Bargaining with Baseball: Labor Relations in an Age of Prosperous Turmoil (review)

William B. Gould IV played baseball when he was a teenager in 1946, saw his grandsons succeed in the sport, and, because he was the chairman of the National Labor Relations Board in 1995, helped precipitate a court decision ending the labor action that had cancelled the World Series the year before. Gould was in the middle of one of the landmark sports-law decisions, and he has put all of this down in Bargaining with Baseball. In addition, he walks his readers through the evolution of the game, both on the field and off, since organized professional baseball was founded. Gould was also a salary arbitrator for the majors, and is now an emeritus law professor at Stanford University. He has seen a lot of baseball, and his discourses on topics he hasn’t seen firsthand are supported by extensive research. This is often a dense book, and it’s not for everyone, since some fans are happy to live with a superficial or nonexistent understanding of the legal aspects of sports. But it’s an informative read on the subject and belongs on the baseball-law reading list, although probably not near the top.

It’s very hard to relate the history of professional baseball without winding up talking about labor relations. The continuing battle between owners and players over contractual rights and salaries colors the sport all along the way, from the effort by clubs to “reserve” or indefinitely tie up their players contracts in the first decade of the majors to the reserve clause’s abolishment in 1975 and the free agency era that followed. So, to keep the management-employee aspects of the game in nearly constant view, as Gould does, is one of the important ways to talk about the sport. He has it right that “money is an abiding characteristic that has stayed with baseball during its entire 140-year existence as a professional game: baseball is a business, and baseball exists fundamentally for money” (17).

The historical background and buildup to the 1994–95 work stoppage and its resolution by Federal District Judge, now Supreme Court Justice, Sonya Sotomayor, occupy most of the first half of the book. With negotiations over a new collective bargaining agreement going nowhere in the summer of 1994, the players struck, cancelling that World Series. With no resolution in sight by December, major-league owners began recruiting “replacement players” for their rosters and, maintaining that talks were at an impasse, announced they would impose their own labor rules, including a salary cap and free agency restrictions. The players union sought an injunction against this unilateral action, and Gould’s NLRB, on a 3–2 vote, requested the action before Judge Sotomayor, which she granted. Gould continually refers to this action as “the mother of all baseball disputes” (three times in two pages, 96–97, at one point). It’s a more than fair argument that the Andy Messersmith arbitration decision ending the reserve system in 1975 had a bigger impact on baseball’s current existence (hence the owners’ desire to defang it in 1995). But the Soto-mayor decision, in which Gould had a primary hand, saved professional baseball from its own worst impulses. There’s no question that the World Series– killing work stoppage hurt baseball a lot, but without the NLRB and court actions, the damage would have been much worse.

Most of the rest of Bargaining with Baseball is devoted to an examination of just about every aspect of the sport. While Gould, who has been a baseball devotee for decades, isn’t wild about all the developments in the sport in the last forty years (he particularly dislikes the designated hitter, artificial turf, aluminum bats, and the current version of interleague play), he’s by no means a curmudgeon. There are many helpful tables, particularly in the sections covering competitive balance in major-league sports, and a number of informative...