Sport: Baseball at the Bar

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The men who run baseball had more to worry about last week than who would play second base. Three black-robed U.S. Court of Appeals judges, sitting in as umpires on a $300,000 damage suit, prepared to call a play that could really hurt. In effect, baseball was told that its player contracts might be violating the U.S. antitrust laws and making "peons" out of professional ballplayers at the same time. Since baseball had been writing the same kind of contract for two generations, it was a little like being told, after years of married life, that the wedding wasn't legal after all.

The heart of the matter seemed to be a bit of contract fine print that club owners like to call the cornerstone of big-time baseball: the so-called "reserve clause" that binds a player to his club for his baseball life—or until the club chooses to trade, sell or sack him. Purpose: to prevent a few rich clubs from hiring all the talent—as they well might if each ballplayer were always free to sell his services in the highest market. Cornerstone or not, two out of three judges decided that the reserve clause looked like peonage. They ordered the lower court to look into the Gardella case, which had been tossed out of court on its first time up.

Dangerous Dan. For Plaintiff Daniel ("Dangerous Dan") Gardella, the word from the bench was the best news in a long time. As a wartime outfield fill-in for the New York Giants, Dan Gardella had never done anything to get himself into baseball's hall of fame (though he hit 18 home runs for the Giants in 1945). One of his chief distinctions was off-the-field acrobatics—he could crawl out a hotel window and dangle from the ledge by his fingertips. Three years ago, after a spring training row with the Giants, he stormed off to play, for more money, with the Mexican League (TIME, March 11, 1946) and was suspended from organized U.S. baseball for five years.

Then Dan Gardella tired of Mexican baseball after one season, and tried to climb back. Complains Gardella: "Not only did organized baseball blacklist me, but it wouldn't permit me to earn a living in semi-pro ball . . . He filed suit against the Giants, against Baseball Commissioner Albert B. ("Happy") Chandler and the major & minor leagues.

"Virtual Slavery?" Happy Chandler's attitude, expressed last week, was that "no major leaguer makes less than $5,000 a year and some make up to $100,000. If you call that peonage, then a lot of us would like to be in it." But Gardella had one answer to that: his salary with the Giants had ranged from $1,850 to $4,000. Judge Jerome Frank of the court of appeals had another: "Only the totalitarian-minded will believe that higher pay excuses virtual slavery."

In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court had ruled that baseball was not engaged in interstate commerce, and therefore was out of the reach of antitrust laws. But now baseball was raking in big money from radio and television. Did that make the game interstate commerce? The appeals court wanted the lower court to settle that one too.