Expanding the Strike Zone

Baseball in the Age of Free Agency

Daniel A. Gilbert

• Publisher: University of Massachusetts Press
• Year: 2015
• Print ISBN:
  9781558499973
  9781558499966
• eBook ISBN:
  9781613763193
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Entertainment Industry
• Index: Social Sciences

With its iconic stars and gleaming ballparks, baseball has been one of the most captivating forms of modern popular culture. In Expanding the Strike Zone, Daniel A. Gilbert examines the history and meaning of the sport's tumultuous changes since the mid-twentieth century, amid Major League Baseball's growing global influence. From the rise of ballplayer unionism to the emergence of new forms of scouting, broadcasting, and stadium development, Gilbert shows that the baseball world has been home to struggles over work and territory that resonate far beyond the playing field.

Readers encounter both legendary and unheralded figures in this sweeping history, which situates Major League Baseball as part of a larger culture industry. The book examines a labor history defined at once by the growing power of big league stars—from Juan Marichal and Curt Flood to Fernando Valenzuela and Ichiro Suzuki—and the collective struggles of players working to make a living throughout the baseball world. It also explores the territorial politics that have defined baseball's development as a form of transnational popular culture, from the impact of Dominican baseball academies to the organized campaign against stadium development by members of Seattle's Asian American community.

Based on a rich body of research along with new readings of popular journalism, fiction, and film, Expanding the Strike Zone highlights the ways in which baseball's players, owners, writers, and fans have shaped and reshaped the sport as a central element of popular culture from the postwar boom to the Great Recession.

1

The Roots of Free Agency

Integration and Expansion in the Baseball World

OPENING DAY is always a special occasion, containing all the hope and possibility of a new season for players and fans alike. The start of the 1964 National League campaign had a particular significance in New York City, marking the debut of a state-of-the-art home for the local club. On April 17, over fifty thousand New Yorkers made their way to Shea Stadium in Queens to see the Mets christen their diamond with a 4–3 loss to the Pittsburgh Pirates. The Mets had been born two years earlier, playing in the Polo Grounds in upper Manhattan, where the New York Giants had labored for years before departing for San Francisco following the 1957 season. The team’s new facility, with its expansive parking lots, movable stands, and twenty-one escalators, stood in sharp contrast to the Polo Grounds and Brooklyn’s Ebbets Field, cozy neighborhood ballparks built along streetcar and subway lines and abandoned with the rise of the interstates.

Shea Stadium was designed for the age of the highway, but the facility’s debut quickly became a story about the limits of urban automobility. Leonard Koppett’s account of the game in the next day’s New York Times, appearing under the headline “Shea Stadium Opens with Big Traffic Jam,” noted that the roads were so choked that city traffic commissioner Henry A. Barnes took to the skies in a helicopter to help “unscramble post-game jams” spreading out past Flushing Meadow on the Van Wyck Expressway. Still, many observers celebrated Shea’s gleaming modernity, even as the finishing touches were still being applied on opening day. “Certain items connected with the ball park are incomplete—including the Mets,” wrote Arthur Daley of the Times. “But it has to be rated as close to perfection in all of its glittering modern appurtenances.”¹

Shea was part of a larger landscape taking shape in Flushing Meadow in the spring of 1964. The home of the Mets stood directly adjacent to the site of the New York World’s Fair, which itself opened to the public just days later. Both the fair and the stadium were the work of New York City’s “master builder,” Robert Moses, and together marked the latest articulation of his enormous imprint on the postwar metropolis.² The stadium, while technically a distinct construction project, was in practice a central element of the exhibition experience, as fairgoers were encouraged to make time for the Mets in between viewing marvels like the U.S. Steel Unisphere and Ford Motor Company’s Magic Skyway. Fair designers implemented a system of ultraviolet hand stamps at the exit gates, making it possible to return free of charge after a few hours spent taking in a ballgame.³ Shea Stadium thus established Major League Baseball’s place within the larger cultural vision that the fair projected, one that championed the United States as an engine of capitalist democracy in an age of unprecedented affluence—“Man’s Achievement on a Shrinking Globe in an Expanding Universe,” as the event’s theme declared.

