Baseball's Monumental Mid-Century Changes
Three books on the media, labor and American society offer insight into current issues
Sports Biblio Reader 3.7.21
The Imagination of Sports in Books, History, the Arts and Culture
Also In This Issue: The Year’s Best Sports Writing; Conor McGregor; Zlatan and LeBron; Bugs Bunny at the Bat; Baseball Thinking, Fast and Slow; Bracketology; Pro Hoops Underworld; Hubie Brown; Don Baylor; Glenn Burke; Ballet Moves at Old Trafford; Football and Portugal’s Dictatorship; The Analytics of Curling; Remembering Irv Cross
Before last year’s belated start to the baseball season, I took advantage of a special baseball book sale from the University of Nebraska Press, and while reading several selections inadvertently realized they shared some important historical connections.
As spring training unfolds for what I hope will be a full season in 2021, the sport continues to grapple with the themes of books examined here—media, labor and culture.
The middle of the 20th century laid the groundwork for baseball’s continuing challenges on all three fronts, as the game’s dominance in sports and popular culture began to erode.
That baseball’s solons have been slow to respond to those forces has been well-documented. In their 2008 book “Center Field Shot,” a history of baseball on television, media and journalism professors James R. Walker and Robert V. Bellamy Jr. frequently remind readers of baseball’s “myth of nostalgia, a source of the game’s charms and its problems.”
In the case of their subject, it was a nostalgic reverence for baseball on the radio (how I fell in love with the game in the late 1960s) that resulted in resistance adapting to a television age:
“By the late 1940s, baseball dominated the spring, summer, and autumn television schedules as it never would again. Not until the cable revolution of the 1980s would as high a percentage of Major League games reach the screen. By the mid-1950s, the roots of the antitelevision argument were in place: Baseball was not well-suited to television.”
The authors methodically detail the commercial and technical development of baseball on television, as well as the stubborn cluelessness of some owners who saw in the boob tube a threat to their vaunted turnstile revenue.
As the 1960s proceeded, baseball leaders focused greater attention on labor issues within the sport. In his 2016 book “Baseball’s Power Shift,” author and high school teacher Krister Swanson provides a solid historical grounding with the Gilded Age struggles involving the imposition of the reserve clause and the short-lived Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, the game’s first union, in the 1880s.
It wasn’t until after World War II that another such effort was started, the American Baseball Guild, by labor organizer Robert Murphy, whose approach was influenced by Depression-era concerns. But like the Brotherhood, this was a public relations-conscious body that made negligble gains.
In response, Major League Baseball established a Players Relations Committee that made some concessions on salaries and pensions while the reserve clause remained unthreatened. That changed starting in 1966, when Marvin Miller took over the moribund MLB Players Association and changed the course of baseball and sports history.
Swanson concludes that “perhaps the greatest example of the owners’ inability to exploit new revenue opportunities in the postwar era was their collective mismanagement of television revenues” during a time when the sport’s economics were in trouble.
As the National Football League began to rise with the advent of television, baseball leaders were scrambling for revenue streams and trying to hold off player rebellion. That didn’t come about until the arrival of Miller, who had been a labor economist with the United Steelworkers’ Union, as a salary holdout by Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale against Dodgers’ owner Walter O’Malley fizzled before the 1966 season.
The dogged, diligent Miller worked to gain the trust of players and plowed into the changing economics of baseball, noting that TV revenue in 1946 made up only one-third of total player salaries. By 1967, TV revenue was three times that of all players salaries.
Miller embarked on a strategic grind, contesting MLB offers on salaries, pensions and other benefits while arguing for arbitration and collective bargaining. When Curt Flood decided to challenge the reserve clause in 1969, MLBPA supported him, but Miller thought the time was too soon.
By the time federal arbitrator Peter Seitz struck down the reserve clause in 1973, ushering in free agency that soon expanded to other sports, American cultural trends were also shaking up tradition-laden baseball. While owners were frustrated with Miller’s labor tactics, Swanson writes that “many players saw Miller as a uniquely talented, progressive reformer who could free baseball from its hidebound past.”
The social protests of the 1960s as they influenced baseball are the subject of “One Nation Under Baseball,” written by freelance writers John Florio and Ouisie Shapiro and published in 2017.
Stretching from the advent of the Kennedy Administration to the gradual demise of Jim Crow, the authors focus on how the Civil Rights movement, anti-Vietnam War demonstrations and labor and political turmoil affected the game, and how its own stars took part.
In crisp and concise chapters, readers get panoramic vignettes ranging from Mudcat Grant’s breakfast with JFK, New York sportswriting legend Jimmy Cannon’s denunciation of the new, socially-conscious breed of “Chipmunk” journalists asking once-forbidden questions, the above-mentioned Koufax-Drysdale and Flood sagas, Tom Seaver’s ad in The New York Times in 1970 calling for peace in Vietnam and MLB’s move to a slowly integrating Deep South:
“Over the course of a decade, the national pastime had come of age. It now resembled a new America, one that survived persistent upheaval. The game wasn’t perfect. It wasn’t even close. But it finally reflected the country in which it was played.”
Some of those questions are being raised again, more than 50 years later, as the NFL and NBA have endeared themselves to younger generations, and as MLB commissioner Rob Manfred continues to bumble around in “modernizing” the game.
