Martin Luther King confronted racial segregation, a
pernicious outgrowth of slavery. At times, baseball players (and others) have
made the legal argument that restrictions on free agency— today, called “player
control”— compare to involuntary servitude. No court has bought this argument;
however, some judges, in dissenting opinions, have agreed with the legal analogy.
Today, we read the best version of this argument, Judge
Jerome Frank’s take on baseball’s reserve clause in the 1940s. Billy Gardella
jumped to the Mexican League, and was blacklisted for five years by baseball’s
commissioner, Happy Chandler. Judge Frank said, in dissent:
We have here a monopoly which, in its effect on ball-players
like the plaintiff, possesses characteristics shockingly repugnant to moral
principles that, at least since the War Between the States, have been basic in
America, as shown by the Thirteenth Amendment to the Constitution, condemning
‘involuntary servitude,’ and by subsequent Congressional enactments on that
subject.
The most extreme of these penalties is the blacklisting of
the player so that no club in organized baseball will hire him. In effect, this
clause prevents a player from ever playing with any team other than his
original employer, unless that employer consents.
As one court, perhaps a bit exaggeratedly, has put it,
‘While the services of these baseball players are ostensibly secured by voluntary
contracts a study of the system as * * * practiced under the plan of the
National Agreement, reveals the involuntary character of the servitude which is
imposed upon players by the strength of the combination controlling the labor
of practically all of the players in the country.
* * * There is no difference in principle between the system
of servitude built up by the operation of this National Agreement, which * * *
provides for the purchase, sale barter, and exchange of the services of
baseball players—skilled laborers—without their consent, and the system of
peonage brought into the United States from Mexico and thereafter existing for
a time within the territory of New Mexico. * * * The system created by
‘organized baseball’ in recent years presents the question of the establishment
of a scheme by which the personal freedom, the right to contract for their
labor wherever they will, of 10,000 skilled laborers, is placed under the
dominion of a benevolent despotism through the operation of the monopoly
established by the National Agreement.’ I may add that, if the players be
regarded as quasi-peons, it is of no moment that they are well paid; only the
totalitarian-minded will believe that high pay excuses virtual slavery.
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