The Later Years of John Montgomery Ward

John Montgomery Ward, one of the early masters of the curve ball, is also credited with developing the raised pitcher’s mound. He devised many infield techniques as well, including signaling for pitchouts to prevent stolen bases and using the intentional walk to increase chances for a double play.

When Ward retired after the 1894 season, he had compiled impressive credentials as a pitcher: a 158-102 record, an earned run average of 2.10 (still fourth best on the all-time list), 244 complete games out of 261 started, and a lifetime strikeout-to-walk ratio of nearly four to one. Having made the successful transition from pitcher to everyday player in 1884, he amassed 2,123 hits, stole 504 bases, and put together a batting average of .278.

Yet it took till 1964 before Ward was voted to a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame. Given the baseball establishment’s historically harsh treatment of dissenters, there seems little doubt that Ward’s delayed recognition had its roots in his role as mastermind of the revolt of 1890.

The detailed story of the single season of the Players League need not be told here. The Players League outdrew the National League at the gate, but its backers panicked when faced with losses greater than they had expected. The NL war committee, headed by the redoubtable monopolist Albert G. Spalding, hid the senior circuit’s own substantial losses from their inexperienced rivals until the revolt was over.

After performing heroically for the Brooklyn team during the 1890 season-he hit .369 with 207 hits and 134 runs scored-Ward tried desperately to keep his new league together. When he failed to gain player representation on the negotiating committee which presided over the Players League demise, Ward asked a question that reverberates through the corridors of baseball history to this very day:

“Do these gentlemen wish to go on record as saying that the occupation of a ballplayer bars him from business association with respectable men?”

Beginning in 1891 the National League ruled the roost again. By 1892 the other major league, the American ,Association, had folded, with four of its teams joining the Nationals to form a league of twelve. There could be no blacklist of the Players League veterans because virtually all the stars had joined the rebels. Salaries were cut, however, and a renewal clause was added to the standard contract of1891, which the owners hoped would take the place of the more indefinite reserve stipulation.

John Montgomery Ward spent two years with the Brooklyn Nationals and then finished his playing days with the Giants in 1893 and 1894, leading the second place New Yorkers to a victory over the pennant-winning Orioles in the 1894 Temple Cup Series.

Ward’s story as a baseball personage was far from finished. He did become a leading amateur golfer in his last years, which has led historian Harold Seymour to declare that Ward adopted the attitudes of the upper class after his rebellious youth. The story of Ward’s later years is actually far more complex and interesting than that.

In the fall of1895, one year after his retirement, Ward made the sports pages again with the announcement of his desire to be removed from the reserve list of the Giants. Many baseball people saw this as Ward’s ploy to free himself of his obligations to the Giants so that he could name his price and choose a new team for a comeback. “Tradition and precedent,” editorialized the weekly Sporting Life, dictated that Ward remain Giants’ property. Ward denied that he planned to return to the active list. “While I am not yet making a baseball salary as a lawyer,” he told the press, “I am doing better every month. I am entirely satisfied that I shall not return to baseball unless my circumstances change materially.”

While Ward was becoming a successful corporate lawyer in New York-numbering among his clients the Brooklyn Rapid Transit company-he kept his interest in baseball alive by representing both individual players and the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues, the minor league body which was formed in 1901. During these years, Ward successfully represented fireball pitcher Amos Rusie in his suit for back pay against penurious Giants’ owner Andrew Freedman. Rusie had to hold out the entire 1896 season before the other National League owners chipped in and paid the wages due the pitcher. Ward also won back pay for Fred Pfeffer, Chicago’s star second baseman, although the case dragged on through the courts for eleven years.

In representing shortstop George Davis, Ward dealt with a case that would eventually cripple his chances of becoming the chief executive of the National League. Davis, whose twenty-year career included 2,688 hits and a .297 lifetime average, left the Giants after 1901 to join the White Sox of the new American League. He had signed a two-year contract with the White Sox, but after 1902 and the impending peace agreement between the two leagues, he decided he wanted to return to the Giants.