At the official dedication on April 22, President Lyndon Johnson proclaimed: “This fair represents the most promising of our hopes. It gathers together, from 80 countries, the achievements of industry, the health of nations, the creations of man.” Not missing the opportunity to make a campaign speech with the 1964 election season under way, Johnson went on to outline his vision for what he would soon brand the Great Society, a nation “unwilling to accept public deprivation in the midst of private satisfaction.” Like the larger political moment that the fair represented, the exhibition presented an opportunity for movements to voice claims for social justice. The day of Johnson’s dedication, activists from the Congress of Racial Equality (CORE) organized an automobile “stall-in” to draw fairgoers’ attention to the racialized inequality on display every day in the city, outside the utopian confines of the fair.⁴

The baseball world of 1964, like the expanse of cultural marvels that spread out beyond Shea Stadium, exhibited its own processes of contradictory global change. In the two decades following World War II, baseball saw transformations that rank among the most celebrated and analyzed in the history of sport, the two best known of which were the racial integration of formerly segregated major and minor league teams, and the expansion of Major League Baseball across the United States, beyond the industrial and commercial centers of the Northeast and Midwest. Integration and expansion have become key chapters of a familiar narrative, with events such as Jackie Robinson’s 1947 debut with the Brooklyn Dodgers and the team’s departure for Los Angeles a decade later looming large in many accounts of the so-called national pastime. Integration and expansion, however, were fundamentally transnational developments, and were central to the deepening of Major League Baseball’s influence beyond the borders of the United States. In the two decades after World War II, as MLB teams integrated and moved to new locations, league officials also brokered new agreements with Latin American and Japanese counterparts. At the same time, emerging forms of writing and broadcasting brought new dimensions to the production and interpretation of baseball’s meaning. Taken together, the changes of the postwar era created the conditions out of which the age of free agency would grow.

Opening day at Shea Stadium, alongside the New York World’s Fair, April 17, 1964. (Meyer Liebowitz/The New York Times/Redux)

The Formation of the Modern Baseball World

Developing from a variety of bat-and-ball games with their origins in the British sporting tradition, baseball was first formalized into codified rules, clubs, and leagues in the United States in the mid-nineteenth century. The sport took shape in the sphere of fraternal organizations in New York City in the 1840s, expanding nationally through the Civil War years, and by the 1870s the first professional baseball teams and leagues had been formed.⁵ While these developments were unfolding in the United States, baseball also took root in other parts of the world. Two locations in particular were central to the game’s international development: Cuba and Japan.

Cuban students who learned the game in the United States brought it home with them, and by the late 1860s the sport was gaining popularity there. Growing numbers of players and supporters made baseball into a form of Cuban national culture, defining the sport in opposition to the Spanish colonial pastime of bullfighting.⁶ The rise of baseball as a national sport in Cuba was echoed in Japan in the final decades of the nineteenth century. Although, as the historian Donald Roden recounts, international sailors and businessmen were the first to play baseball in the country, an ultimately more important development occurred when U.S. educators in Japanese secondary schools began teaching the game to their students in the early 1870s. Roden argues, “While Americans in Yokohama played baseball to be more American, Japanese students, especially in the higher schools, turned to baseball in an effort to reify traditional values and to establish a new basis for national pride.”⁷ In the years of baseball’s early development in both Cuba and Japan, and in the decades that followed, the sport would provide space for the construction of competing and complex national and transnational identities.

Cuban and Japanese players, coaches, and supporters not only made baseball a popular sport in their respective nations but also served as key conduits in further disseminating the sport regionally. Cuban baseball enthusiasts were largely responsible for spreading the game throughout the Caribbean. For example, the thousands of Cubans who fled to the Dominican Republic during the Ten Years’ War (1868–1878) brought baseball along with the capital that would help create their new home country’s modern sugar industry.⁸ In East Asia, Japanese individuals and institutions similarly served as key conduits of baseball’s regional development at the turn of the century. Although a U.S. missionary, Philip Gillett, is credited with first introducing baseball to Korea, the soldiers and officials of the occupying Japanese army facilitated the sport’s further development as a rich and contested form of Korean culture.⁹

By the first years of the twentieth century, the basic outlines of the modern baseball world were in place, with teams and leagues established throughout regions of North America, the Caribbean Basin, and the Pacific Rim.¹⁰ Despite the history of transnational subjects—from students and teachers to businessmen and soldiers—spreading and remaking the sport, some in the United States claimed ownership, championing baseball in nationalist terms. Chief among such figures was the prominent sporting goods magnate A. G. Spalding, himself a former star ballplayer, who argued in one of the first histories of baseball (published in 1911) that the sport had “followed the flag.”¹¹ While U.S. interests and institutions—including the military—played central roles in building the baseball world, the sport’s transnational development was not a simple function of one nation’s global power. As the Dominican and Korean cases suggest, the pervasive characterization of baseball as “America’s game” fails to account for the regional networks of capital and culture that shaped its history around the world.

