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Major League Baseball players had few rights before the signing of the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports in 1968. They didn’t get all of their current rights all at once, either: the battle was, and is, an ongoing one. Before the Players Association, before Marvin Miller, there were other attempts to organize baseball players against the bosses. In this series, we’ll investigate each of those attempts, and suss out what went wrong. Part 1 can be found here.
After the successes — but inevitable failure — of the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players and its player-led Players League, the National League was, in essence, the only game in town for professional baseball. It was the sole major league, at least, as it had vanquished the Players League by working with the capitalists the players had relied on to, well, not do that, and the combination of biggest pockets and best players put an end to the American Association’s chances of ever catching up. From 1892 through 1900, the NL’s monopoly on major league baseball was unassailable.
Continue reading “The History of Baseball Unionization: The Players Protective Association”