The Reserve Clause

[TonyK]

I'm reading Al Spalding's America's National Game and have reached the chapter about the 1889 National Agreement and The Brotherhood's answer in 1890. It seems to me that one major issue in MLB has always been the reserve clause starting with the first pitch thrown in 1871.

In 1879, NL teams could reserve only 5 players per team (to help the weaker teams according to Spalding). Am I right to assume they held onto their best pitcher and their four best position players? The majority of ML players were free to come and go as they pleased including revolving from the NL to the AA after 1882, and vice versa.

In the National Agreement of 1889, both the NL and the AA approved reserving 14 players per club, or pretty much their entire teams. Now the majority of ML players were tied to their teams like it or not. This was the spark that caused the player's revolt.

Spalding notes that even John Ward agreed with the reserve rule being a necessary evil. What is interesting to me is Ward speculates what might happen if rookies were only reserved for the first 4 or 5 years of their careers. Isn't this similar to what was finally done some 85 years later around 1975 when free agency was adopted? If it is, then why did it take so long to follow Ward's advice?

In reaction to the National Agreement the players union, The Brotherhood, did the only thing possible to buck the system by forming their own major league, The 1890 Players League. Spalding claimed that the players refused to meet with the owners. Ward claimed that the owners refused to meet with the players. This went on for nearly two years.

The lesson that the Players League gave to the players was that they could not both run and play in their own league. Had the players won free agency back in 1890 would there ever have been an AL, and how much money would Cy Young and Honus Wagner been paid in their peak years? Baseball would surely have had a different history.

[rrhersh]

This is be a multi-part response. The first thing, though, is to realize that Spalding was not a disinterested observer. Everything he writes needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

The reserve clause was not an issue in 1871 because it was as yet undreampt of. The only attempt at restricting player movement initially was a rule that a player could not sign with a new team for the following season until the current season was over, traditionally the end of October. This rule was often ignored.

The earliest incarnation of the reserve clause was in 1879, as an informal gentlemen's agreement between National League club owners. The initial limit of five players was rapidly expanded to include pretty much the entire roster (about eleven or twelve men in those days). The number five gets bandied about a lot, but it was a brief transitional stage. The majority of players were certainly not free to come and go as they pleased.

As for moving between the NL and AA, this was only possible when the two organizations were at war. When we talk about a baseball war or an outlaw league, respecting the reserve lists is what we are really talking about. (That and territorial rights, but reserve lists is the more immediately pressing issue.) The NL and AA were at war in 1882, but the first National Agreement (aka the Tripartite Agreement, since it also included the minor Northwest League) made peace. NL/AA relations were hardly unblemished after that, but for the most part a player was not free to jump leagues. That is the background to the Players League.

I don't know what the lesson of the Players League is. I do know that I wouldn't ask Al Spalding what this lesson is. The PL collapsed because the PL money men backed down. Perhaps the lesson is that the players should have had firmer financial backing before going to war.

Richard Hershberger

[TonyK]

This is be a multi-part response. The first thing, though, is to realize that Spalding was not a disinterested observer. Everything he writes needs to be taken with a grain of salt.

The reserve clause was not an issue in 1871 because it was as yet undreampt of. The only attempt at restricting player movement initially was a rule that a player could not sign with a new team for the following season until the current season was over, traditionally the end of October. This rule was often ignored.

The earliest incarnation of the reserve clause was in 1879, as an informal gentlemen's agreement between National League club owners. The initial limit of five players was rapidly expanded to include pretty much the entire roster (about eleven or twelve men in those days). The number five gets bandied about a lot, but it was a brief transitional stage. The majority of players were certainly not free to come and go as they pleased.

As for moving between the NL and AA, this was only possible when the two organizations were at war. When we talk about a baseball war or an outlaw league, respecting the reserve lists is what we are really talking about. (That and territorial rights, but reserve lists is the more immediately pressing issue.) The NL and AA were at war in 1882, but the first National Agreement (aka the Tripartite Agreement, since it also included the minor Northwest League) made peace. NL/AA relations were hardly unblemished after that, but for the most part a player was not free to jump leagues. That is the background to the Players League.

I don't know what the lesson of the Players League is. I do know that I wouldn't ask Al Spalding what this lesson is. The PL collapsed because the PL money men backed down. Perhaps the lesson is that the players should have had firmer financial backing before going to war.

Richard Hershberger

I thought the 1871 NA had a 30 day rule where a player had to wait 30 days before playing for a new NA team? Teams ignored the rule anyway.

My "What If" question is what if the players in 1890 understood that John Ward was no match by himself against the NL and hired the best lawyers to fight the owners? Perhaps they would have been advised not to play ball until a settlement was reached.

Am I right in thinking that the lesson of the Players League kept ML players in check until the 1970's?

[rrhersh]

I thought the 1871 NA had a 30 day rule where a player had to wait 30 days before playing for a new NA team? Teams ignored the rule anyway.

Sixty days, actually. The professional NA borrowed the idea from the amateur NA, but where the amateur rule had been thirty days the professionals made it sixty.

The problem initially was that the rule applied to former clubs regardless of whether the former club was amateur or professional. They hadn't thought this through. A professional club only carried a roster of eleven or twelve guys, so a few injuries could put them in a bind. Any decent amateur would have already played in an amateur match, so whackiness ensued. They changed the rule in, I think, 1873 so that it only applied to professional clubs. For the 1875 season the rule was changed so that a player "honorably released" from his club was immediately available.

Then there was the issue of players on clubs that went defunct. The rules initially didn't cover this situation. Club went ahead and signed several such players, and the convention later ratified this on the grounds that the purpose of the rule was to prevent players from jumping from their club, but if the club was defunct this clearly wasn't an issue.

So as for teams ignoring the rule, yes and no. They played ineligible amateurs, and this was an issue in counting championship games. But the NA was actually quite successful in keeping players tied to their (professional) clubs during the season.

You have to be careful when reading accounts of this subject. Many accounts discuss "revolving" without clearly defining what is meant. Sometimes it is applied to any case of a player switching teams, even during the off season. In other words, free agency. In the true amateur era baseball clubs were social fraternal organizations, so moving from one to another was viewed as abandonment. (There is still some of this today: consider the fan reaction to the guy who comes up through the organization and is with a club for ten years, then signs elsewhere for more money.) This was largely a dead letter by the professional era, and the NA did not even try to stop revolving in this sense. But revolving in the sense of players jumping midseason from one professional club to another for more money? Preventing this was an NA success story that tends to get lost in the popular version of the NA-as-failure.

Richard Hershberger