cover image Balls and Strikes: The Money Game in Professional Baseball

Balls and Strikes: The Money Game in Professional Baseball

Kenneth M. Jennings. Praeger Publishers, $117.95 (273pp) ISBN 978-0-275-93441-5

Impressively researched and well written, this valuable study by a business professor at the University of North Florida opens with a history of labor-management negotiations from the early days of organized baseball in 1869 to the present, with emphasis on the period after 1966, when Marvin Miller became president of the Major League Baseball Players' Association. Jennings traces the erosion of the reserve clause and the rise of arbitration in salary disputes, examining the participants in negotiations--players, owners, managers, agents, even commissioners--and showing the stake each has in the money game. Many striking points are made, i.e., there is no discrimination in salaries of minority players and there is little relationship between pay and performance. (Apr.)