Baseball in Union Suits

Most sport writers played it for laughs. They quipped about Second Basemen's Local 307 and overtime pay for extra-inning games. But the idea of labor unions in baseball was catching. It was no joke for the Pittsburgh Pirates; over 90% of them seemed dead set on wearing a union label. Last week, after ten days of hemming & hawing, Pirate President Bill Benswanger bowed to the spirit of the times, agreed to negotiate with the players' union.

Unionism was big talk in other big-league locker rooms. Never before had ball parks been so crowded. Owners' profits were up; hot-dog vendors sold more hot dogs; everybody seemed to be making more money but the ballplayers. Westbrook Pegler, no union lover, but once a baseball writer himself, was sympathetic to the players: "The owners will have some of themselves to blame. Not all, but enough of them, have been harsh and arrogant, mean in money matters and completely ruthless in imposing on the youth of great players such as Dizzy Dean who used himself up long before his time."

The Waiting Game. The man who is organizing baseball's union is letting the players do some of the work. Bob Murphy, 35, studied law at Harvard, has never played pro ball. Until six months ago he was a labor-relations expert on management's side. When several of his baseball-playing friends told him their troubles, he advised them, half kidding: "Form a union." Before Bob Murphy knew it, he had formed the American Baseball Guild. Some of the boys spread the word at spring-training camps. One of their toughest jobs was selling ballplayers the idea of paying 50-c--a-week dues.

Bob Murphy hasn't budged from Boston. He simply waits for teams to come to town to play the Boston Braves and the Red Sox; the visitors are usually curious enough to go out to his place to hear his story. His main talking points: 1) a minimum wage of $7,500 a year, which sounds good to lesser lights who seldom finish up a season with enough carfare to get home; 2) 50% of the sale price to go to a player when he is sold to another club. Not until his union is good & strong does Murphy intend to do anything about baseball's reserve clause--the one-way contract which binds the player for his baseball career but says a club owner can fire him on ten days' notice.

Murphy, a shrewd, quiet bachelor, picked the Pittsburgh Pirates to work on first because "I wanted a big union town." He claims members in ten or eleven clubs, says he intends to notify owners of five other teams, representing both major leagues, that the union wants to talk shop. After he got the big leagues under control Murphy figured the minor leagues (with their 6,000-odd players) could stand some organizing. Then, said he, the ballplayers could fire him if they wanted to, but he didn't think they would.

Baseball's slaveys were working up to a double play in their squeeze on management. In on the play: the Pasquel brothers' Mexican League. Last week three members of the league-leading St. Louis Cardinals decided not to wait for collective bargaining. One was barrel-chested Max Lanier, southpaw pride of the Cardinals and just about the best pitcher in the National League. In Manhattan last week, he and Cards Lou Klein and Fred Martin looked up mustachioed Bernardo Pasquel, were promised many pesos, left a note on the pillow saying they were Mexico-bound.

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