Boston and Billings: the reserve clause connection
If you’re a reasonably astute baseball fan, you know who Dave McNally is and what he accomplished. To refresh your memory, the Billings native won 181 games for the Baltimore Orioles and three more games for the Montreal Expos before he retired from baseball and returned to his hometown to become co-owner of the Archie Cochrane Ford dealership with his brother Jim.
And if you truly know baseball, you know that Dave played a lead role 50 years ago in the Seitz arbitration case, perhaps the most significant sports labor case in history. The ruling in that case ended in favor of McNally and fellow pitcher Andy Messersmith. It overturned baseball’s reserve clause, which had been in effect for a century and which tied players to the team that originally signed them to a big-league contract. Thus, players had no real power to negotiate for a higher salary or to seek a spot on another team. With the reserve clause gone, players gained the right of free agency, and soon they were signing contracts for millions of dollars.
That’s the landscape of workplace fairness that McNally helped usher in. And it’s the theme of my upcoming biography of him, Dave McNally: the Montanan who Revolutionized Baseball.
But unless you’re really a baseball history nut, I’ll bet that you don’t know who Arthur Soden is. Neither did I until I stumbled on a reference to him in a YouTube video about McNally’s role in liberating players from the reserve clause.
Who was Arthur Soden? He was a Boston businessman and president of a Beantown baseball team in the National League for 30 years, starting in 1876. And he’s the man who devised the reserve clause, according to his obituary in the Boston Globe on August 14, 1925, soon after his death at age 82.
Briefly, here’s what was happening in the 1870s at the dawn of major league baseball. Before 1876, Boston had teams in the National Association of Ball Players and the National Association of Professional Ball Players. As the Globe put it,“(t)he selling of (gambling) pools, corruption of players by gamblers and contract jumping by the players–which at that time was called ‘revolving’–practically wrecked those organizations.”
The “revolving” stopped when the National League came into being,“but the gamblers stuck like leaches,” according to the Globe. In 1877, betters conspired with four players to throw games. NL President William A. Hulbert investigated and got enough evidence of wrongdoing to gain confessions from two players who implicated the other two. All four were blacklisted for life, and baseball was spared from open gambling until the Black Sox scandal of 1919.
Meanwhile, Soden found success as head of the Boston baseball club. The team regularly won championships, due in no small part to Soden’s plan for keeping talent in his and other owners’ folds.
During his first year as president, Soden “realized that no one would care to invest money in the business when clubs had no rights in players which would hold the m for the following year.” His solution was what was first called the reserve list, which the obituary called “the chief stabilizer in the baseball business.” When the plan started, clubs could reserve only five players, so they concentrated on their most valuable ones, But over time, the scope of the plan grew to cover every player on a team’s roster.
Since Dave died from cancer in 2002, I can’t ask him if he ever heard of Soden. But now I know, and so do you, about the connection between a 19th century man in Boston and a 20th century man in Billings that resulted in an earthquake in America’s game.