air until owners decided like oh it's it's march like here's how much money i have and you know congrats um which is like not a great way to live your life it's nice to know there's never been a time where it's been fun to move. Yeah, exactly. There was actually like a specific case with one player who was like, ended up going to the players league because he had been in a situation where he was

functionally traded from Cleveland to Buffalo and moving to Buffalo, like sent him over the edge. So yes, it's always been like this. But yeah, so it was just like this system where it was totally in flux year to year, there were no guarantees. And so they originally saw that the reserve clause as something closer to like a franchise tag almost that like, okay, I know that this team has the ability to bring me back, I can like try to plan ahead for next year, I can have some level of guarantee that my salary will be close ish to plan ahead for next year. I can have some level of guarantee that my salary will be close-ish to the same thing next year. And it only applied to certain players. Like at first, I think it was four players on a team could be subject to the reserve clause. And so like,

players actually embraced this as like, okay, this is a measure of security. But then they just kept gradually expanding the powers of the clause and how many players it applied to. And soon it applied to basically every player on a team was stuck on that team for life unless they were traded, which they also really didn't like because they had no say and no rights over that. you had salaries were going down because with all of the movement that you had previously before the reserve clause even though you had no salary guarantees you could also kind of play teams off of one another and that obviously went away under the reserve clause and so these players had seen over the course of you know less than 10 years go from an environment that sucked in one way where they had no security no stability stability, didn't know what they do from one year to the next to total team control in a way that they thought might bring them stability, but instead just drove their salaries down and, you know, meant that they

were getting traded in ways that they didn't like. And yeah, so they basically seen in the space of, you know, less than 10 years, so less than one career, two very different systems that worked poorly in different ways, a union, more of a proto-union that was advocating for some things that eventually led to the creation of the Players League. Yeah, it was a really interesting group in that, as you said, it wasn't organized as a union. They weren't affiliated with a larger labor organization. and they weren't affiliated with like a larger labor organization. But it was just this idea that like, okay, if we join together, like we can A, find ourselves in a better spot to advocate for ourselves in terms of trying to talk to the owners in change conditions. And they didn't really get far with that.

But the other function that they had was something kind of like mutual aid, which, you know, at the time, if a player was hurt and if you couldn't appear in a game, you didn't get paid, like the salaries were not guaranteed. And so that was a huge thing if you get hurt while playing, or even if you got sick, which was a lot more common in the 1880s, there went your salary. And so they did this kind of mutual aid thing where they would help guys out if you couldn't play because you were hurt or sick and so it really was i think most instrumental in just like showing them like okay this is what solidarity looks like this is you know we can talk about the problems we're facing we can try to help each other like we're

not seeing much change from owners and we're getting more and more frustrated but even though this isn't like a formal group with a specific labor function, we can come together and we can think about how to make things better for ourselves. And they tried to address the concerns around the reserve clause and come up with a more sort of fair and balanced salary structure. And it was one that the National League was thoroughly uninterested in and proposed a countermeasure which i think is you might point to as the thing that really precipitated this move for the the players league yeah which sounds in some ways like some recent proposals yes right yeah this is basically a salary cap a hard cap but they would grade each player from a to e so if you were an A grade player,

you would make the absolute max salary $2,500 a year and then less for B, C, D. And then if you were an E grade player, you would make $1,500 a year and you would have to do extra work either as a groundskeeper or a ticket taker. So it's like humiliating in addition to there's no way to improve your pay. So yeah,

this was basically all of their frustrations were perfectly showcased in this one proposal by ownership to just make everything worse in every single way. So the leader of the players at this point of the brotherhood is John Montgomery Ward, who is a Hall of Fame shortstop, although it took many decades for him to get into the Hall of Fame, largely or probably because of his advocacy here and some of the lingering bitterness about that. But he was also a lawyer, or at least had just gotten his law degree and was respected not only as a great player, but someone everyone liked. And so he and the other leaders realized,

okay, the owners are intractable. We're not going to get anywhere continuing to talk to them, which again, also seems to apply to this moment. But instead of just kicking things back and forth or trying to walk out or something and preserve the status quo, but in a more favorable way, they just said, no, we will do our own thing. And I don't know if you have your article open here and would care to read Ward's words here when he announced the formation of the Players League. But as you noted, a lot of this sounds really familiar, which is one reason why I enjoy your deep dives into these historical topics and why I have my own newspapers.com subscription is that there are just so many echoes of past things in the present.

Yeah, it really is striking. This is part of what they had when they handed out to both to all the players to give them a copy of this and also to fans, to reporters, the statement that went, There was a time when the League stood for integrity and fair dealing. Today, it stands for dollars and cents. Once it looked to the elevation of the game and an honest exhibition of the sport, today its eyes are upon the turnstile. Men have come into the business from no other motive than to exploit it for every dollar in sight. I mean, that sounds as if it could be a player's statement really at any time.

Right. Yeah. The only part I would quibble with about this statement is the idea that things were ever different, right? Right. Even before that. I mean, maybe when they were, you know, amateurs before anyone got paid for like a very, very brief moment. And then that was like the shining example that everyone lamented the loss of for the rest of time. Yeah, exactly. exactly but yeah they talked about walking out they talked about going on strike on july 4th in 1889 and decided like it's not worth it we'll stay the course for this season and as soon as we hit the off season for 1889 we're just making our own league like we all want to do it the vast majority of them like why

not and you're in this environment where they'd all seen teams pop up relatively quickly. I mean, obviously, the business of baseball was very different back then. So the idea of starting a new team was like, do you have a team? Do you have a stadium? That's pretty much it. And so they were just like, yep, we're going to create our own structure. Like, how do we think baseball should be run? like, yep, we're going to create our own structure. Like, how do we think baseball should be run?

We, the players, are going to put that into action over the course of, you know, the six months of the offseason, and then we're going to start our own league. Yeah. And I guess building a ballpark in those days was like, let's get some boards and cobble together some bleachers. I mean, a little more involved than that, but not quite what building a ballpark entails today. Yeah, exactly. That actually was one of the, the like really shocking things to me is that some of these ballparks were built in like six weeks um which feels like a safety concern and um it was sometimes they would fall down or burn or whatever yeah yeah exactly and but yeah they basically just apart from that you just had to figure out the structure of the league. And for them, that was, you know, they knew they were going to need outside investors because all of the players to have ownership shares. They wanted things to be kind of governed with each team would have an eight-man board where you'd

have four players who'd be elected by the other players themselves. And you have four investors who'd be elected by the other investors. And everything would be made, every decision would be made collaboratively by that group. And you'd have a similar ownership structure for the league as a whole. So you'd have no person with too much power. Like, yes, you'd have outside money coming in because we needed it. But you would have a system that was mostly based on these democratically elected representatives that would hopefully be able to guide things to a better spot where your goal wasn't to make as much money as possible, but was to make a sustainable baseball league was their thinking.

