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This chapter examines one of the most contentious issues in professional sports leagues that were tackled at the Congressional hearings in 1951 and 1957: player rights. The reserve clause and the player draft allowed owners to minimize competition for players and therefore to have salary-setting power over their players, giving them discretion in how much they paid them. Owners and their commissioners employed novel arguments supporting the necessity of having the reserve clause. This chapter first provides an overview of the sorry state of player salaries in professional team sports before considering the owners' explicit use of the reserve clause and how players began challenging it. It concludes with a discussion of Congress's inquiry into player rights, the challenges to the player draft, the formation of players' associations, the outcome of the hearings, and the inquiry's impact on owner-player relations.

This chapter examines Major League Baseball's (MLB) drug testing policy under Commissioner Peter Ueberroth, the man who inherited Bowie Kuhn's responsibilities and with them baseball's drug problems. Under Ueberroth's guidance, the league appeared to enjoy a remarkable renaissance. Nevertheless, there was something illusory about the success of Ueberroth's tenure: he struck out on the issue of drugs. This chapter considers Ueberroth's mandatory drug testing policy as part of his campaign to eliminate drugs from baseball in the wake of the Pittsburgh drug trial. It also discusses the league's joint drug policy with the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), along with the dispute between the union and team owners over the issue of drug testing. The test case for the MLBPA's position would stem from the proliferation of contract clauses requiring voluntary drug testing.

This chapter explores how the collective ethos represented by groups such as the Players Association was threatened by another American ethos, one that had more deeply entrenched roots dating back to the nineteenth century, that itself felt threatened by the collective movement. This ethos—the individualistic, “positive thinking” movement—rejected the critical, often grim portrait of America drawn by the collectivists, and chose instead to embrace an optimistic worldview that depended upon the willful ignorance of the types of inconvenient facts often highlighted by the collectivists in their quest to bring about social change. The clash of these competing visions of American life would result in the culture wars that led a majority of Americans to turn against the civil rights and Players Association movements, and into the sunnier outlook of the positive thinkers.

This book charts the history of drug and alcohol use in Major League Baseball (MLB). It aims to recover the story of baseball and drugs from the tyranny of baseball mythology by analyzing the perceived problem of drug use, with particular emphasis on illegal recreational and performance-enhancing drugs, in MLB. It examines how the drug testing movement, for two decades the persona non grata of professional baseball, surged to the forefront of Major League thought following the congressional hearings of 2005, culminating in the 2006 establishment of the Joint Drug Prevention and Treatment Program between the league and the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA). The new testing protocols were buoyed by the findings of the Mitchell Report, which explicitly warned against retroactive punishment—the league could not slash and burn its way to integrity by torching past transgressions—and instead focused on the need for diligence in the future.

This chapter discusses how, after being cut from the Chicago Bears, Bob Thomas was signed to the Detroit Lions' roster for their 1982 season opener against the Bears. But just as things were looking up for both Thomas and his new team, the inevitable reared its ugly head on September 21 as the NFL Players Association went on strike. Upcoming games were stricken from the schedule for the foreseeable future. After fifty-seven days, the two warring sides finally came to an agreement on November 16. The seven games missed from the regular season would not be made up, but an expanded playoff format of sixteen teams would be granted to earn back the interest of the fans and to make up for lost revenue. However, when the Lions resumed official team practices, Thomas was let go. Thomas packed his football gear and returned to Lisle, readying himself to continue his law work.