Throwback Thursday: Danny Gardella's Forgotten Challenge to Baseball's Reserve Clause

Each week, VICE Sports takes a look back at an important event from this week in sports history for Throwback Thursday, or #TBT for all you cool kids. You can read previous installments here.

The first time Danny Gardella met Jorge Pasquel was at a gym in New York City. This was in the mid-1940s. Pasquel and his brother were the fabulously wealthy owners of the Mexican League. Gardella, the son of a mason who grew up in the Bronx, was an outfielder for the New York Giants. Jorge Pasquel, according to author Fran Zimniuch, was incredulous that Gardella, who spent his winters working in a shipyard, had to work a regular job in the offseason, and so he offered the outfielder a spot in the Mexican League.

Gardella declined—but their partnership would eventually become the first true threat to the hegemony Major League Baseball's owners held over their employees through the reserve clause.

During the 1945 MLB season, Gardella hit .272 with 18 home runs and 71 runs batted in. He had a decent bat but was an erratic outfielder, largely because of his fear of fly balls. He was hoping to win a tryout at first base, but the Giants had future Hall of Famer Johnny Mize returning from World War II to play the position. The Giants wanted Gardella to accept a $5,000 contract, a $500 raise from the previous season. Gardella wasn't happy with the offer. He contacted Pasquel, who offered him $8,000 to play for the Mexican League's Vera Cruz franchise. Gardella signed the deal on February 18, 1946, 70 years ago this week.

Pasquel wasn't done. He made several more deals that spring, signing 17 players, including Sal Maglie, Mickey Owen, and Max Lanier, whom the newspapers referred to as "jumping beans." Pasquel also signed a number of black players who had never been given a chance in the major leagues, and offered hundreds of thousands of dollars to established stars like Bob Feller, Stan Musial, and Ted Williams, none of whom were willing to make the leap. He even reportedly offered Babe Ruth a million dollars to become the league's president. All of this began to pose a serious threat to MLB's authority, and so in June of 1946, commissioner Happy Chandler declared that United States players who jumped to Mexico would be subject to a five-year ban.

At first, none of this affected Gardella directly. He spent a year in Mexico and then won the home-run title in the Cuban League; he played in the Mexican League with Ruth, who was in ill health and appearing in exhibitions for huge sums of money. (When Ruth reportedly asked Gardella if he had any tobacco, Gardella replied that he had a cigar; Ruth took half the cigar and chewed it up.) But in 1947, while Gardella was preparing for a semipro exhibition game on Staten Island, a telegram came in from the commissioner's office and was read over the loudspeaker: Anyone who played with Gardella or any of the other Mexican League defectors would be blacklisted from MLB for good.

Gardella pulled out of that game. A few days later, he went to his dentist, who referred him to a lawyer named Frederic A. Johnson, who in turn filed a $300,000 lawsuit on Gardella's behalf. The suit charged the Giants and both the American and National Leagues with engaging in a conspiracy in restraint of trade; it was rejected by a district court, which cited a 1922 Supreme Court ruling that baseball was not subject to federal antitrust laws regarding interstate commerce. Nevertheless, Johnson appealed the decision, and eventually won a federal appeals court ruling after Judge Learned Hand noted that national radio and television broadcasts had altered the landscape. A jury trial was ordered.

"It had the odor of peonage, even slavery," Gardella would tell the Los Angeles Times in 1994.

The owners tried to pressure Gardella, who was working as a hospital orderly. Brooklyn Dodgers owner Branch Rickey said opponents of an antitrust exemption "lean[ed] to Communism." A Florida representative said that Gardella's suit "could well sound the death knell for the sport that has kindled the fires of ambition in the breasts of so many thousands of young Americans." Still, Gardella wasn't entirely alone: allies in New York, including a state senator and assemblyman, introduced legislation to invalidate the reserve clause in the state, declaring it "akin to peonage."

Eventually, baseball relented and allowed the Mexican League defectors to return ("I was tempering justice with mercy," Chandler later wrote). In October 1949, Gardella took a $60,000 cash settlement; he was also promised that he could play for the St. Louis Cardinals in return for dropping his lawsuit. It would take another few decades before the reserve clause was toppled altogether—largely due to the thankless legal challenge brought by Curt Flood—but both Gardella and Pasquel had made their mark. On the field, Gardella had one at-bat with the Cardinals and flied out. The Mexican League went bankrupt in the early 1950s and merged with the Class C Arizona-Texas League. Jorge Pasquel died in a plane crash in 1955.

Gardella died in 2005, at age 85, of congestive heart failure. He spent his post-baseball life as a construction laborer near New York City. He wondered sometimes whether he should have pushed through his lawsuit rather than settling, but he also wondered whether Johnson, his attorney, understood that "baseball would have been considered such a darling that we never could have won." Presaging future athlete-led antitrust challenges to MLB and the National Collegiate Athletic Association, he once summed up his suit by stating, "I feel like I let the whole world know that the reserve clause was unfair…. I was no Communist for exercising my American rights."