And they weren't shying away from trying to compete directly with the NL. They weren't striking out in new markets. A lot of these teams were in the existing markets that the NL was populating. And sometimes their ballparks were right next door to one another, right? Yeah, which was like a weird quirk in that they didn't intend to do that necessarily like they they set out they knew they wanted to operate in the same markets because they knew those were great baseball towns and i mean right as is as is today it's very regional game it makes sense that you want to stick where you found success um but yeah they end up with building these ballparks in what end up in a lot

of cases being very close to the NL stadiums. The schedule, this was a decision made by the NL rather than by the Players League. The schedule is like exactly the same because the NL was interested in like in pushing them. So they are playing, most games are happening in the same city on the same day. So if you're in Pittsburgh on, you know, May 15th, there's going to be a players league game, and there's going to be a national league game, and it would be up to the fans to decide like, what am I going to go see? So that was a decision that the National League made to kind of, they were hoping it would be enough to just push the players league out of under because,

you know, the National League is was more established they had more money but it really instead kind of showed actually how strong the players league was in a lot of ways because the the players league had the better players like most of the the the players that fans loved and appreciated had gone to the players league that meant that they had higher attendance which back then was pretty much your only source of income as a team. The players were what the fans appreciated. And so the fans went to go see the Players League rather than the National League. Yeah. I mean, there were only, I guess, 60 million or so people in the US at that time. And probably they were more geographically

compressed even than today. And everyone was traveling by train. So there were only so many markets, I guess, that could support a baseball team and play other baseball teams at that point. So there were a limited number of options. But even so, it seems like they had the stronger product. And as you know, it seems like the vast majority or a clear majority of players went over to the Players League. Do you know the reasons why the ones who didn't stayed in the NL? You can't call them scabs, I guess. That doesn't quite apply to this situation. But was it just the fact that they were offered more money to stay by owners who were threatened by the Players League and they didn't want to try some new upstart league? They weren't

persuaded by the oratory of John Montgomery Ward. It was mostly that. Yeah, it was a small group that were all kind of ideologically aligned in that. Yeah, just like they'd said from the beginning, like, not interested, don't want to do this. The National League is offering more money like that. It wasn't a cause they were interested in. You're right it is a weird situation where they're not scabs because they just kept doing their their job in the league

they'd been playing and and at least until the very end when everything was falling apart it seemingly didn't interfere with the the players league like they didn't try to get in the way they were just like this isn't my thing and go have fun and so it yeah it was kind of an interesting situation where you had the vast majority, at least the vast majority of like players with name recognition going to the players league. And then you had this pretty small group who just decided to stick behind and, you know, take their chances on something that was more established and not mess with any of the more newfangled ideology of the players league.

So they're drawing well, they have, you know, the attention of fans, the better players are playing in the players league. What ends up being the undoing here? Because this all sounds incredibly sort of utopian. This is what we would want, right? Like a democratically run, sort of utopian. This is what we would want, right? Like a democratically run, well-attended, well-regarded league. But obviously, we don't cover the players league at Fangraphs today, and you don't cover it at Sports Illustrated or The Ringer. So what was the undoing here? Yeah, it is a huge bummer because, as you said, it seemed for a while like this could really work, that they were outdrawing the national league they had pretty strong solidarity and yet they did have those outside investors that they'd had to bring in to get the money to make it happen and some of these investors were interested uh

on an ideological level like oh like this seems like something cool to support but most of them had just been interested from a financial perspective like they saw the best players in baseball going to start their own league and thought, this is a smart thing to invest in because they're better players, they'll make more money. I'm doing this strictly because I'm looking for a return on my investment. And because of the fact that they were going up head to head that entire season, margins were very slim. They weren't making a ton of money. Some teams were doing better than others. Like some teams were doing okay, but on the whole, they were losing money, especially because they'd all had the cost of building new ballparks, which is, you know, a one-time expense. But even as quick as it

was and as haphazard as that construction was, it was still a big expense that they'd fronted. They were very nervous that they weren't getting a big return right away. And that was something that the owners and the National League saw. And the National League owners were extremely nervous about everything falling apart. They had lost a ton of money, more than the Players League that year. They were very scared about the ability to continue. And they knew that if we do one more season of this, it's all going to fall apart. Like we can't afford to do another year of this. And so they made the very shrewd decision to kind of bluff about their own financial situation to make it seem as if, you know, well, we can go on forever. Like, you know, we're willing to wait you out and go head to head again next year, going to these investors and saying, are you willing to do this again? I don't think so. We can buy you out. If you, if you turn

on the players, you know, this is the smart thing to do. You can rec don't think so. We can buy you out if you turn on the players. This is the smart thing to do. You can recoup your investment now, but you're going to lose everything if you keep going. And so of course, you only need so many investors to turn before the whole thing starts falling apart. And that's what happened. The players were in some cases very angry and a lot of cases just kind of like heartbroken but it basically before they had a chance to really even try to stop it you had investors on every team pulling out because the national league executives had convinced them it was the smart thing to do and uh and then it was basically gone yeah do you think most of the players were in this for the spirit of the thing

and the camaraderie and the principle or just they wanted to go where conditions would be better and the paycheck would be higher. And so when this fell apart, they were okay with going back. You know, was it just Ward and the core leadership team that really had the esprit de corps? Or was that generally shared from what you could tell? I think it varied. You know, I think there were certainly some players that were more interested in this as like a kind of utopian exercise than others. Like one of the ones that stood out to me was the team in Philadelphia invited Samuel Gompers to come talk to them, which is like a very big statement on organized labor. And also is even, I think, more interesting that he came and, you know, they had this speech from union leader Samuel Gompers. And, you know, they had this speech from union leader Samuel Gompers.

And other teams, you had much less of that interest in affiliating with, like, formal organized labor, much less interested in expressing this as an exercise of, like, we the people, which was a slogan that the team in New York used a lot of, like, this is, you know, a working man's team. This is what we're all about. of like, this is a, you know, a working man's team. This is what we're all about. And some teams, the players on those teams were less interested in kind of making that explicit connection to a cause. And so it seemed like when it fell apart, you had, it seemed like the biggest thing was just demoralization because it, you know,

what ended up happening was you go back to the National League because you have no choice. And in a lot of ways, they came down on them harder than they'd been to begin with that, you know, you went right back to the team that had had your rights in 1899, 1889, excuse me, the reserve clause still in place, in some ways feels stronger now, because you tried to topple it with something that was radical and, you know, really interesting by striking out on your your own and it just kind of collapsed under you the owners even though they've lost a lot of money and are like kind of privately panicking in a lot of cases of okay okay you know we need to start making

money now are kind of harsher than ever in some respects and so yeah the 1890s ended up becoming a pretty not great decade to play baseball and that you get the American League coming in in 1901 kind of as a response to that in some senses that um yeah like the players were just demoralized the owners became stricter than ever and so there wasn't really even a chance to try to to build something back up again because it was just so like the scorched earth effect of what what the owners did after they were able to have control again. Yeah, I was going to ask sort of as we look to connect this to our current labor environment, obviously there are a lot of parallels in terms of the sort of apply to these negotiations that we're in the midst of? What parallels would you draw? What might the players take from the experience of the Players

