Major League Rebels

Robert Elias is Dean’s Scholar and Professor of Politics and Legal Studies at the University of San Francisco. His baseball books include The Empire Strikes Out: How Baseball Sold U.S. Foreign Policy and Promoted the American Way Abroad; Baseball and the American Dream: Race, Class, Gender and the National Pastime; The Deadly Tools of Ignorance; and Baseball Rebels. His baseball essays have appeared in Nine, Jacobin, Baseball Research Journal, Pacific Historical Review, Diplomatic History, International Journal of the History of Sport, and Cooperstown Symposium on Baseball and American Culture. He’s also been published in the Washington Post, The Progressive, The Humanist, Social Policy, Peace Review, Counterpunch, Transatlantica, and many other periodicals and books. He is a longtime Society of American Baseball Research and Baseball Reliquary member. He lives in Mill Valley, CA, near San Francisco.Peter Dreier is E.P. Clapp Distinguished Professor of Politics and founding chair of the Urban and Environmental Policy Department at Occidental College. A former newspaper reporter, community organizer, and senior policy advisor to Boston Mayor Ray Flynn, he has authored, coauthored, or edited eight books, including The 100 Greatest Americans of the Twentieth Century: A Social Justice Hall of Fame and Place Matters: Metro Politics for the Twenty-First Century. A member of SABR and the Baseball Reliquary, Dreier has published hundreds of articles, op-ed columns, and essays on baseball, politics and social movements for the New York Times, Washington Post, Los Angeles Times, the Nation, American Prospect, Dissent, New Republic, Huffington Post, Salon, Talking Points Memo, the Progressive, and elsewhere. He frequently appears in the national media and has been interviewed by Bill Moyers, Travis Smiley, Rachel Maddow, and Bill O’Reilly, among others. He lives in Pasadena, CA.

• Foreword, by Bill Lee IntroductionResisting Labor Exploitation1. The Players Revolt Against Gilded Age Baseball 2. Challenging Baseball’s Corporate Monopoly 3. Ending Indentured ServitudeContesting the American Empire4. Resisting War, Fighting for Peace5. The Latino Battle Against Baseball Colonialism and Racism 6. Protesting America’s War on Terrorism Conclusion7. Rebels for All Seasons8. Baseball Justice: An Unfinished AgendaIndexAbout the Authors

Since baseball’s inception as a professional sport, the entities that control it have sought to wring the maximum profit from the game, argue Elias and Dreier. Their book outlines myriad ways in which MLB team owners and league officials have manipulated laws and ignored morality in favor of money—often at players’ expense. Elias and Dreier also recount moments when players have countered major-league machinations. For instance, in the 1880s, hall-of-famer John Montgomery Ward organized possibly the first professional sports players union, in an ultimately failed attempt to secure fair wages for himself and his peers; the union hoped to do away with the reserve clause that forever tied players to a given team. Ninety years later, All-Star center fielder Curt Flood took a bold stance that helped bring about free agency and a new, stronger players union, headed by the extremely competent Marvin Miller. The book also examines the MLB’s decades of alignment with and tacit support of the U.S. military. Elias and Drier have exceptional insight on behind-the-scenes labor fights in the MLB; a fine depiction of capitalist avarice. A must for baseball fans.