Krister Swanson - Baseballs Power Shift: How the Players Union, the Fans, and the Media Changed American Sports Culture

While professional baseball remains very popular in the United States today, it is easy to forget that the game held an even more prominent place in our nations everyday life from the late 1800s through the 1980s. It was truly our national pastime, and Americans from every ethnic background and walk of life shared a passion for the game. With its deep Yankee origins and traditions, the game introduced millions of new citizens to what it meant to be a true American. Baseball helped reinforce a shared sense of community in rapidly growing cities bursting at the seams with immigrants from all over Europe. It rode the wave of new media forms to even greater popularity, with radio stations like KMOX in St. Louis turning an entire region of the nation into Cardinals fans and publications like the Sporting News prospering almost exclusively on the public demand for the latest information about the game and the heroic men who played it.

Baseballs prominent place in American culture has led many historians to focus their work on the ways in which societal shifts brought about significant changes in the game. Over the course of the twentieth century, baseballs history was interwoven with major developments in race relations, life on the home front during World War II, and postwar expansion into the Sunbelt. These are all worthy topics, and many exceptional books explore them to the fullest. I share these historians intellectual interest in the relationship between baseball and society, but instead of focusing on one particular historical moment or theme, I chose to look at a give-and-take relationship between the game and our society. I wanted to write not just about the ways in which society brought about change in the game but also the ways in which baseball, and specifically its players union, reshaped American society and culture. The growth of the union movement provides an ideal opportunity for this type of study. The players unionization efforts required public support in order for them to succeed. This forced the players, and their union leaders, to heed the shifting demands of public opinion in order to maintain this support. Over time the players union members not only responded to public opinion, they actively worked to shape opinion in order to win the backing of the baseball public. As a result, the players attempts to unionize had a major impact on the values and ideals of American sports fans, and ultimately on the entirety of American sports culture.

This story goes back nearly to the birth of the game. Baseballs beginnings date to the 1850s, and in short order it became a popular pastime among soldiers during the Civil War. Within a decade of the wars completion, there were professional baseball leagues throughout the northeastern United States. The highest level of competition, known as Major League Baseball, was well established by the early 1880s. These early ballplayers enjoyed the same basic relationship with the capital class as workers of every stripe did during the Gilded Age. Team owners sought to exercise the same control over their players as factory owners enjoyed over their workers. The owners, often referred to as magnates, structured the standard player contract to limit the players freedom of contract, bargaining power, and control over working conditions. Ballplayers, just like workers in other industries, sought to unionize in order to improve their conditions and found themselves dealing with the same frustrations as other nascent unions of the time.