League as they think about how to approach their relationship with ownership now? Yeah. I mean, you obviously couldn't try this again, even if you wanted to. The antitrust exemption would kind of change the mechanics of starting your own baseball league but i think the biggest thing is just the recognition that this dynamic has existed like quite literally since the beginning and that there's like none of this is new even if the specific details are like none of these sentiments are new. And I think the biggest thing is that it sounds kind of hokey and cliched, but what it means to have, like, true solidarity as a unit and to recognize that, you know, if you're operating as one group, if you're controlling the public message, that was a huge thing the players league did that they were pretty effective with of showing that like the players are the ones who make baseball happen which again like sounds so simple and is so basic but that was part of the reason they went with the name players league that yes ultimately this all falls apart but

they were very successful with the idea that we are the ones who make baseball happen like a team is just a team. An ownership group can do anything, but the players are who you're here for and are what baseball means. I think that idea is very powerful. Messaging that to the public is very powerful. And I think that was where the Players League

had its greatest success. And I think it is something that you see kind of come up again and again of this idea of like what is baseball it's the players is it possible that rob manfred and the owners have actually been around since then and they have just by injecting the blood of the young these are actually the same people who are part of this negotiation because it seems like they're operating in exactly the same way sort of suspicious if you ask me someone Someone should look into that. Definitely. so far, right, that there is a point at which it tends to buckle and then players will make concessions to ownership. And so even though the collapse of this league is not in itself

encouraging, I found it sort of reassuring that it was the investors that were really the undoing, right? There was not a failure of solidarity on the part of the players. It was just that, you know, they had investors who got got by faulty, you know, financial statements on the part of the NL, perhaps another parallel that we might draw to today. But it wasn't that they were undone by exhaustion or an inability to sort of coalesce together over the long term. It was that they had to make concessions to the reality of needing investors to get things going, and that was their undoing. If one can take a silver lining from all of this, maybe that was one of mine. It feels very dark that one of the potential lessons here is that the urge to financialize this and to try to make it into a profit-making machine

for investors is the undoing rather than anything on the baseball side. Again, it feels relevant, but also in a very sad way. Yeah. But there you are. Yeah. Do you think Ward could have done anything differently if he had foreseen how it was going to end and that betrayal by the investors.

I mean was there any way for them to do this without the investors or was that just a necessary what turned out to be evil. that just a necessary what turned out to be evil yeah i i think he in some ways from from the reading i did was kind of blinkered about this because he was so dedicated to the cause that he was like completely taken aback by the investors bowing out which you know i think if he had i think perhaps if they had like structured the payouts a little differently if they had been more committed to the beginning of like a not going season by season but like okay like here is when you which this wasn't really how people did business back then so I don't think he would have thought to do this because no one did but like okay here are the returns you can expect after three years after five years this is a long-term investment like this is just like kind of seed money you're pouring in at the beginning but it will grow with

xyz instead it was very much like these owners were you know okay it's august of our first season where is our money when that's not really how something works if you're trying to build a league for that's going to be sustainable in the long run i think it seems like they could have done more to like massage the fears of the investors by just looking at, okay, this is something for the long term. Here's how we're going to make it work. But yeah, it's a good question because it was, I think, such a good idea in many ways, like not a perfect one, but it really was like the vision it takes to come up with something

like this is just remarkable to me. And then to see it collapse after just one year with something that feels like it could have been avoided, even though, you know, they were always going to outside investors because they didn't have money. But it's sad that it came out the way it did, because you'd like to think that you could have gone around that somehow, and yet they couldn't. Yeah, it's too bad. I mean, I don't think that we, for some of the reasons you said and a whole host of others, we couldn't do something like this today. But I imagine that the value proposition argument to potential investors would be much more straightforward in today's world than it was back then, right?

Because we have this context and understanding of sports as an extremely profitable enterprise, particularly when they're good enough to be broadcast. So in some ways, it would be easier today to say, okay, stick around for five years and then gosh, you'll never believe what these franchises are going to be worth. But the environment with the existence of MLB makes that so much harder. Yeah. And I think that was also part of it that like all of these investors had seen various teams go into bankruptcy and have to get sold. And like that was very normal for a team to exist for like two years and then bye. So yeah, weirdly, like if you had a 21st century view of what investment can look like, I think it might have been turned out a little differently. But

for various reasons, of course, it didn't. Yeah. And there were some subsequent challenges to MLB's dominance. None of them quite like the Players League, but you had the Federal League come along a couple decades later. And then a decade after that, there was the Supreme Court decision that you referenced that makes this harder to do. And after that, I guess there was the Mexican League attempt in the 1940s to lure some MLB players there with high salaries, and then the Continental League, which never quite came together. But as you noted, it would be difficult to do something like this today. But we did answer an email question last week where someone asked us essentially, if the lockout just lasted indefinitely, what would happen? Like, would baseball survive or would major league baseball survive and I guess there would come some point if MLB as it currently exists clearly was not going to be played and there have been some challenges to the antitrust exemption and I'd imagine that if the lockout extended for years that might make something like that more feasible and of course you have TV contracts which are long term and then you have the ballparks and the expense of building those. So it would be tough.

But if a work stoppage somehow went on for years and years and years, I guess something like the Players League could actually happen. Not that I am rooting for the lockout to go on for years and years and years. Yeah. I mean, if it has to happen, I would be very interested in seeing the antitrust exemption meaningfully challenged in court by a player-led league. That seems like a very interesting way for it to go down if it has to. But yeah. And the last thing I was going to ask you, I alluded earlier to this, but you are a member of the Sports Illustrated Union, which was formed a couple of years ago, and you've been serving on the bargaining committee and you all just agreed on a contract this week, which congratulations, I'm sure a ton of work went into that. And I was in the Ringer Union when we formed and we negotiated for a deal. I was not on

the bargaining committee, but just being in the union at that time gave me an appreciation for how much work goes into that and how busy the bargaining committee members were. So I wonder whether getting a front-row seat to that kind of negotiation, obviously different from the MLB and MLBPA one, but some of the same principles and tactics come into play. Does that inform your knowledge or coverage or perspective on the current MLB bargaining situation? Yeah, it really has. And it's somewhat of a weird situation to be covering this labor dispute while also having been so, I mean, really the hour union kind of took over my life there for a while, just because it is a lot of work to get that first contract done. But I learned so much about, I mean, it sounds silly, but just about people, about all my coworkers, that you have so many conversations about what are people interested in?

