Customer Reviews

Baseball's Radical for All Seasons: A Biography of John Montgomery Ward (American Sports History Series)

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One of the most contentious issues throughout the history of major league baseball is employee relations. The owners and the players have been fighting it out throughout the more than the 150 years of professional baseball. Most of that time the owners have had the upper hand, but it might not have turned out that way had John Montgomery Ward gotten his way. He led an effort in the 1880s and 1890s to gain more authority, and thereby more money, for the players in the National League. It failed, but the story is fascinating; modestly told in this short biography.

Ward deserves better. His off field activities are far more important than anything he did on the diamond, and author David Stevens missed an opportunity to analyze in depth his employee relations efforts, especially his attempt to form a union and the creation of the ill-fated Player's League. Of course, Stevens talks about these efforts, but I had hoped for a more in-depth, scholarly discussion. For such an analysis I would recommend "Never Just a Game: Players, Owners, and American Baseball to 1920" (University of North Carolina Press, 1994) by Robert Fredrick Burk. There are also other better biographical works on Ward, including a superb biography by Bryan Di Salvatore, "A Clever Base-Ballist: The Life and Times of John Ward Montgomery" published by Pantheon Books in 1999.