What does it mean to be paid to play a game?
Author Andrew Forbes on the relationship between baseball and labor
Assembly Press
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Andrew Forbes is a Canadian baseball fan. It isn’t all that different from being an American baseball fan, he says, except for the fact that all sports coverage will go out of its way to make a headline about hockey before getting to baseball news - and you hear two anthems at the start of games.
But more relevant to our topic (though Canadian baseball fans may make for an interesting topic for the future), Forbes has a new baseball book out today. Field Work is a collection of essays about labor and baseball, part memoir, part criticism, and part history. In the book, you will find connections between Shohei Ohtani’s phantom plane ride to Toronto and Curt Flood’s actions against the reserve clause, between a man who wanted to be a doctor and the legend who could strike out Babe Ruth. In the following interview, we chat about where the idea for Field Work came from and the intersections of professionalism and play in the sport.
Why did you choose labor as an angle to approach baseball?
That came about for two reasons. One was an artist Amelie Mancini who had a postcard series years ago about baseball players with odd jobs. A friend of mine sent me one about a not particularly famous ballplayer named Ted Wilks, who worked in a power plant. It put me to thinking about what a lot of marginal players did to stay near the game.
Then I was reading Steve Steinberg’s biography of the pitcher Urban Shocker, and just in passing, he mentions Hubert Pruett, who was a pitcher who ended up with the Browns. Hub did not have an extremely distinguished career in baseball, but if he had one thing notable attached to his name, it was that for a couple of years, this rather diminutive lefty had a really surprising ability to strike out Babe Ruth. The more I dug into him, it got more interesting. It turned out that Pruett's lifelong goal and driving ambition was not to be a pro ballplayer but to fund his studies. He ended up doing so, slowly earning a medical degree and becoming a doctor.
That got me further thinking about the relationship. We think of baseball as something that people would do anything to do as a profession, but for others, it may in fact have been the means to a different end.
I was really struck by your essay on Pujols and the failure of his body towards the end of his career. There seems to be something to be said about the amount of time that can be used to do this very specific type of physical labor. Why do you think this isn't talked more about in the labor sphere?
There may be a very basic reason and that's that we, as organisms, don't like to think about our own physical development. But you're right. When we talk about any human being worth half a billion dollars (which is what contracts are looking like now), you have to temper that by understanding that the window of earning for most of these players is very tight.
What we don't talk about is that it is sunk cost for most of these owners, recognizing the last four or five years of one of these contracts. But that's the cost of doing business. And there may also be the secondary thought, that given the lifespan of executives in Major League Baseball, “It won't be me sticking around to see the end of it. It'll be somebody else's Albatross.”
There's also the window at the other end, which is young players, the way that they're so quickly caught up into this industry that seeks to professionalize what they're doing to – cynically - to extract a great deal of money from their parents. But to use promises of the possibility of the D1 baseball scholarship and getting drafted and maybe one day making it to the majors - to expand that window and make that period of when they would be useful to other people in this youth sports industrial complex that much bigger.
I’m in Canada, and I think that a lot of what we see here mimics the systems in place for youth hockey. I've never coached kids in the States, but it seems to be drafting off of the systems in place to take very young hockey players and baseball players, and convince them and their parents that they're only tens of thousands of dollars away from having a real shot at a spot in the draft and making their way through the minors and making the big leagues.
I assistant coach players, 12, 13, 14 years old, what we call a Tier 2 team, which is to say that there was a more competitive level above our guys, but they were a little too good to play house league ball. A lot of these guys, their families, were spending thousands of dollars over the winter to send them to prep academies and finishing school, catchers camp. I would never want to stomp on anybody's dreams, but any dispassionate observer would have to say there is really little to zero chance that you're going to be able to play beyond high school.
But the dream persists and people of means are happy to pour money into this hole to give their kids the illusion of the possibility that they will become big leaguers.
It's really interesting to recognize something as a profession while it is also a game and most people in the world interact with professional baseball as entertainment, and how all that affects how the economies of the whole thing…
The position of the gatekeepers of baseball for many decades was that you should be lucky that we'll even consider paying you to do this. But it's hard to know when you as a citizen stop having to pay to play a game and instead get paid by the game.
The positive changes that we've seen in the way that Major League Baseball treats Minor Leaguers in the last few years, brought fourth by the players union, you no longer have to live an abject poverty or have three jobs in the offseason just to make those unearning months during the summer feasible. We may have shifted where the guillotine is, but there still seems to be a real threat of insolvency hanging over people chasing that dream. And in baseball especially, there's such a long period of gestation for a career. It's not like in the NBA you'll get drafted and then you can be on a bench or maybe even starting the next year.
I don't think it's permanently settled, and I think that Major League Baseball owners being what they are now and have always been, they will be looking for ways to claw some of that back. That's just the inherent tension in the relationship.
Was there anything you saw in your research that was surprising about this project?
I think that the more I dug into the reserve clause and the struggle against it from its very first appearance in the late 19th century… its ability to ruin careers and lives. You know Curt Flood’s phrase, ballplayers were well paid slaves. And decades before Curt Flood, not well, but paid, slaves. It's kind of astonishing when you dig into individual stories, both of people ground up in those gears and people who fought against them and were unable to change anything for decades until Flood. It didn't work immediately after Flood's court case, but I think it was the tipping point. It began the turn of public opinion that made it impossible for the game to go forward under the old system.
I think it's safe to say that without Flood’s courage in sacrificing what he thought probably was going to be a year or two of his career, but really in effect ended up being the rest of his career, I don't think any of that comes to pass, not within that time frame. It may have taken another decade or two.
Are there any other historical turning points that you would that you can find in MLB labor history?
The COVID season was a real strange reset for employment relationships globally, including baseball now, in the relationship between Major League Baseball and NPB in Japan and how those players are given the freedom to move back and forth. It's an ongoing history full of important moments that obviously isn't over yet.
Field Work is published by Assembly Press and is now available at bookstores and online.