What do people want? What's the best way to make this happen? How can you, what is the best way just to listen to people to make sure that everyone is feeling heard like that is a very hard process that I learned a lot from and then just how much of a slog bargaining can be like what it's like to sit at a table where you're with the people who you know with management the people who are you know controlling your work product and going back and forth over both over things that feel very small, but that you end up hashing out hours and hours and hours is seeing how a contract gets made. You know, obviously, MLB is in a different situation now and that you always kind of work off your last collective bargaining agreement. And because this is our first starting from

scratch is very different. And you have to just spend a long time laying the groundwork for all sorts of things. But just seeing how a contract gets made. And also, I mean, I think something that I had heard in covering MLB's labor dispute and, you know, had heard with ours as well, but didn't really understand until I was in it was how much movement can get done very, very quickly when time pressure is on. movement can get done very, very quickly when time pressure is on in that, you know, we spent months of either barely talking or, you know, having very little movement on stuff. And then finally, when we had kind of a clock at the end of the huge leaps and bounds getting covered, you know, in a matter of hours. And so it was cool to realize like, oh, like that's,

that's not just something people say or something that people use to kind of kick the can down the road like you really can watch like you know 50 pages of an agreement get agreed to in you know 24 hours but yeah it's interesting because there's a lot that make sports unions very particular and you know obviously you don't want to draw too many parallels but just being involved in in this process and seeing how any contract gets put together has been extremely informative. And yeah, it was just not to be sappy about it, but like a really cool, really enriching thing to be a part of. And I think my favorite thing I've done in my career so far. I also meant to mention that although the game on the field was largely the same in the Players League, you noted that there were a couple of differences the quality of play was probably higher because

they had more of the former major league players but also they added a second umpire which seems smart and they banned making catches with one's hat as well as one's glove so if we have any quibble with the players league it's that if not for the Players League, who knows? We could still see some players making home run robberies with their caps, which would be fun. This is a great question. And not to—Mag is laughing because I have heard about the next rabbit hole, as it were. I am now obsessed with making catches and hats. Ben, do you know what the current penalty is for trying to make a catch with your hat? Isn't it like three bases or something? It's three bases,

which seems extreme to me. And I, not to open up another rabbit hole, but I will just quickly leave you with, as far as I can tell, this rule has been in place for a very long time, but they tweaked it a little in 1922. And until 1922, the wording was, if a fielder is foolish enough to try to make a clownish catch of a batted ball, each runner gets three bases. So that was a sub note to catching it with your hat. That like, if you're foolish enough to make any clownish catch, you also get hit with three bases.

Is it looking clownish penalty enough? Why do we need to have an additional penalty i love how judgy i love how judgy the rule book is it is so judgy it is the best it's so mean foolish and like just say if you make a clownish catch but no if you are foolish enough to try to make a clownish catch i love love it. I'm so intrigued. Yeah, I feel like that came up on some early email episode of Effectively Wild, and we were appalled by the penalty at that time, too. It does seem too harsh, and I think it would be fun. Maybe it'd be too easy. Is that the problem? Would it be too easy to make catches if you had, I mean, think of how much fun that would be,

choosing whether to use your mitt or your hat and the different angles that you could get a hat as opposed to a glove. I guess it would be bad for batting averages and BABF and all of that, which we probably don't need to suppress offense even further. But still, seems like overkill. Three bases for looking clownish. Come on. Yeah, I've been really trying to think about it. I think I'm going to ask an umpire supervisor like Tom like the tom leopard who used to be the editor of the rule book and now is just an umpire supervisor i was gonna call him because i just want to know why like obviously it mechanically yes like your

hat's gonna get blown out of your hand if you're trying to catch like a liner but like why just let them use their best judgment if it's a ball that can be caught in your hat, I think you should be able to catch it in your hat. Like there's a reason little kids try to do this because it's fun. Yeah. And I just want to know why. Like why was, why were they so harsh about it? I really want to know. So if anyone has ideas about why it's so bad, why it's three bases bad,

which as far as I can tell, it is the only penalty that is specifically three bases. Like there are some that are two bases. And if the runner can advance further, they can. But I control left three bases and I believe it's the only one. Yeah, there's some strange bias against caps and other headwear because there's also that rule for catchers where they're not allowed to scoop up a ball with their mask which came up last year with kurt casali i think and he was just scooping a ball in the dirt and there's a penalty associated with that too like the detached equipment rule so all sorts of rules in there that one's i guess not about looking clownish or foolish was this like

an early like you're showing up the game or something it's like the bat flip of its day was using your your hat to make a catch or something i don't know but i look forward to your deep dive and i guess if that goes back to the 19th century too that's far enough back that we could have you back on to discuss that all right i look forward to it i'm sure i'll have lots to say. Okay. Well, in the meantime, we will link to the Players League piece and the Hall of Fame tracker piece and all the other pieces that Emma writes for Sports Illustrated. And you can find her on Twitter at Emma Batchelary, which I always try to remember is two C's and two L's and also two M's and I guess also two I's, although non-consecutive, and three E's. There's just a lot of repetition of letters in the word. So if you're having trouble spelling it, just double up on a letter or two

and you will probably find it. Thank you, Emma. Thank you. All right, we'll take a quick break now, and then we will fast forward a little more than 80 years to 1972 and the first work stoppage and the first strike, which we will discuss, among other subjects, with Dane Perry of CBS Sports. My heart is strung up on a timeline There is no end and no design

So I want to start this segment by reading Evan Drellick's lead to his latest update or non-update on the state of the MLB CBA talks. He published this on Thursday afternoon and he wrote, Everything we've seen thus far suggests MLB owners want talks. He published this on Thursday afternoon and he wrote, everything we've seen thus far suggests MLB owners want to test the players, that they intend to wait out the players as long as possible to see if they'll crack under the threat of losing paychecks. This lockout strategy at the commissioner's office appears designed around one goal, minimizing how much owners have to give up. If you as an owner wait until the last minute, players might grow impatient

and you can surrender less than you would otherwise. Or if the players totally crumble, maybe you part with close to nothing. And if the players stand tall, well, at least you didn't give up any more than you had to any sooner than you had to. What ownership's approach means for players is that if they really want change after all these years of complaints about the status quo, the players are serious about achieving their goals. They will have to force owners to make it. Sounds a lot like, well, a lot of years in baseball history probably, but certainly sounds a lot like 1972, which Dane Perry recently retraced in exhaustive detail at CBS Sports in a piece called How Baseball Changed Forever in 1972, a timeline of MLB's most

memorable events 50 years later. Dane, other than lockout-driven desperation, which is a perfectly fine reason to write something, what inspired you to do a deep dive on 72? As you mentioned, that's the motivator, I think. You and Meg can both understand that we're all scrambling for content these days. And that was definitely the prime mover here. But to date myself, that's the year I was born. So there's some fascination that way.

And beyond that, it's just a general interest in the players of that era and just some of the characters that they became and how sort of like culturally everyone was kind of feeling each other out. Like, you know, what, what, what are these players that we're not familiar with going to be like? And what are these, what is this other group of players going to be like that we're not familiar with? It was, it was just kind of like walking into a party where you don't know anyone. It seemed like all these sort of cultures finally being belatedly mashed together and having to sort things out.

And that's fascinating. And of course, the labor side of it, the emergence of the Players Union and their first really big standoff with the owners. And of course, there's also a lot of tragedy spicing that year as well. And it's just, you know, a lot of everything happened. Yeah. A lot was going on with mustaches that year, which maybe we will discuss a little later. But labor-wise, yeah, it seems like a year when everything was kind of coming to a head.