In the twentieth century, the period between the two world wars, which saw the emergence of professional leagues in a number of countries, marked a new stage in the sport’s development. As organized circuits grew in several nations, baseball enjoyed ever greater popularity in the United States, becoming a major modern culture industry. New superstar players like Babe Ruth enjoyed comprehensive coverage in daily newspapers and, by the late 1920s, on radio. Ruth’s mass mediated heroics came on the heels of the “Black Sox” scandal of 1919, in which several members of the Chicago White Sox were banned from Major League Baseball for conspiring to “fix” World Series games against the Cincinnati Reds. As one of the most charismatic and celebrated athletes to ever play the game, Ruth helped to rescue MLB’s popularity in the wake of this industry-shaking controversy, leaving a cultural imprint rivaled by few athletes in the history of any sport.¹² White players by no means held a monopoly on celebrity status. African American athletes such as catcher Josh Gibson and pitcher Satchel Paige were mass culture sensations as well, their exploits receiving comprehensive coverage in the black press.¹³

The interwar period also saw the further development of transnational connections and exchanges across the baseball world. One particularly significant example was the practice of off-season barnstorming, in which players formed touring teams to play in front of new audiences. Ruth and other U.S. stars made several international barnstorming tours, including one to Japan that played a key role in stimulating the formation of that nation’s professional leagues.¹⁴ Baseball in the Americas in the era of racial exclusion consisted of overlapping networks of leagues and barnstorming circuits. Many players barred from white professional ball played year-round, often in the United States and Canada in the summer and in the Caribbean during the winter. Havana, the capital of Latin American professional baseball until the Cuban Revolution, was as central a baseball hub as New York or Chicago.¹⁵

As the modern baseball industry took shape at the turn of the twentieth century, lasting forms of organizational hierarchy developed. The term “organized baseball” has its roots in the late 1800s, when league officials in the United States came to a series of key accords—known as “national agreements”—over the mutual recognition of player contracts and territorial rights.¹⁶ As the historian Jules Tygiel notes, signatories to the pacts “referred to their operations as ‘organized baseball’ and labeled all others ‘outlaw’ leagues’ ” in order to “distinguish themselves from lesser pretenders.”¹⁷ With the color line dividing the sport into separate and unequal spheres of action, the expression “organized baseball” was deeply racialized. In the second half of the twentieth century the term took on a more explicitly international dimension, and an aura of nationalist chauvinism, as MLB officials and team owners exercised new territorial power throughout the baseball world.

Another important hierarchical divide in professional baseball has been the distinction between “major” and “minor” leagues. The sport’s early history saw multiple competing circuits, and the frequent practice of rivals “raiding” their competitors’ rosters. The leaders of two especially powerful bodies, the established National League and the upstart American League, resolved a long-running dispute by signing the pivotal National Agreement of 1903, creating a partnership known from that point forward as “the major leagues.” Two years before the 1903 agreement, feeling threats to their own ability to retain players and attract fans posed by the ongoing power struggle between the NL and the AL, representatives of other professional baseball leagues operating in the United States formed the National Association of Professional Baseball Clubs (NAPBL, or simply the National Association). Designed to protect shared interests in the face of growing National and American League power, from its founding in 1901 the National Association became the collective voice of the minor leagues. The National Agreement of 1903 formalized relations between the majors and their subordinates, establishing a hierarchy of circuits (with the minors ranked as class A, B, C, or D) and further cementing the universal system of player contracts and other provisions that the minor league officials had adopted in forming the NAPBL two years earlier.¹⁸

Over the course of the first four decades of the twentieth century, the relation between major and minor league teams was transformed, most significantly, through a new approach to player development: the farm system. The most influential figure in this history was Branch Rickey, who pioneered the model with the St. Louis Cardinals beginning in the early 1920s, before later stints as general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers (1943–1950) and the Pittsburgh Pirates (1950–1955). Under Rickey’s system, which other executives soon copied, the Cardinals owned the contracts of players distributed across a large network of affiliated “farm” clubs. Rather than requiring a team to purchase a player’s contract from an independently operated National Association affiliate, the farm system made it possible to summon players to the majors (or trade them to another club) whenever the need or opportunity arose. By the end of the 1930s, Rickey’s system was an established standard, with most minor league affiliates serving as farms for the majors.¹⁹ The emergence of the farm system effectively redefined the National Association as a subsidiary organization of the major leagues.

Distinctions between major and minor carry deep implications of the power relations at work in the baseball world. Major League Baseball derives its identity from the conceit that its teams and games represent the very pinnacle of the sport, and that, for example, the annual competition between the best NL and AL teams can legitimately be called the World Series. Even as Major League Baseball gained more and more power and influence in the second half of the twentieth century, and treated increasing numbers of leagues in other parts of the world as “minor” circuits (by using them for player development purposes), many in those “other” places employed more nuanced categorizations. For generations of fans, players, and team owners in the winter professional leagues of the Caribbean, for example, the enterprise has always amounted to something much more than “minor.”

The Racial Integration of ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• 1. The Roots of Free Agency: Integration and Expansion in the Baseball World
• 2. A Piece of Property: The Making and Meaning of Free Agency in Major League Baseball
• 3. Two Strikes: Star Power and Solidarity in the United States and Mexico
• 4. On the Borders of Free Agency: Dominican Baseball and the Rise of the Academies
• 5. Constructing Ichiro’s Home Field: Seattle, the Mariners, and the Politics of Location
• Epilogue
• Notes
• Index