Who invented spring training

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Even the size of the field itself was a handicap to the women who could not hit the ball over the fences for homeruns. This sharp contrast between the men playing faster regulation baseball on certain nights, and the women basically playing a modified softball fast pitch on others, did not favor the women.

Even though the larger cities offered a greater population base, there was also a much greater diversity of entertainment opportunities from which people could choose to spend their leisure time. Attempts to add pre-game entertainment of all kinds, including novel symphony performances, failed to increase attendance.

Another factor in the failure of the Minneapolis and Milwaukee teams may have been Wrigley's decision to "go it alone" in these cities or his inability to recruit local guarantors to subsidize teams there. In any case, he didn't have the nucleus of leading businessmen in Minneapolis and Milwaukee to support and promote their AAGPBL teams as had been accomplished in the smaller cities. Early in the season, it became evident that the war would not force major league baseball to disband, and Wrigley lost interest in the girls' league.

It was under Meyerhoff that expansion and publicity of the League reached its peak. On Nov. Each club now had a voice in the adoption of rules and regulations and the direction of the sport. All assets were turned over to the new directors and Wrigley was no longer involved with the league.

Ken Sells resigned as league president and Max Carey was named the new president. League Play - Meyerhoff undertook a rigorous advertising campaign to promote the League in Everything was going well with the war and for the League. Patriotic fans were ensuring the League had a future.

Families were turning out in large numbers at all the ballparks. Meyerhoff continued to project the image he and Wrigley had envisioned for these women.

They were now involved deeply in displaying their abilities on the playing field. The emphasis changed and Charm School was discontinued. Meyerhoff arranged for the girls to play exhibition games at 13 army camps and veteran hospitals during the last five days of spring training. The players went into the hospitals and spoke to the wounded soldiers before and after the games. Players in the League eagerly supported the War effort. Several of the players had husbands and brothers overseas and many had relatives in the service.

This war effort brought a lot of positive publicity national press to the League. By the end of the season, attendance reached , Life was great. The All-American host cities organized Junior Leagues for young girls 14 years and older. The teams traveled to exotic locations for spring training: Pascagoula, Mississippi in ; Havana, Cuba in ; and Opalocka, Florida in The rules were modified each year to lengthen infield distances and approve first side-arm pitching and overhand pitching Ambitious post-season tours to Cuba and South America were organized as part of a plan to create an International League of Girls Baseball.

The Springfield Illinois Sallies and Chicago Colleens were added to the League's roster in but lost their franchises by the end of that season. For the next two years the Colleens and Sallies became rookie training teams that played exhibition games and recruited new talent as they toured through the South and East. Highlights of these tours included contests in Washington, D.

In the first three years after World War II, teams often attracted between two and three thousand fans to a single game. One League highlight occurred when an estimated 10, people saw a Fourth of July double-header in South Bend, Indiana. However, attendance declined in the following years.

One of the reasons for decreasing attendance and a resulting decrease in revenues was the decentralization of the League. With no centralized control of publicity, promotion, player procurement, and equalization of player talent, the League began to break down. Facing eight antitrust lawsuits in , MLB requested Congress to pass a general immunity bill for all professional sports leagues.

However, no legislative action was recommended. In fact, the owners by this time had so thoroughly convinced the players of the necessity of the reserve clause to the very survival of MLB that several players testified in favor of the monopsonistic structure of the league. They cited it as necessary to maintain the competitive balance among the teams that made the league viable.

In the House Antitrust Subcommittee revisited the issue, once again recommending no change in the status quo. They would end up playing for the teams in the market in the best position to exploit their talents for the benefit of paying customers — in other words, the biggest markets: primarily New York.

During the decade preceding his study, the three New York teams consistently performed better than their rivals. It remained in the background, however, until the players hired Marvin Miller in to head the organization.

Hiring Miller, a former negotiator for the U. Miller began with a series of small gains for players, including increases in the minimum salary, pension contributions by owners and limits to the maximum salary reduction owners could impose. The first test of the big item — the reserve clause — reached the Supreme Court in Curt Flood, a star player for the St. Louis Cardinals, had been traded to the Philadelphia Phillies in Flood did not want to move from St. He would play out his contract in St.

Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ruled that Flood had no right to act in this way, and ordered him to play for Philadelphia, or not play at all. Flood chose the latter and sued MLB for violation of antitrust laws. The court acknowledged that the ruling that MLB was exempt from antitrust law was an anomaly and should be overturned, but it refused to overturn the decision itself, arguing instead that if Congress wanted to rectify this anomaly, they should do so. Therefore the court stood pat, and the owners felt the case was settled permanently: the reserve clause had once again withstood legal challenge.

They could not, however, have been more badly mistaken. While the reserve clause never has been overturned in a court of law, it would soon be drastically altered at the bargaining table, and ultimately lead to a revolution in the way baseball talent is dispersed and revenues are shared in the professional sports industry.

Curt Flood lost the legal battle, but the players ultimately won the war, and are no longer restrained by the reserve clause beyond the first two years of their major league contract. In a series of labor market victories beginning in the wake of the Flood decision in and continuing through the rest of the century, the players won the right to free agency i. Of course the biggest victory was free agency.

The right to bargain with other teams for their services changed the landscape of the industry dramatically. No longer were players shackled to one team forever, subject to the whims of the owner for their salary and status.

Now they were free to bargain with any and all teams. The impact on salaries was incredible. Over the long haul, the changes have been even more dramatic.

Of course, not all of that increase is due to free agency. Miller organized the players and unified them as no one had done before. The first test of their resolve came in , when the owners refused to bargain on pension and salary issues. The players responded by going out on the first league-wide strike in American professional sports history.