And compared to what we were just talking about, the late 19th century, a lot has changed. A lot has also not changed since that point. The reserve clause is still in place, but it is starting to crack here. So the Players Association under Marvin Miller has really only been around officially for a few years at this point. But you have all of these things developing. You have Kurt Flood. His case, which has been going on for a while, is going to be heard by the Supreme Court. The appeal unsuccessfully. Ultimately, you have Ted Simmons, who is becoming one of the first to test the reserve clause and play without a contract and the automatic renewal. And then later in the year, you have the Andy Messersmith trade that sent him to the Dodgers and kind of laid the groundwork for him to be a trailblazer with Dave McNally and really test the reserve clause. But you also have the first official work stoppage and the first strike. And it is striking, no pun intended, to think about some of the things that led to that,

because compared to what the players are wrestling with today, it seems so simple and so small scale what actually drove them to that first strike, And yet the solidarity was there and then led to additional gains. So can you MLBPA was not a functioning union until Miller took over in the late 1960s. And he negotiated the first CBA with the owners. And as CBAs go, that was a relatively uneventful one. But things in 1972 got a little more complicated, and there was a player strike. And it was over, a pension fund that the owners had agreed to fund. And isn't it quaint thinking about the days of private industry pensions? That was the closer I get to retirement, the more I pine for the age I never lived in. But yeah, and this will ring of the familiar anyone who follows owners these days and that the pension in those days was tied to the national television contract.

And they got a new one and the owners just refused to tell them what it was worth. Like they would not tell them how much the new contract was worth. And this, of course, now hiding revenues is old hat to the owners and it's still still a thing. And it's, I guess, I didn't realize it was a thing back then. I just, for whatever reason, naivete or what have you, I just thought maybe there was just more natural transparency back then. But no, there was not. And they just refused to say what it was worth. And this led to a pension dispute. And Miller, in sort of a compromise, I guess, said, hey, well, let's tie it to inflation. And then it was, of course, oh, absolutely not.

And then it went from there. It was a very brief strike. And the owner's bargaining rep, John Geharan, I think is how you pronounce his name. But he said flatly, we thought this was the time to take him on because we didn't think much of him. We didn't think they were a particularly strong union, and that's an understandable viewpoint considering how young they were, considering how difficult it would be to conj the union was not a strong entity as it is now. And that's, I think, one of the miracles of Miller that he was able to get this sort of rabble-rousing union environment going despite some, you know, cultural inclinations that worked against it. And that remains impressive to me to this day. And Geharan was wrong and the union ended up winning that strike.

Yeah. I'm curious, you know, it's hard with a project like this to, you obviously can't include everything particularly in a year that is as eventful as this one was. Was there anything around sort of his successful agitation with the players and the way that he was able to sort of convince them of the necessity of not only the strike, but the solidarity to hold firm that you left out or would like to have included? Because I think that this isn't, you know, I always assume that people know this era of baseball well. And then I read Twitter in response to stories like Evan's, and I realized that we do

not understand the history of labor in baseball. So what from this time strikes you in terms of how he was able to best persuade them? Because I think that, you know, as Ben said in the lead-in, there is an assumption on the owner's part still that at some point they will crack. Yeah. So it's, you know, inspiring, I guess, to look back at a time when the union was much less strong than it is now, and they were able to sort of maintain that solidarity, even if it was only for a brief strike? Yeah, that's a good question. I'm not going to pretend to be sort of biographical authoritative

expert on Marvin Miller's life, but I think one of the things he did was he just had a level of expertise coming from the steelworkers union and being a trained economist. He was actually able to speak to the players and teach them, which prior union leaders were not able to because they were essentially valets to ownership. And I think he educated in very plain spoken terms the players about what was at stake, what they had the potential to win and why all of this was terribly unfair. And that, you know, the grandfatherly owner was not your friend. And in fact, he was using sort of loyalty that you presented to him against you. And I think this was, uh, this was sort of that early brilliance of Marvin Miller. I would have loved to have gone into that, but I was already approaching 10,000 words and risking the contempt of my editors. And so,

yeah, that's probably something to delve into more like in the late 60s examination. But, you know, he just was able to speak to them in a way that kind of peeled back the scales in their eyes and showed them what was going on. And he was able to do it in plain spoken terms, layman's terms that they could understand, and it went from there. Very bold of you to put the 43-minute read in the byline for this piece. That's auto, that auto-populates, and I'm like, okay, it's not 43 minutes. It did not take that long. Right, yeah, that's, yeah, so, yeah.

Especially when we're firing off, like, little newsers that are like, one-minute read, and this pops up. And I'm like, okay, you're just turning people off now. he described it it sounded like Miller was almost surprised by the players resolve when it came to this particular issue that he knew that there was going to have to be some sort of showdown and potentially a work stoppage but that he wasn't even necessarily picking this particular fight as the one to make the make or break issue but that as he was touring the spring training camps and everything all the teams were voting to authorize a strike, and they were really riled up about this. So he did a good job of, I guess, instilling in them the awareness of the power they had. And maybe just because it was such a concrete issue and it was such a simple issue, I mean, that's the thing. It's just this pension plan, and they weren't asking for anything wildly exorbitant or unreasonable.

It's like, let's just adjust it for inflation, basically. And the owners just weren't accustomed to having any sort of terms dictated to them, right? So just the idea that they would have to negotiate seemed like such an affront that they were like, we're not even going to talk about this. It's what we say goes and we just decree things and then you say yes sir and because that wasn't happening they drew a line and then the players drew a line and then ultimately it ended up with the situation where you lose 86 regular season games and also from what steve described like even after they agreed to come back it was like the owners were

trying to basically get the players to make up those games for free. And Marvin Miller was like, nope, that's not happening. So they didn't do that. But really, it was just like a complete unwillingness to engage, which, you know, you'd think 50 years later, and with many rounds of bargaining having been completed and with the Players Association having established its strength long ago, that the owners would at least realize, okay, we might have to budge from our positions here at some point. But I guess after getting their way a lot lately, they have decided to test things again. I try to be – when I'm thinking about different viewpoints on different things, I try to be sympathetic and I try to think about, well, this is how their thought process took them here and this is why it's understandable given their background, blah, blah, blah, blah. And with the owners back then, I sort of get it. I mean, they were just coming toward the back end of the reserve clause.

