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13 Disp. Resol. Mag. 14 (2006-2007)
How Arbitration Has Enhanced the Sports World

handle is hein.journals/disput13 and id is 100 raw text is: How Arbitration Has Enhanced the Sports World BY PAUL WEILER AND GARY ROBERTS EUTRAL AND EXPERT ARBITRA- tion now plays a major role in professional sports, more than in any other business and labor setting . Forty years ago, this was not the case. When Richard Nixon was elected president in 1968, the neutral arbitration schemes present in many labor situations were unheard of in the four major sports. Since then, in our personal view, neutral arbitration has transformed and dramatically en- hanced the sports world. Many fans, though, believe that arbitration has worsened the sports en- vironment, contributing to what they perceive as growing player disloyalty and soaring ticket prices. For example, Red Sox fans felt quite upset when, soon after leading their team in 2004 to its first World Series championship since 1918, two star players, Pedro Martinez and Johnny Damon, both rejected the team's offers to a neutral appraisal of their value and instead ex- ercised their free agent right to move south to New York. Martinez joined the Mets and Damon the Yankees, both in pursuit of salaries around $15 million apiece, much higher than the Red Sox were willing to offer them, despite the Red Sox having by far the highest ticket prices in baseball. Red Sox seats now average nearly $50, 40 percent higher than the Yankees' and Paul Weiler is the Henry 1. Friendly Professor of Law, Emeritus, at Harvard Law School in Cambridge, Mass. He can be reached at pweiler@law harvard edu. Gary Roberts is the deputy dean and Sumter Davis Marks Professor of Law at Tulane Law School in New Orleans, and in July will become the dean of Indiana University School of Law in Indianapolis. He can be reached at groberts@law. tulane.edu. Both have written and worked extensively on sports law. Mets' averages of around $35. At the time of the Red Sox' pre- vious World Series victory, in 1918, their star pitcher was paid well un- der $1,000 a season and the average Fenway ticket price was around $3. The team owner, told by the woman he was having an affair with that she needed money to finance her forth- coming Broadway hit No No Nanette, coupled with the increased salary demands and off-the-field behavior of the team's pitching star, decided to sell that star to a team then known as the Highlanders for $250,000. That sale both transformed the team, which renamed itself the Yankees, and the career of the player sold, George Her- man Babe Ruth. In New York, he turned himself into an everyday player and prolific home run hitter. Indeed, in New York in 1920, the Babe hit 54 home runs, launching the modern of- fensive era in baseball and becoming the sport's greatest icon. What Ruth was to home runs, Martinez was to dominant pitching at the turn of the new century. In 2000, Martinez, in a Red Sox uniform, won his second straight Cy Young Award as the league's top pitcher while posting the best single-season earned run av- erage in the American League in more than three decades. Ruth helped the Yankees become the most dominant team in baseball, while Martinez sparked the Red Sox renaissance, be- coming one of baseball's highest-paid pitchers. But those two former Red Sox stars, Ruth and Martinez, reaped vastly different monetary rewards from their respective moves to New York. That difference was produced, at least in part, by labor arbitration. Indeed, a Harvard Law School pro- fessor and avid Red Sox fan, Felix Frankfurter, who was appalled by the sale that resulted in Boston's Curse of the Bambino, years later helped President Franklin Delano Roosevelt draft a new federal National Labor Relations Act. Then, as Roosevelt's advisor, he helped persuade the Su- preme Court to make its legendary switch in time that saved nine in order to uphold the constitutionality of the NLRA, after which he himself was later appointed to the Supreme Court by Roosevelt. The subsequent and quite pro- labor union interpretations of the NLRA by Frankfurter and his col- leagues on the Supreme Court quickly inspired Hollywood actors to elect a liberal Democrat actor, Ronald Rea- gan, as the leader of the Screen Actors Guild. In 1961, Reagan took the actors out on the longest-ever Hollywood strike, producing the guild's equitable settlement, especially for bit players, before embarking on his new profes- sional career as a politician. In 1980, Reagan was elected as our 40th presi- dent and became better known for his conservatism and his breaking of the Air Traffic Controller's union. But the earlier Reagan success as a union- ist inspired players such as Mickey Mantle, paid $100,000 by his Yankees in 1961, to fully commit to both labor unionism and then salary arbitration for themselves. In fact, Dick Moss, a star Harvard Law School student of DISPUTE RESOLUTION MAGAZINE 14 SPRING 2007

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