Playing Hardball
In 1892, Andrew Carnegie’s steel plant at Homestead, Pennsylvania, across the Monongahela River from Pittsburgh, was booming while thousands of steelworkers were toiling there seven days a week 12 hours a day and enduring unsafe conditions and a 22 percent pay cut. The Homestead workers went on strike, leading to a 12-hour gun fight with 300 armed Pinkerton agents that killed nine workers and three guards.
Shortly after the Homestead battle, the Brooklyn Grooms baseball team arrived to play the Pittsburgh Pirates. Led by John Montgomery Ward, charismatic leader of the sport’s first players union, the Grooms were visiting Homestead to show solidarity with the strikers. Their escort was Pirate star pitcher Mark Baldwin. City and state authorities arrested strike leaders, charging them with conspiracy, riot, and murder. Alleging similar crimes, officials soon rounded up another 160 individuals, including Baldwin, who admitted having been present during the steelworks violence but only as a spectator. The Pittsburgh Dispatch printed rumors that Baldwin had “furnished his fellow citizens with two Winchester rifles on the memorable morning of the battle.” For lack of evidence, Baldwin avoided trial. A week later, Pennsylvania Governor Robert Pattison declared Homestead under martial law, and 8,000 state militiamen arrived to back Carnegie, who staffed his factory with non-union workers and broke the strike.
The Homestead strike showcased a new class of worker activist amid the labor turmoil of the Gilded Age: professional baseball players. Baldwin’s roots were in Homestead, where he grew up a steelworker’s son and steadfast labor supporter. At Pennsylvania State University and then with amateur teams, he pitched and played shortstop. In 1886 he signed with the Chicago White Stockings of the National League, becoming a star until he demanded a raise and owner Albert Spalding fired him. Blackballed by every team in the league, Baldwin joined the Columbus Solons of the rival American Association. He bolted again in 1890, when ballplayers themselves formed the Players League, made up of teams jointly owned by its athletes and