The entitlement mentality in the owners had been so hardwired over the years. These were their boys, quote unquote, and they're good boys and they go out there and they play hard for me and all that kind of stuff. And I would liken it to, what if my son came up to me and said, I am going to, I would like $15 a week in allowance instead of what you are presently giving me and my duties will remain the same. Please respond. And I would be like, oh, how dare you? And that's probably a similar mentality. My sympathies completely lie with the players, but at least in that generation of owners coming out of how they've been cosseted and entitled over the years, I sort of get it. Now, no, I do not get it. Right. And they were also trying to hold the

line because as you detailed here, the cracks were forming in the foundation of the reserve clause, right? And the owners were willing to do, I won't say whatever it took because they weren't actually willing to do all that much, but they were at least willing to say, give Ted Simmons a raise so that he would not test the legality of the reserve clause. But they just knew that that whole system was based on that and of the reserve clause. But they just knew that that whole system was based on that, and Miller knew that too. And he knew that that fight was brewing, and they weren't quite ready for it yet. But that whole thing is happening in the backdrop with Kurt Flood, with Simmons, later with Messer Smith and McNally. So there's a sense in 72 that

maybe you're kind of on the precipice of a real sea change as opposed to just this isolated war over the pension plan. Yeah, and it's just all the balls that Marvin Miller had in the air at that time. I mean, not only is this determinative Curt Flood case coming to a head, but he's also, I would imagine, day-to-day monitoring the Ted Simmons situation, probably in close contact with him. And, you know, I left this out and probably should not have, but I read at one point in my research that Miller was encouraging Simmons, look, if you get that kind of offer, you need to sign it. The time for the fight will come. You need to look out for yourself on a certain level. And that's impressive to me. And Simmons did just that. But the groundwork had been laid, thanks in part to Kurt Flood being able to secure that sort of... His fight led to

the establishment of arbitration, which in turn led to the establishment of free agency. So it's sort of a daisy chain of events and you remove one of them and everything changes. Yeah. Well, if you'd included that, it might've been a 44 minute read. I can't ask that much of people. No, I've got 43 minutes for you, but anything more. Yeah. I don't know if you dug into the coverage at the time, because again, you were pulling from a number of sources and going through the whole year, not just focusing on the strike. But it is interesting because Steve did a little deep dive into some columns that were written at the time and people

in the sporting news, people in the Times. And compared to the columns that people critique now for being maybe too both sidesy or anti-player or whatever, go back and read what people were writing in 1972 because it is wild. It is, you know, how dare you entitled, you know, jumped up. Oh, you've got the best plan in the world. And, you know, you're making a mockery of the game and you're spoiled. And just like the most, I mean, one-sided sort of takes. Any journey through the Sporting News archives is eye-opening. Oh, yeah.

Very eye-opening. Any spink-related byline. It was one of the later spinks by that point, but carried on the fine family tradition. And I was thinking of this because The Athletic, I think Steven Nesbitt just did an MLB fan survey and it's maybe not representative of the cross-section of all fans. It is athletic subscribers, 11,000-something voted on all of these questions, and some of them were lockout-related. And at least among the respondents there, the sentiment seemed to be heavily in favor of the players. One of the questions was, who are you most upset with over MLB's lockout

and ongoing labor strike? 61.2% said owners, 33.5% said both equally, 5.3% said players. So that's surprising to me. It is, yeah. Among people who picked a side, it was like 92% said they were more upset with the owners than the players. Now, will that continue? You know, if we lose games, I don't know. Is it because it's a lockout and not a strike at this point? I don't know. Or is it just because these are the more extremely online, you know, athletic subscribers who are voting on a poll and maybe the internet sentiment is not really reflective of a casual fan or more mainstream fan's opinion. But it does seem that even if a lot about the situation is the same, at least

some of the sentiment seems to have shifted maybe toward the players. And of course, the conditions have changed and the way the owners are approaching things have changed in some ways. And it is an owner-imposed work stoppage at this point. So all of that could be influencing it. But the caliber of coverage, maybe it's not as good as it should be or as even-handed as it should be, but it certainly has shifted since 50 years ago, I would say. Yes. I'm curious on this idea of what coverage looked like at the time, if you had a sense of what fan sentiment was around the games that were lost,

because famously there were a number of games lost in this year in a way that ended up being pretty meaningful to the postseason picture, which you detail here. And was sort of similarly, was there a sense on the fans part that, I can't believe we lost, what was it, 86 games because these greedy players were doing stuff they shouldn't? Or was it more even-handed? I'm assigning virtue to 1972 in a way that's

probably unwarranted. I wish I had an answer to that. In the day-to-day news articles that I read, they were primarily the New York Times. There was not much of that in there, not much temperature taking. Based on my later experiences in 1994, for instance, when I was – this was pre-professional career and I was just a fan in those days. I have to imagine it was pro-owner, particularly 1972 back then. Just because I think it comes down to, for a lot of fans, who started this. I think probably driving some of the opinion right now, it's an owner lockout. If it's a player strike, well, they're the ones who walked off the job, that sort of thing. I have to think that's the main driver, and I certainly think that had to be the case in 1972. kind of coverage that would allow them to look beyond that sort of surface level take and sort of take them by the hand and show them, well, this is what is really going on. Like you mentioned, Ben, with the Sporting News Archives and that sort of thing, I imagine their consumption was probably limited to those kind of opinion pieces, even though

I can't speak to that directly. But yeah, I have to imagine it was pro owner. That's something that comes up now when you talk about the specter of losing part of the season. You know, Ken Rosenthal wrote a column for The Athletic this week where he pointed out that, at least for now, this certainly seems to be more on the owners than the players, that the owners are not engaging. And now that he is free from his MLB Network job, I guess, you know, he was free to go off on Rob Manfred a little without getting any memos from anyone.

But he also did get some criticism from people online because he sort of made starting the season on time the ultimate good, you know. So he wasn't necessarily saying that the blame is the same on both sides, but he was saying, hey, whatever you do, you got to figure this out because we can't lose games. And as people pointed out, well, if you take that option off the table, then that almost inherently is kind of a pro-owner position because that could be one of the biggest assets the players have in their corner is the ability to deprive the owners of that revenue, right? And so no one's rooting for games to be lost, of course, but if you're saying that the ultimate goal is not to lose games as opposed to getting some kind of fair and equitable contract, then maybe you are

leaning toward one side or the other, even if you're not necessarily intending to. But I wonder how that sentiment stood in 72, because back then there was no precedent right there had been no previous work stoppages not because the conditions were better just because the players didn't have the power to take some kind of collective action but because it had never happened i wonder if the specter of it happening was even more so considered a catastrophic scenario that had to be avoided at all costs, or whether now, because it has happened and we have seen the costs that can come from that, whether it's in baseball or in other sports, we know, okay, this is a thing to be avoided, which I guess was always obvious that you'd rather not have a work

stoppage, all else being equal. But just because it was the first, it must have been seen sort of as the sky is falling even more than usual, I'd imagine. Part of me wonders if back in the early 70s, considering how new the MLBPA was, if people's reaction was, wait a minute, what are baseball players doing with the union? They're not steel workers. They're not miners. They're not blue collar tradesmen. What are they doing with the union? I would imagine the strike was probably the first a lot of people learned that they had an organized labor presence. And I don't know if labor sympathies bled over like that or if it's one of those things where you view this as sort of a hobby job where they shouldn't be organized

and that they're getting paid to play a game, that old trope. So yeah, I would imagine there's some surprise about there being a union at all. Yeah. I know people said at the time like, hey, the average MLB career is four years or something. In what other line of work can you even expect a pension payment after four years, right? Right, right. That was a common thing people said. They compared it to other fields of work that aren't necessarily comparable and suggested that if this industry or this group of workers didn't have that, then why should MLB players have it? And it doesn't really make sense

for a union that represents a certain group of workers to say, well, this other group doesn't have that, so we shouldn't try to get it or something in a different industry. But I think, you know, because baseball is so different and the idea of baseball organization was so new at that point, people were kind of comparing to maybe their own pension plans and saying, well, I don't have this, so why should these greedy baseball players get it? That's my reaction right now. Yeah, I was going to, well, maybe, you, maybe that's part of why the sentiment has shifted. We don't have the expectation of pension plans anymore.