Davis appeared in four games for New York in 1903 before Ban Johnson, president of the American League, got a temporary injunction restraining him from playing with the Giants. The Giants had offered Davis $6,300 a year for each of two years, compared to the White Sox’ $4,000 one-year offer for 1903. The Giants argued that they were within their rights to offer Davis a contract since they had options on both 1902 and 1903 in their original 1901 contract.

Davis had already sought legal counsel from Ward, his former manager, who had approved of his jumping to Chicago. Although Ward considered the Chicago contract valid, he sympathized with Davis’s desire to return to New York and to earn more money. His advice was for Davis to ask Chicago for expense money to go to training camp. When that request was turned down, he advised Davis to report to the Giants. In the face of the injunction, though, there was little Davis could do. He sat out the entire 1903 season and afterwards was awarded to Chicago by the new National Commission, headed by a close friend of Ban Johnson’s, Cincinnati Reds’ president Garry Herrmann. The White Sox had won, but they had to payout $2,800 in legal and other expenses, an indignity Ban Johnson never forgot.

In the fall of 1909, when Ward was put forward by a strong but not controlling faction of National League owners for the league presidency, Johnson made it clear he would resign from the National Commission rather than accept Ward. Two club owners, Pittsburgh’s Barney Dreyfuss and Cincinnati’s Herrmann, told the press they would join Johnson in a ten-team American League rather than accept Ward as president. The anti-Ward owners made public Johnson’s letter of late November 1909 which branded Ward’s action in the Davis affair “clearly conspiracy.” Johnson went on:

It is far from our purpose to say, or even suggest, who the National League should select as its President, but common sense, and the interests of other parties to the National Agreement, should be considered if the present cordial relations are to continue.

For his part, Ward kept a low profile. His backing came from the controversial owner of the Cubs, Charles Murphy, an advocate of syndicate baseball, which many followers of the game feared could move players at whim from strong to weak franchises. The two New York magnates were solidly behind Ward, although their reasons were basically negative. Brooklyn’s Charles Ebbetts was peeved at what he considered the leniency of the previous president toward umpires who made anti-Brooklyn decisions. The Giants’ john T. Brush, no favorite of Ward’s in earlier years, had a long-standing enmity toward Ban Johnson.

The outcome remained in doubt. Sam Crane, a rare former player among the sporting scribes, asserted naively, “Ward is a lawyer of standing and repute, and there has long been a feeling among the magnates that a disciple of Blackstone should be at the head of the organization.”

Evidently, the feeling was not overwhelming. The first three ballots showed a 4-4 deadlock. At that point Ward laid down a public challenge to Garry Herrmann: “I am willing to submit the question as to my action in that [Davis] case to any reputable attorney he may name,” Ward declared. “If Mr. Herrmann’s selection says that I did anything contrary to right I will withdraw at once from the race for president of the league, provided Mr. Herrmann will withdraw that objection to me if the decision is in my favor.”

The same day that Ward went public, Ban Johnson cabled a characteristically shrewd message to the National League meeting. Wiring from Syracuse on his way back from the much smoother American League meeting, he wrote:

This should indicate forcibly to you and your colleagues that we do not wish to interfere or embarrass to the slightest degree your organization in the election of an officer.

Johnson knew that the deadlock was permanent and that even this display of gall would produce no more supporting votes for Ward. After one more tie vote, Ward withdrew his name from nomination, and a compromise candidate, former umpire Thomas Lynch, was elected the next president of the National League. (Ward later sued Johnson for $50,000 in libel damages. In 1911 Federal District Judge Learned Hand ruled in Ward’s favor and awarded him $1,000.)

As the senior circuit closed up shop after its hectic meeting, it hurriedly adopted a rule that allowed the removal of waivers on a player claimed by another club. The American League already had this regulation. John Montgomery Ward would soon rue this edict as well as his failed candidacy. For at the winter meetings of 1911, Ward appeared as the new president of Boston’s National League club, soon to be nicknamed the Braves in honor of the Tammany Hall connections of its owner, New York contractor James B. Gaffney.