The minor leagues are being stripped bare of their local appeal, monster salaries are as jaw-dropping as superstar homeruns, and the cost of a good field-level seat (my sweet spot: 3rd base side, bag-high, 10-15 rows up) were becoming increasingly unaffordable before COVID-19.
MLB’s maddening TV restrictions also continue—out-of-market games only on MLB.com, while YouTube TV, to which I subscribe, no longer carries the regional sports networks that air my local team’s games. Back to the radio I may go, nostalgia be damned.
More baseball players are speaking out on social issues of the day, as baseball continues its reckoning with its segregated past.
For old-school fans like me, allegiances to the game are for life. If the game is to flourish with new, more dizzying cultural, technological and economic changes afoot, baseball leaders can’t afford to be as hidebound as the old birds of another time or as ham-fisted as those currently steering a somewhat teetering ship.
A Few Good Reads
AC Milan star Zlatan Ibrahimovic and LeBron James have been feuding over the former’s “stick to sports message” aimed at the Lakers’ star, who said he will be doing no such thing. It’s some rare pushback against James along social justice lines, but some find it more than hypocritical that he has nothing to say about the plight of Uighur Muslims in China;
A long way from LeBron and Lakerland: At GQ, Hugo Lundgren profiles a G League player navigating the underworld of pro basketball in what figures to be his final stab at trying to reach the NBA;
The venerable Hubie Brown continues to call NBA games at the age of 87, and he’s just as diligent in preparing for games now as when he started following the end of his coaching career three decades ago;
It’s been 75 years since “Baseball Bugs” was released as a Looney Tunes cartoon, and as Fred Frommer writes at The Washington Post, it reflects a time shortly after World War II when baseball was the dominant spectator sport and a powerful cultural force;
Manchester United’s Edinson Cavani is a major reason why the Red Devils are second in the English Premier League table, and some of his improvement has been chalked up to cross-sport training that includes ballet lessons. Physiotherapist Luke Abnett tells the Irish Times that “Pound for pound, ballet dancers are the strongest athletes you will find. . . . In ballet, there’s a need to not only have strength of movement but precision of movement. It’s a combination of the strong movement muscles with the fine-tuning stability muscles;”
From the Outside Write soccer history blog, an account of how the Académica de Coimbra club’s rise to the finals of the 1969 Portuguese Cup final played an understated role in helping end the country’s dictatorship under António de Oliveira Salazar;
The late Atlanta Falcons’ great Tommy Nobis (one of my childhood heroes) has become something of a barometer for Pro Football Hall of Fame speculation. At Sports Illustrated, Rich Gosselin compares Nobis’ short-lived career in assessing the prospects for tackle Tony Bosselli, whose time also was limited due to injuries;
After a stunning second-round loss to Dustin Poirier in a UFC grudge match last month in Abu Dhabi, Conor McGregor finds himself Ali-like, likely to tap into his working-class Dublin roots for the inspiration to mount a comeback;
Longtime college basketball metrics hound Ken Pomeroy has recently been employing his statistical analysis skills to the ice. Instead of hockey, however, his newest obsession is curling;
Behavorial scientist Daniel Kahneman’s Nobel Prize-winning book “Thinking Fast and Slow” is on front-office shelves around Major League Baseball, a must-read for insights on making a myriad of scouting decisions;
The late Don Baylor is remembered at Tablet by Jeremy Sigler, whose family became friends with the slugger during his Orioles days. Sigler’s Baltimore father, a physician, saved the life of Baylor’s son. When Sigler was helping his parents move in recent years, he found a copy of Baylor’s memoir with a personal inscription that included the message “Baseball is temporary, but friends are forever.”
Sports Book News
Fantastic news for fans of the “Best American Sports Writing” anthology that was published for 30 years by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt: The series is continuing with a new publisher, and with a slightly different title. The debut of “The Year’s Best Sports Writing” will be published in October by Triumph Books, a major sports book publisher. Glenn Stout, who guided the BASW project from the beginning, is editing the first book in the new series, which will have an editorial board that includes Howard Bryant, Kim Cross, Latria Graham, Linda Robertson, Roberto Jose Andrade Franco, Michael Mooney, Alex Belth and Ben Baby. Stout writes that the first year’s selections have been made and will be announced later, and explained how the new series will unfold;
Among Triumph’s latest releases is “Bracketology,” by Joe Lunardi, ESPN’s resident NCAA basketball tournament projector, who details his formula that he’s honed in the age of March Madness bracket office pools;
Published this week by Philomel Books, “Singled Out,” a biography of Glenn Burke, the first openly gay former Major League Baseball player, known during his brief career as the inventor of the high-five, and who died from AIDS. Author Andrew Maraniss has this excerpt at The Undefeated about how Dodgers players, including Dusty Baker, grappled with the prospect of having a closeted teammate.
Passings
Irv Cross, 81, was a former NFL player who became the first black sports analyst on American television. After a 9-year career as a Pro Bowl cornerback with the Eagles and Rams, he joined CBS TV to join what became a notable studio crew for “The NFL Today” that included Phyllis George. Cross was diagnosed with dementia in later life and is among the NFL veterans who designated that his brain be donated for medical researchers after his death.
For further reading:
“Bearing the Cross: My Inspiring Journey from Poverty to the NFL and Sports Television,” by Irv Cross
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