Yeah, we've all been beaten down by the system. So it's like, well, go get theirs, man. Good for you. Wish I could do it. Exactly. Woven throughout this is the actual play on the field once the players actually did return to play in 72. How did you pick what you included

here? I mean, obviously the things you highlighted are some of them pretty monumental in their own right, but you know, it wasn't like these were the only important games. How did, how did you pick and choose, Dana? Or were you just really worried about that 43 minute mark? Yeah, I went back and forth on a lot of it. And like my default position was, you know, I was going through like daily stories and going through, you know, the baseball reference logs and that sort of thing, and found some kind of rudimentary timelines, which highlighted some things. And my process was essentially to start by talking myself out of this needs to be an entry. It's like, oh, we don't, I don't really need to include that. You know, why, you know, this level of granular

detail, nobody's going to want that. Let's just skip all this stuff. We don't need to do this no hitter. We don't need to do this particular benchmark. But then I would stew over and say, yeah, I should probably include that. And then it just sort of came self-perpetuating like, well, if I put that in, I certainly need to put this in and that kind of thing. So, but more than that, I just wanted to give a, you know, the, I'm preaching to the choir here, I'm sure, but the beauty of baseball is just its everydayness and how every day brings something else. And it's just sort of this good friend throughout the spring and summer and fall that is there every day for you.

And I just wanted to kind of convey that this season, despite all the sturm and drang of it, is like that. It's like the seasons we know, but these little miracles are happening for good and bad every other day or so. And so that kind of motivated the descent into minutiae, if we'll call it that. Yeah, I mentioned mustaches earlier, and there are multiple mustache-related entries here. And we were just talking to Emma about a very pro-mustache era. Yes.

John Montgomery Ward sported a mustache, but we've moved forward 80 years here. Maybe the labor issues are sort of the same, but the facial hair has changed. And this was an era when players were just trying to normalize mustaches again. And so in April, the Cardinals trade Jerry Royce shortly after trading Steve Carlton, not moves that they covered themselves in glory with.

And seemingly one of the reasons for that was that Cardinals owner Gussie Bush was not happy with the mustache that he had grown. And so he said, let's trade him. And that didn't work out well for the Cardinals. On the same day, apparently the rescheduled delayed opening day, Reggie Jackson takes the field for the A's wearing a mustache and supposedly was the first player to have worn one on the field since Wally Shang in 1914. So it had been quite a while since the last Major League mustache and A's owner Charlie Finley is upset. He tells him he has to shave. Jackson doesn't. So Finley comes up with this scheme where he tries to talk a couple other A's into growing mustaches, hoping that it won't be

cool anymore once everyone's doing it, and then Reggie won't want one anymore. But then he pivots to mustaches fully, and he realizes that there's a marketing opportunity here if everyone has a mustache. So he really did a 180 on mustaches, and suddenly they were everywhere, at least on the Ace. Charlie Finley was, in some senses, awful. He was virulently anti-player and almost had a plantation owner mentality with his players and that kind of thing. and that kind of thing. But he was so insane that he just – his behavior as owner just led to these incredible moments all throughout the A's dynasty. And this was one of them.

And he and Reggie Jackson just – I mean, I wrote a biography of Reggie Jackson more than a decade ago. And my favorite part of researching that was just the way he and Finley would go back and forth at each other. I mean, there was one part where Finley would call him in the middle of the night, like at three in the morning, thinking that they could get him to, while half asleep, agree to this contract they had offered

and that kind of thing. Just things like that. And this mustache thing preceded that. And it was, I mean, just the little manipulation of, okay, if he won't shave it off, I'm going to tell these guys to do it. That'll show him. And just the beautiful pettiness of it was something else. And, you know, based on kind of what I'd researched at some point, Reggie was kind of off-put when other people started wearing it. And, you know, credence to Finley, he kind of figured them out there.

But yeah, I mean, they now, that dynasty is now lovingly known as the mustache gang, and that's the origin story. You note that he offered bonuses to all the A's to grow some sort of facial hair, and there were only two holdouts. Larry Brown and Mike Hegan refused to have facial hair even with the bonus i wonder if they refused or if they were simply unable to grow a convincing stash yeah yeah you know what that's a fair question collected in refusal there's my 43 minute follow-up piece so there you go well and facial hair wasn't the only uh fashion choice being made here right you know that this

was the sort of premiere of the the double knit synthetic uniforms and the beltless unis that we tend to associate with this era i wonder if it would have been hotter to play baseball and wool or a double knit synthetic at least a double knit synthetic of the 1970s it seems like that would be yeah not super breathable right no i would not think so yeah i guess i'd have to vote the non-wool maybe by a slim margin. But yeah, none of that sounds pleasant. started internist here. And you also had Bernice Guerra, who became the first female umpire in affiliated ball and unfortunately seems to have lasted only a single game before resigning just because it was so unpleasant because of fans and other umpires and participants in that game and their treatment of her. So she was a trailblazer in that respect, still waiting for the first major league

umpire who is a woman. But 50 years ago, at least a barrier was broken there briefly in Affiliated Ball. So that's something worth remembering. And another first that is not really something that I really thought of is, oh, this must have happened for the first time somewhere. It just seems like something that always was. But of course, closers were not always a thing and closer entrance songs were not always a thing. And so you explained here that Sparky Lyle, the new Yankees relief ace, he became the first closer to have an entrance song

against his will and over his objections. He did not want one and the Yankees made him have one and they played pomp and circumstance when he came in and he objected for years until they finally stopped playing it but he made a good case here I thought he said I asked the team management two years ago not to play the music they did it all next year and started again this year I just thought it was stupid and I finally got them to cut it out. What if I got the hell hit out of me? What would they play? The old rugged cross, which is a good point. You do look a little silly if you have your big song and then you get knocked around. Yeah. I, I, you know, I can remember decline phase Joe Nathan coming out to, you know, some, some, you know, foot stomping

rock music. And then, you know, it's, yeah, it's, it's, it's, yeah, it's kind of a humorous outcome, but I can see how the closers don't like it too much. Yeah, the closer entrance song, that's kind of gone by the wayside these days. I couldn't name all that many closer entrance songs. Now, I guess because the closer role has lost some of its luster, right? And you have teams that are using 10 different guys

to get saves based on matchups right so they're yeah we're just dedicated closers where when they come in it's a whole big production and saves in general have kind of been devalued de-emphasized so there aren't as many that i can say maybe we can do a position player pitching music now or something like that since that's a growing trend. Which position player who pitches will be brave enough to come in to answer Sandman? That would be outstanding content if someone did that. Who will be the first? I think one of the other things that's striking, and I mentioned this before we started recording, is you have this very modest entry for July 12th.