The strike began during spring training, and carried on into the season. The owners finally conceded in early April after nearly games were lost to the strike. The labor stoppage became the favorite weapon of the players, who would employ it again in , , and The latter strike cancelled the World Series for the first time since , and carried on into the season.

The owners preempted strikes in two other labor disputes, locking out the players in and After each work stoppage, the players won the concessions they demanded and fended off attempts by owners to reverse previous player gains, particularly in the areas of free agency and arbitration. From the first strike in through , every time the labor agreement between the two sides expired, a work stoppage ensued. In August of that pattern was broken when the two sides agreed to a new labor contract for the first time without a work stoppage.

The first player to become a free agent did so due to a technicality. In Catfish Hunter, a pitcher for the Oakland Athletics, negotiated a contract with the owner, Charles Finley, which required Finley to make a payment into a trust fund for Hunter on a certain date.

When Finley missed the date, and then tried to pay Hunter directly instead of honoring the clause, Hunter and Miller filed a complaint charging the contract should be null and void because Finley had broken it.

The case went to an arbitrator who sided with Hunter and voided the contract, making Hunter a free agent. In a bidding frenzy, Hunter ultimately signed what was then a record contract with the New York Yankees. Prior to the dawning of free agency, it was a rare circumstance for a player to get anything more than a one-year contract, and a guaranteed contract was virtually unheard of. If a player was injured or fell off in performance, an owner would slash his salary or release him and vacate the remainder of his contract.

The first real test of the reserve clause came in , when, on the advice of Miller, Andy Messersmith played the season without signing a contract. Dave McNally also refused to sign a contract, though he had unofficially retired at the time. In order to test the clause, which allowed teams to maintain contractual rights to players in perpetuity, Messersmith and McNally refused to sign contracts.

Their teams automatically renewed their contracts from the previous season, per the reserve clause. The argument the players put forth was that if no contract was signed, then there was no reserve clause. They argued that Messersmith and McNally would be free to negotiate with any team at the end of the season. The reserve clause was struck down by arbitrator Peter Seitz on Dec. Messersmith and McNally became the first players to challenge and successfully escape the reserve clause.

The baseball labor market changed permanently and dramatically in favor of the players, and has never turned back. The baseball labor market as it exists today is a result of bargaining between owners and players. Owners ultimately conceded the reserve clause and negotiated a short period of exclusivity for a team with a player.

The argument they put forward was that the cost of developing players was so high, they needed a window of time when they could recoup those investments. The existing situation allows them six years. A player is bound to his original team for the first six years of his MLB contract, after which he can become a free agent — though some players bargain away that right by signing long-term contracts before the end of their sixth year. During that six-year period however, players are not bound to the salary whims of the owners.

After their successful strike in , the players had increased their bargaining position substantially. The next year they claimed a major victory when the owners agreed to a system of salary arbitration for players who did not yet qualify for free agency. Arbitration was won by the players at in , and has since proved to be one of the costliest concessions the owners ever made.

Arbitration requires each side to submit a final offer to an arbitrator, who must then choose one or the other offer. The arbitrator may not compromise on the offers, but must choose one. Once chosen, both sides are then obligated to accept that contract.

Once eligible for arbitration, a player, while not a free agent, does stand to reap a financial windfall. If the other does not agree to go to arbitration, then the player becomes a free agent, and may bargain with any team.

If arbitration is accepted, then both sides are bound to accept the contract awarded by the arbitrator. In practice, most of the contracts are settled before they reach the arbitrator.

A player will file for arbitration, both sides will submit their final contract offers to the arbitrator, and then will usually settle somewhere in between the final offers. If they do not settle, then the arbitrator must hear the case and make a decision. Both sides will argue their point, which essentially boils down to comparing the player to other players in the league and their salaries.

The arbitrator then decides which of the two final offers is closer to the market value for that player, and picks that one. The owners, used to nearly a century of one-sided labor negotiations, quickly grew tired of the new economics of the player labor markets.

They went through a series of labor negotiators, each one faring as poorly as the next, until they hit upon a different solution. Beginning in , under the guidance of commissioner Peter Ueberroth, they tried collusion to stem the increase in player salaries. The strategy worked, for awhile. During the next two seasons, player salaries grew at lower rates and high profile free agents routinely had difficulty finding anybody interested in their services. The players filed a complaint, charging the owners with a violation of the labor agreement signed by owners and players in , which prohibited collusive action.

They filed separate collusion charges for each of the three seasons from , and won each time. The result was a return to unfettered free agency for the players, a massive financial windfall for the impacted players, a black eye for the owners, and the end of the line for Commissioner Ueberroth.

Economist Andrew Zimbalist calculated the degree of market exploitation for baseball players for the years , a decade after free agency began, and during the years of collusion, using a measure of the marginal revenue product of players. The marginal revenue product of a player is a measure of the additional revenue a team receives due to the addition of that player to the team.

This is done by calculating the impact of the player on the performance of the team, and the subsequent impact of team performance on total revenue. He found that on average, the degree of exploitation, as measured by the ratio of marginal revenue product to salary, declined each year, from 1. The degree of exploitation, however, was not uniform across players. Not surprisingly, it decreased as players obtained the leverage to bargain. So much is made of the farm system today and how the success or failure of an organization to build one is tied directly with their long-term success.

However, most people don't know where the farm systems came from. After the new century dawned, the American League made peace with the National and both settled into a comfortable competitive balance. Then, teams began to focus on how best to acquire talent. Rickey had an idea. Minor league teams had been bound to the majors by a major-minor agreement for some time.

Teams routinely bought players from minor league clubs and procedures were in place to assure compensation. If you were already buying players from certain clubs, why not form a partnership? Rickey began buying stock in various minor league clubs and tying them to his major league team, the St.

Louis Cardinals. This allowed Rickey to control each team's assets and move players between them as necessary.