Chicago-Kent College of Law is currently celebrating its 125th anniversary. As part of the celebration, the school has published Then & Now: Stories of Law and Progress, a collection of essays by Chicago-Kent faculty members exploring what was happening in law and society around the time of the school's founding. For my contribution, I explored a fascinating episode in late-nineteenth-century baseball history, which featured a famous ballplayer who also happened to be a lawyer.
As 1888 drew to a close, John Montgomery Ward stood atop the world of professional baseball. The star shortstop had just led the New York Giants to the National League pennant, followed by a triumph over the St. Louis Browns of the rival American Association in what even then went by the inflated title of baseball’s “World Series.” A dominating pitcher early in his career (he threw the second perfect game in major league history), an arm injury forced Ward to recreate himself as an infielder, where he became one of the best fielders and hitters of his era. He was lauded in the press as a ballplayer with “few equals and no superiors,” and “by long odds the most popular player in the profession.” These accomplishments would eventually earn Ward a place in the Baseball Hall of Fame.
Ward’s skills on the ball field were only a part of what made him such a remarkable figure. Contemporaries and historians alike have struggled to describe him. One adjective-happy biographer took the saturation approach: he was a “jug-eared, willowy, peach-fuzzed, overreaching punk” as well as “honorable, smart, and tenacious.” More admired than liked seems to have been the consensus view of Ward contemporaries. In a profession not known for intellectualism, he stood out. Although Ward left school at the age of thirteen in order to pursue his baseball career, he eventually earned, in his spare time, degrees in political science and law from Columbia. He was said to speak five languages. A regular contributor to newspapers and periodicals, in 1888 he published Baseball: How to Become a Player, which he described as a “handbook of the game, a picture of the play as seen by a player.”
Ward was also a pioneering labor leader. In 1885 he established America’s first sports union, the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players. Initially designed to help sick, injured, or hard-up ballplayers and promote professional standards, the Brotherhood quickly evolved into something approaching a craft union for ballplayers. Ward had forward-looking attitudes on race as well. At a time when the color line was hardening in American society, and organized baseball had become a whites-only affair, Ward urged the Giants to sign an African American pitcher.