we started recording is, you know, you have this very modest entry for July 12th. Arthur Rivera, a pilot based in Puerto Rico and president of the American Air Leasing Company, purchases a Douglas DC-7 aircraft in Miami. And folks who are familiar with baseball history will go, why is a plane relevant in 1972? So you do a very good job, like slow rolling a horror film in this. Because obviously this year sadly culminated with the death of Roberto Clemente. What a year. I don't know. The history is very strange. Jackie Robinson's death also. The fact that it's on December 31st is just really

too contrived seeming. You know what I mean? And yet it happened. I'm sure all of your listeners are familiar with the story, but he was sending relief supplies to Nicaragua following a massive earthquake, and he was running out of planes. He had more supplies than he had cargo space on his plane, so he procured a fourth one. I believe it was a fourth one. And he interfaced with this pilot

whose name is mentioned in the piece, and a plane of, you know, probably not airworthy, and a pilot who was probably not equipped to do that, and a co-pilot who wasn't even certified to do it, and they had no on-flight engineer, which regulations required them to have. And Clemente, rather than just sending the supplies on his way, had received word that some government officials in Nicaragua were interfering with the supplies that had already arrived, and were not allowing them to get to the people who needed them worse. And Clemente said, you know, I'm going and making sure this is going the way it's supposed to go. And a mile and a half into the flight, the plane turns back and goes down in the Atlantic and everyone on board is killed, including Clemente. And it's a hero's death, you know,. There are not many of those. We tend to ascribe military

deaths as heroic, but always the other side would not agree with that assessment. This is one of those deaths that I think everyone agrees is just a heroic demise. As I was researching this, it still got to me, something that happened when I was barely even born. And it's just – he was such a towering figure and such an important figure and such a great player that it's still jarring to go back and read those events and think about it. And, you know, I'm going through there and I'm taking all the details down. And it's like when we relive anything like that, there's a small part of you thinking, maybe it won't go this way this time, which is absurd. But it's kind of the way the mind works, and it happened with this.

Yeah, and less tragically, the end to that season ended in a way that I think if that were to happen today, I can't imagine what the reaction would be because of those 86 games that we mentioned that were not made up it actually had some implications for the al east race where the tigers finished 86 and 70 the red sox finished 85 and 70 they're even in the last column and that's it season over tigers win because they're half a game ahead so i'm confident that even if there is a work stoppage that caused us some of the season this year, that that will not happen. Hopefully that

we won't have either that or a strange 1981 sort of scenario where teams with the best records end up not making the playoffs because they don't win one of the split seasons or something. Hopefully we would come up with a better way to determine the winners of even a shortened season now. The older I get, I think the more nihilistic I become. And part of me would enjoy that kind of nonsense, just having a team win a division by a half game. And just Twitter serves few purposes, but I think it would be such good entertainment in that kind of situation. Just everyone yelling at each other about, you know, we won. We played the number of games and we're the division champions. No, you're not. You know, all that

sort of thing. I think it would be wonderful entertainment and I personally support the idea of having say the Yankees play 162 games and the Rays or Blue Jays or Red Sox or whoever playing 161 and ending in madness. It would be the circumstances under which the Mariners finally make it back to the postseason.

I think we all know that they would be the one and a half game behind. There you go. All right. Well, just to bring things full circle here at the end, the other thing that happened on December 31st is that the CBA expired, and that eventually led to another work stoppage, in this case, the first lockout in 1973, which I guess was over salary arbitration, partly at least. So I don't know if you looked into that too much because it didn't actually fall within the purview of the 72 exercise here, but the seeds of that, again, sprouted at the very end of that year.

Yeah, I would love to act like I knew exactly what it was over, but as you anticipated, once we got past December 31st, I logged off. If the lockout goes on long enough, you might have to do the 73 sequel. But yeah, I think the owners locked the players out in spring training. And then they agreed on a three-year CBA that defined the salary arbitration process with that neutral arbitrator that decided between the player's offer and the owner's offer, which is something that the players are still fighting to protect now because the offers that the owners are making to have some sort of set scale or base

it on stats or something would take away the ability to put things before a third neutral party so that is still part of things and that comes from then and that time at least the spring training games resumed and no regular season games were lost so we can hope for a happy ending along those lines again but glad that you got to do this even if it came during difficult circumstances it was a lot of fun and also sometimes sad to relive this year definitely an eventful one and the one that gave us dane perry so that's something at least is it opinions will vary on that but no well you can read dane Is it? Opinions will vary on that Well you can Read Dane at CBS Sports

If you have 43 minutes And you can also find him On Twitter at Dane Perry Where you can wish him a happy Golden anniversary at some point this year So thank you Dane Megan, Ben, thank you so much for having me I had a good time

Alright that will do it for today Thanks for listening and hope you've enjoyed this primer point this year. So thank you, Dane. Megan, Ben, thank you so much for having me. I had a good time. All right. That will do it for today. Thanks for listening and hope you've enjoyed this primer on previous labor disputes. You can pick almost any point in baseball history and find that the parties had some of the same disagreements that they have today, though they didn't always handle them the same way. But when we had Evan Drellick on last year, we talked about how the few previous CBAs laid the groundwork for this current CBA dispute, but that was only going back a decade or two. Clearly you can go back more than a century and find some of the same pressures at play. Also, if you want to hear more of the discussion about whether the Hall of Fame tracker has been good or bad for Hall of Fame discourse, check out this week's episode of Fangraphs Audio,

where Jay Jaffe talks to and perhaps disagrees with Buster Olney about that very same subject. In the meantime, you can support Effectively Wild on Patreon by going to patreon.com slash effectivelywild. The following five listeners have already signed up and pledged some monthly or yearly amount to help keep the podcast going and help us stay ad-free while getting themselves access to perks like monthly bonus episodes and an Effectively Wild patron-only Discord group. Ian Weedlin, Duncan Regan, Jake Lampert, Brennan Menke, and Kevin

Brotzman, thanks very much to all of you. You can also join our Facebook group at facebook.com slash group slash Effectively Wild. You can rate, review, and subscribe to Effectively Wild on iTunes and Spotify and other podcast platforms. Keep your questions and comments for me and Meg coming via email at podcast.fangraphs.com or via the Patreon messaging system if you are a supporter. You can follow Effectively Wild on Twitter at EWpod. And you can browse the Effectively Wild subreddit at r slash effectively wild. Because of some travel plans, we are doubling up on recording on Thursday, and so I will have another episode up for you very soon. After this one posts, we will be back to talk to you then. I've tried Z-Fake mustache

You're a tough one to have cracked But my biggest fear is the song I hear When a joke of mine goes wrong