Category
Business & Labor
Ownership, money, labor battles, governance, and the economics behind the game.
Branch Rickey Built the Farm System (and Then Broke the Color Line)
May 17, 2026
Branch Rickey made two decisions that changed baseball more than any other executive in the sport's history. The first was an innovation in business. The second was a moral act with economic consequences.
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The Federal League and the Supreme Court Decision That Made Baseball a Legal Monopoly
May 17, 2026
In 1914, a group of wealthy businessmen declared the Federal League a third major league. The war lasted two seasons. Its legal aftermath lasted a century.
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George Steinbrenner and the Business of Winning
May 17, 2026
Steinbrenner purchased the Yankees for $10 million in 1973. When he died in 2010, the franchise was worth over $1.6 billion. His legacy is contradictory, but no owner in modern baseball history matched his results.
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Kenesaw Mountain Landis and the Invention of the Commissioner
May 17, 2026
The owners needed a strongman. They found a federal judge who demanded absolute authority, banned the Black Sox for life, and maintained baseball's color line for 24 years.
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Minor League Baseball and the Players Nobody Pays
May 17, 2026
In 2019, a minor league player earning the typical salary of $1,100 per month took home approximately $5,500 before taxes for the entire season. Some qualified for food stamps. This was not an accident. It was a business model.
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How Baseball's Revenue Sharing Works (and Why Small Markets Still Struggle)
May 17, 2026
Revenue sharing redistributes money from high-revenue teams to low-revenue teams. Whether it works depends on whom you ask and what your definition of competitive balance looks like.
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The Rise and Fall of the Montreal Expos
May 17, 2026
The Expos had the best record in baseball when the 1994 strike hit. They never recovered. Montreal has been without baseball since 2004.
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The Owners' Secret Agreement
May 9, 2026
For three consecutive winters in the mid-1980s, major league baseball owners secretly agreed not to sign each other's free agents. The scheme was illegal, the damages totaled $280 million, and the consequences reshaped labor relations in the sport permanently.
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The All-American Girls Professional Baseball League
April 29, 2026
Philip Wrigley launched the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League in 1943 to fill empty wartime ballparks, and for twelve seasons it drew hundreds of thousands of fans to watch women play professional ball. The league folded in 1954 and was largely forgotten until a Hall of Fame exhibit and a Hollywood film brought it back.
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Bonds, McGwire, and the Summer of '98
April 29, 2026
Mark McGwire and Sammy Sosa chased Roger Maris in 1998 and saved baseball from the wreckage of the 1994 strike. Within a decade, the home runs that rescued the sport had become the evidence against it.
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The Curse of the Bambino
April 29, 2026
The Red Sox sold Babe Ruth to the Yankees in January 1920 and didn't win a World Series for the next 86 years. The drought produced so many near-misses, so many collapses in exactly the wrong moment, that it stopped looking like bad luck and started looking like something else.
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Free Agency and the Messersmith Decision
April 29, 2026
For a century, baseball's reserve clause allowed teams to control a player's career indefinitely. It took a Cardinals outfielder willing to sacrifice his own career, a Supreme Court loss, and two pitchers who played a season without contracts to break it.
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The Negro Leagues Were Major Leagues
April 29, 2026
For three decades, the Negro Leagues produced some of the best baseball ever played in the United States, built a parallel economy of black-owned teams and venues, and developed talent that white baseball refused to acknowledge until it could no longer afford to ignore.
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Moneyball and the Data Revolution
April 28, 2026
A night-shift security guard in Kansas started writing about baseball statistics in the 1970s. Three decades later, a small-market general manager used those ideas to build a 103-win team on a third of the Yankees' payroll.
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Pittsfield, 1791, and an Early U.S. Use of the Word "Baseball"
April 27, 2026
A Massachusetts bylaw from September 5, 1791 records one of the clearest early U.S. uses of the exact word 'baseball' in civic law, and it helps define the game's documentary timeline.
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