Ward pledged to find local backers of the Braves, and he began work on increasing the number of grandstand seats. But he inherited a team that had finished last the previous season despite having players with five of the eleven top batting averages in the league. Ward counted on the 45-year-old Cy Young for pitching help in 1912, but Young’s career was over; he never appeared in a 1912 contest. Ward announced that he was building with young players, and he signed the colorful young infielder Walter (Rabbit) Maranville. But when the Braves sought help through the waiver list, every player Ward claimed was removed. “It looks like every man for himself, and the Old Boy take the hindmost,” Ward commented ruefully.

The Braves never were a factor in the 1912 race, dropping quickly to last place and “going from worse to Worcester,” as one local scribe put it. Ward did not finish out the season, resigning at the end of July to return to New York. Many writers thought that his heart was more in golf and that he lacked the ability to communicate with the younger players. The Sporting News editorialized in a piece called “The Curtain on Mr. Ward” that he had been depriving players of drinking water in the dugout and liniment in the clubhouse. “His head and heart [were] woefully lacking,” it declared, referring to him as “a shattered idol.”

Ward’s career in the baseball limelight was still not over. On the surface, he seemed to be endorsing the status quo when he testified in Washington in the spring of1913. He spoke against federal regulation of baseball for antitrust violations. “Baseball is now under the direction of an autocratic trust, but it is good that it is,” Ward told the solons. “Baseball is something which cannot in my opinion be discussed by legislators or judges. There are some judges who are fans, I know, but the whole idea of baseball is such that it is difficult to reduce it to legal terms.”

Yet in less than a year Ward was involved with a new “outlaw” league, serving as business manager of the Brookfeds, the Brooklyn franchise in the Federal League. Actually, there is no great contradiction between Ward’s testimony and his connection with the new Federal League. While Ward distrusted politicians’ knowledge and motives in probing sports, he had faith in American businessmen to know a good market and to develop it. With baseball and American cities both booming in the years at the edge of World War I, Ward believed there was room for a third and maybe even a fourth major league.

At the end of 1914, the first year of Federal head-to-head competition with the existing major leagues, Ward compared its progress favorably with the American League in its first year. More players, he noted, had jumped in one Federal season than in the first two American campaigns. Furthermore, he asserted that the new league “now has enough established stars to proceed in the development of young players,” which,as a long-time advocate of minor league baseball, he understood was the key to long-range success.

Ward left the Brookfeds early in 1915, having made only a short-term commitment to the new organization because of the pressure of his law practice. It is probably true that he had some doubts about the antitrust suit the Federals brought in 1915. This suit would make a national figure and later a commissioner out of the presiding federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis. He also disapproved in principle of long-term contracts for players, which he felt sapped their initiative and their motive to excel.

Yet he made it clear that he believed in the right of ballplayers to go with the highest bidder if their contract was deemed one-sided and unjust by the courts. He applauded New York State Judge Herbert Bissell’s condemnation in June 1914 of the ten-day clause in Hal Chase’s standard contract. He approved of that jurist’s proclamation that Chase was within his rights to turn the clause on its head and give the team ten days’ notice. Ward surfaced briefly as an associate counsel in 1916 during one of the early hearings in the famous Baltimore Federal League antitrust suit that ended in 1922 with the Supreme Court’s historic exemption of baseball from the antitrust laws.

Following his Federal League flirtation, Ward stayed out of baseball for the last ten years of his life. He died after contracting pneumonia during a 1925 hunting trip in Georgia. It may be idle to speculate on what might have happened if he had held a place in baseball’s highest councils during those years. The course of the game’s bizarre business history, especially its labor-management relations, might have been different. Certainly, Ward understood the travail of the player better than most executives, few of whom had played the game. Perhaps he would have brought to baseball’s business and legal relations the kind of spirit he called for in 1888 when he wrote in How to Become a Player, the first such manual ever written by a baseball player: “First of all, let me say that no one will ever become an expert ball player who is not passionately fond of the sport.”