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Gatekeepers Of Americana: Ownership's Neverending Quest For Control Of The Baseball Creed, Mitchell J. Nathanson

Mitchell J Nathanson

This article examines owner-player relations from the founding of the National League in 1876 to the present and concludes that the owners’ repeated refusal to negotiate with the players’ union throughout the 1970’s and early 1980’s were merely additional chapters in their ongoing quest to position themselves as the sole protectors of what has become known as the “baseball creed” and all that is symbolic of baseball as metaphor for traditional American values. In order to maintain their status as the lone gatekeepers of the American values supposedly embodied and taught by baseball, it has always been necessary for ownership …