A visitor from abroad during the 1890 baseball season might have thought Marxists were rallying in Brotherhood Park upon hearing echoes of “We are the people! We are the people!” Chicago was famed for its militant union movement, and the South Side stadium marked an exotic intersection of sports and labor history.
The battle cry of Chicago Pirates’ fans and rival teams’ — “We are the people” — was a memorable phrase from the manifesto of the Players League, a feisty challenger to baseball’s National League. The upstart league resulted from a bitter and unsuccessful struggle against professional baseball’s reserve clause, which would bind a player to a team for life.
“Players have been bought and sold as if they were sheep instead of American citizens,” the manifesto proclaimed. “The player had to submit or get out the profession in which he had spent years achieving a proficiency.”
The manifesto was authored by John Montgomery Ward, the star shortstop of the New York Giants. Learning that he was to be sold to either the Washington or Boston team, he demanded compensation for leaving New York, where he graduated from Columbia University’s Law School in 1885. He wanted half of the record $12,000 the Giants were asking; they balked and dropped the matter.
Upon the initial success of Ward’s Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, the team owners counterattacked. In 1889, they reinforced the reserve clause by dividing players into five groups and setting maximum salaries that ran for each from $1,500 to $2,500.
Players would be assigned to a group based on assessments of their performance on and off the diamond. Under the Brush Classification Plan, players would be judged by their “habits, earnestness and special qualifications.”
The Sporting News, baseball’s newspaper of record, reported that the players found the classification scheme so odious they intended a midseason “strike which will be the biggest thing ever heard of in the baseball world.”
Hearing the news, Ward cut short a European tour with an all-star team, as the Tribune reported from Paris under a March 3, 1889, headline: “Ward to Kick Against Classification.”
Ward opposed a strike, which would be tough to win. Courts could rule that unions were illegal monopolies, once Congress passed the Sherman Antitrust Act, in June 1890, the Players League’s initial season.
Landing in New York, Ward began weaning the players off a strike with a more radical proposal: secession from the National League and formation of a new league mimicking (perhaps unwittingly) Marx’s dream of a society not divided into workers and owners.
Players would be shareholders, paid from the gate receipts and serving alongside investors as team management. On Nov. 4, 1889, players lined up at a New York hotel to sign onto the Players League.
Mike “King” Kelly — the slugging star of Boston’s team and offseason vaudeville performer — reached for a theatrical metaphor:
“I’m one of the bosses now, and the triumvirate (of National League moguls), well, to be frank, they are my understudies. Next year we’ll be in command and the former presidents will have to drive horse cars for a living and borrow rain checks to see a game.
Kelly signed on as manager of the Players League’s Boston Reds, rejecting a last-minute offer from the White Stockings, Chicago’s National League team that later became the Chicago Cubs.
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“Aw, I want the $10,000 bad enough; but I’ve thought the matter all over, and I can’t go back on the boys,” Kelly told the White Stockings’ owner.
As the bidding war intensified — which the National League owners hoped to avoid with the Classification System — Tribune correspondents filed reports of players enticed to remain with their old teams and others moving on.
“Although I belong to the brotherhood I shall not leave the Pittsburg club,” said Ned Hanlon, player-manager who supported the Players League. “My position as manager and captain in addition to playing will mean more money to me than I could ever realize from any brotherhood scheme.”
When Charles “Pop” Smith, a veteran infielder, was asked if he was joining the Players League, he replied: “Yes, I will sign, but I want as much as the other side will give me.” Evidently it wasn’t forthcoming. He was the only Boston regular not to jump ship.
The Chicago Pirates snagged Charles Comiskey, first baseman and manager of the National League’s St Louis team. Having played sandlot ball in the Maxwell Street neighborhood, he was bound to be popular with Chicago fans.
“We’ve been after Comiskey for a long time and we’re anxious to secure him,” the Players League secretary told the Tribune. Four St. Louis players followed their skipper to Chicago.
Asked about the Players League, the New York Giants’ president snapped: “You mean the scheme of cranks.” Other owners feared they were losing the cream of the crop.
“I haven’t talked with any players,” the president of the Indianapolis team said. “But I am sure that when the league meets we can amiably adjust any differences that may exist between the players and the team managers.”
Instead the owners mounted a second counterattack: Ward was sued for breach of contract, and in cities with two teams, the National League’s schedule deliberately mimicked the Players League’s.
As Players League officials were waiting and worrying about a judge’s 1890 decision over the lawsuit against Ward, a celebratory telegram, making the league’s clear victory, was received in its headquarters in the Chicago Opera House building:
“New York, Jan. 28 — Let the wine flow. We are the people. John M. Ward.”
Once the season began, the Tribune published comparisons of the attendance at Brotherhood Park on the South Side, where the Chicago Pirates of the Players League played, and the West Side Park where the White Stockings played. By June 22, 19,323 spectators had passed through the Pirates’ turnstiles and 12,169 through the White Stockings.
Both Chicago teams made a pennant run, and New York fans were treated to a truly bizarre play: A home run that started in one ballpark and finished atop another.
Only an alley separated the National League stadium from the Players League’s. On May 13, the Giants’ Mike Tiernan hit a ball that sailed over the Polo Ground’s wall and “struck the fence of Brotherhood field” as fans in both parks cheered, the New York Times reported. “And why not? Tiernan had done what few people ever believed could be accomplished.”
But as the season ended, it was obvious that the players’ experiment was a failure. Their teams were deeply in debt, and their investors refused to put up any more money.
“The Players League as it stands today is little better than a skeleton of itself and the sooner the remains are buried the better,” the Tribune wrote on Nov. 25, 1890. “The insurrection will mark a new era in the history of the National game, and many of the evils that have creeped into it have been eradicated.”
Yet the reserve clause remained, as it would for decades. Players League defectors scrambled for National League contracts, on whatever terms they could get. Some came out OK. Comiskey, who managed the Chicago Pirates, eventually bought the city’s American League franchise. As an owner, he had a reputation for being as penny-pinching as those he’d fought against.
Eight of his players were bribed to throw the 1919 World Series. At the ensuing “Black Sox” trial, a defense attorney asked Comiskey if he hadn’t broken his contract by bolting to the Players League. “He jumped to his feet and shouted angrily at attorney Benedict Short,” the Tribune reported.
Ward played for four more seasons, then practiced corporate law and occasionally represented baseball players. In 1964, he was posthumously inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y. Ward’s plaque lists his accomplishments on the field. His crusade for players’ rights is acknowledged cryptically:
“Played an important part in establishing modern organized baseball.”
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