Legal Bases: Baseball and the Law

On June 12, 1939, in dedicating the Baseball Hall of Fame, Judge Kennesaw Mountain Landis proclaimed: "I should like to dedicate this museum to all America, to lovers of good sportsmanship, healthy bodies, clean minds. For those are the principles of baseball." The game of baseball mirrors our history, our identity, and our culture. And, if baseball is the heart of America, the legal process provides the sinews that hold it in place. It was the legal process that allowed William Hulbert to bring club owners toghether in a New York City hotel room in 1876 to form the National League, and ninety years later it allowed Marvin Miller to change a management-funded fraternity of ballplayers into the strongest trade union in America. But how does collective bargaining and labor arbitration work in the major leagues? Why is baseball exempt from the antitrust laws? In Legal Bases, Roger I. Abrams has assembled an all-star baseball law team whose stories illuminate the sometimes uproarious, sometimes ignominous relationship between law and baseball that has made the business of baseball a truly American institution.Leading off in Abrams' lineup is Monte Ward, the hall of Fame pitcher-shortstop and graduate of Columbia Law School who organized the first baseball union. After Curt Flood's valiant, but doomed, effort in federal court, Andy Messersmith strikes out the reserve system in arbitration. And in the ninth inning, pinch-hitter Judge Sonia Sotomayor drives in the winning run of the 1994 major league players' strike. Along the way, Abrams also examines such issues as drug use and gambling, enforcement of contracts, and the rights of owners and managers. The stories he tells are not limited to his official lineup, but include appearances by a host of other characters from baseball magnate Albert Spaulding and New York Knickerbocker Alexander Joy Cartwright to "Acting Commissioner" Bud Selig and Jackie Robinson. And Abrams does not limit himself to the history of baseball and the legal process but also speculates on the implications of the 1996 collective bargaining agreement and those other issues like intellectual property, eminent domain, and gender equity that may provide the all-star baseball law stories of the future. Author note: Roger I.Abrams is a major league baseball salary arbitrator who has arbitrated cases involving Ron Darling and Brett Butler. He is also Dean and Richardson Professor of Law at Northeastern University School of Law and has taught and written in the field of sports law for more than a decade. He is the author of The Money Pitch, also published by Temple University Press.

Baseball may be just a game on the field, but it's a a complex web of contracts and consolidations off of it; from the moment William Hulbert invoked the power of the legal system to unite a disparate group of clubs into the National League in 1876, the law and the game have turned into fascinating teammates. Abrams, the Dean of Rutgers University Law School and a Major League salary arbitrator, has produced an engaging episodic history of the connection--from Monte Ward's attempt to form the first union in the late 1800s to the labor wars of the '90s that made the sports page sound like the civil code. Along the way, he stops to examine Napolean Lajoie and the institution of the reserve clause, baseball's anti-trust exemption and Curt Flood's fight for free agency, Marvin Miller and modern collective bargaining, arbitration, collusion, and the Pete Rose scandal. Comprehensive and anecdotal, Legal Bases covers as much ground as a good shortstop and interprets complex arguments and issues with the clarity of a catcher's sign. The final verdict: Appealingly absorbing. --Jeff Silverman