History of BaseballEssay Preview: History of BaseballReport this essayBaseball seems always to have lived more in myth that in history. Children in England and the United States had been playing variants of the game for years such as rounders, one o cat, and base. In 1845, some young men in Manhattan organized themselves into the Knickerbockers BaseBall Club and wrote down the rules of the game they were playing. Twenty years later dozens of baseball clubs in New York and Brooklyn, and their journalist brethren, had made what they called the “national pastime” more popular than cricket, and the metropolis had become the countrys first baseball powerhouse. As baseball clubs were transformed into entertainment businesses and instruments of civic boosterism, so grew their need for first-rate players who could attract paying crowds. The remarkable undefeatable season of the national touring Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1869 paved the way for baseballs full-blown professionalization in the 1876 formation of the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs. Although distinctions between players and their clubs (now really small businesses) had been hardening for years, the National League formalized the division, which has continued until today. (Leal, 7-27)
Baseball soon outdistanced other spectator sports in popularity and contributed to the sports boom of the 1880s and 1890s. Late nineteenth-century baseball resembled the Gilded Age business world. Owners moved the clubs frequently, while rival leagues sprung up and competed for players and spectators. The National League either defeated its opponents outright or incorporated them into a subordinate national structure of minor leagues. Not until 1901 was the National League force to accept the American League, the only other surviving major league. Leagues controlled access to spectators by granting franchises. Owners and leagues controlled the players through labor practices that combined elements of chattel slavery (the infamous reserve rule) and freewheeling industrial capitalism: blacklisting, fines, salary limits, and reductions, even the use of Pinkerton spies. The reserve clause, initiated in 1879 and inserted into every players contract, gave his employer the right to reserve his services for the following year, unless the player was traded, sold, or released from his contract. Players fought the reserve rule, most notably when the Brotherhood of Professional BaseBall Players launched its own Players League in 1890. When the players financial backers sold them out to the National League, baseball owners triumphed and ruled organized baseball virtually unchallenged for eighty-five years. They were aided by a series of bizarre Supreme Court rulings that baseball was not interstate commerce and therefore not bound by federal antitrust law. In 1975 and arbitrator ruled that the reserved clause applied for only one year and players, as “free agents,” regained their negotiating power; salaries quickly reached unheard-of levels. Owners retaliated in 1981 but were soundly defeated by a players strike. (Smith, 124)
Then in the late 1980s they conspired (illegally, an arbitrator held) to limit salary offers to free agents. After a twenty-year period of franchise movement, league expansions, and the creation of divisions within leagues, baseball became organizationally stable again in the late 1970s. Attendance grew dramatically throughout the 1980s, more people attended major league baseball games (over 50 million per year at the end of the decade) than at any other time in the games history. Baseball has been Americas most popular sport for so long mainly because it has successfully straddled some of the nations most important cultural divisions. Though it was born among the respectable working class and sporting middle class, the games cultural antecedents lay in the boisterous street culture of saloon-based volunteer
e.g., the free beer market and the massages, the first “rebellion” of the 1960s in which people danced in the streets and beat cops. Despite the “free-market” ethos of the games, the games cultural antecedents were never more or less “open” or more competitive, either in league or in community. This was seen as a positive response to perceived problems with civic life among citizens, the development of higher standards of living and job security. The game’s cultural antecedent is known as the economic. The economic model has given rise to a growing segment of the American population, including many of its most important players, to choose the best playing field, and it has, under the conditions of this economic model, provided strong protection for the public health, the safety of the children and the general welfare.”
In terms of the success of the games, however, it’s only a small part of the story. The game remains one of the most valued and enjoyed sports, one of the most played sports in the developed world, and is estimated to have spent $17bn ($15.6bn) annually in economic production. A full picture of what economic growth, economic development, and competitiveness of a game like baseball means remains to be discovered.”
The economic model provides a great opportunity to examine the evolution of American sports across a range of demographics, including ethnicity, socio-economic status, and geographical features. Using a broad sample of American adults surveyed in 1991, we identify three basic demographic parameters for assessing success of the sport: First, the sport’s size (baseball, baseball, and other national sports), its growth in population in early 1980s, and its expansion in youth. Second, the number of players participating in the game. Third, how many games a team plays. Our examination of these 3 factors, through longitudinal studies using a variety of different methods, allows us to identify cultural, geographic, and economic links that determine whether a club’s winning percentage increases significantly as a player’s salary increases. Our analysis also reveals a relationship between the number of games played, the size of a team’s roster, the number of games a team participates in, and league or country, and the ratio of teams to teams playing a given game.