MLB's Darkest Secrets

America's pastime, baseball, was the first professional sport in the country. The iconic game has been around since the 18th century and started as an offshoot of cricket. In 1845, "a group of New York City men founded the New York Knickerbocker Baseball Club. One of them — volunteer firefighter and bank clerk Alexander Joy Cartwright — would codify a new set of rules that would form the basis for modern baseball, calling for a diamond-shaped infield, foul lines and the three-strike rule," History recapped. Not only did baseball become wildly popular across the country, but playing the game also became a respite for soldiers during the American Civil War. 

The sport outlasted even more conflicts, like when future members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame served in the military during World War I. By World War II, over 500 professional players served for their country. In fact, "President Franklin Delano Roosevelt issued what is now known as the 'Green Light Letter' to encourage play to continue. He deemed the game a necessary morale booster during the difficult times."

Even with all the feel-good stories and wholesome family fun at ballparks, baseball also has a darker side. Similar to the negative aspects of the NFL, Major League Baseball has several moments it wishes could be erased. From drug use in the league to shady owners and cheating, fans of baseball are all too familiar with scandals.

Step up to the plate and get ready to learn MLB's darkest secrets.

In their original labor contract with the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) in 1968, MLB owners were adamant "that collusion be against the rules. Their fear was that the players, in a pre-free-agency world, would work together in negotiations to raise their collective salaries," SB Nation summarized. Instead, collusion became a word associated in the opposite direction, with owners conspiring against the players. 

Starting in the mid-80s, many MLB team owners began focusing on turning a profit — by limiting spending on free agents — instead of trying to win the World Series. "By 1990, three arbitration rulings established that they had colluded illicitly, and they ended up paying $434 million, including interest, to settle players' case against them. That sum would be the equivalent of about $800 million today," the Los Angeles Times reported.

Unfortunately, it looked like owners were once again up to no good decades after the ruling in 2018. "There are signs that the owners are colluding again to force down players' salaries and lock in their own profits," The Los Angeles Times wrote. The most obvious sign, according to the players association, was the huge amount of unsigned free agents while team revenues and profits were skyrocketing. In one example, Atlanta Braves general manager Alex Anthopoulos mentioned that he worked with 27 clubs to discuss players that may be available for free agency. As a result, the MLBPA announced via Twitter that it would investigate "the integrity of the entire free-agent system."

An eight-year contract between MLB and national TV networks ended in 2021. Even though MLB stood to earn significant revenue for its next TV contract from 2022 to 2028, there was a concerning decision from ESPN. The network, owned by The Walt Disney Company, "did not take as many games in the new deal as it did in the current one," Forbes reported. 

This may be in part because the number of baseball fans, and sports fans in general, appear to be decreasing. "It's critical to reach a younger portion of the fan base," the league's chief operations and strategy officer Chris Marinak told The New York Times. "They have the longer span of fandom. We need to do a better job of communicating to Gen Z what it means to be a fan," he added. On the field, MLB has used the minor leagues to test out rule changes to pick up the pace of the notoriously slow game. This has included introducing "pitch clocks and limits on defensive shifts to make games shorter and more exciting."

To cater to the next generation of fans, MLB also "recruited influencers to produce TikTok content for the World Series." After a competition to look for creators that focused on baseball-specific content, MLB announced the inaugural list of 11 influencers in its Creator Class. Each creator earned the opportunity to attend games and other sponsored events to highlight "the players and game on and off-the-field through music, fashion, art and more" in short videos.

Though the nation's pastime has long been a source of entertainment for fans of all ages, it has also revealed an ugly truth about inequality in the country. "For nearly 60 years baseball was a segregated sport as the American and National Leagues that formed Major League Baseball unofficially banned African-Americans from their ranks," per MLB. 

Starting in the 1850s, African Americans in the South began to play the sport "despite the proliferation of Jim Crow laws," the National Baseball Hall of Fame recapped. Decades later, Bud Fowler – a 2022 Hall of Fame inductee — became "the first Black player in professional baseball." Sadly, Black players began to be banned from professional teams, so a number of them formed their own "barnstorming" teams and went "around the country to play anyone who would challenge them," per the NLBM. By 1920, the Negro National League was founded, and with the addition of other leagues, these became collectively known as The Negro Leagues.

One of the most famous Black players in baseball history is Jackie Robinson, who joined the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947. It was a momentous occasion, but the superstar still had to deal with hatred. "Despite Robinson's stellar play, he endured a great amount of verbal abuse from fans," MLB recapped. On the field, "opposing players hurled verbal insults at Robinson but they also played rough and employed tactics that many saw as outside the bounds of acceptable play." Fortunately, Robinson endured all the animosity and paved the way for future progress.

MLB pitchers have an amazing ability to hurl a ball towards home plate with lightning speed and wickedly deceptive spin. While this is definitely due to training and natural abilities, some players look for an additional edge with sticky substances like pine tar, spit, and mud. "Pitchers definitely cheat," a baseball analyst told The Washington Post. These foreign substances "alter the way in which the ball travels to the plate, allowing a pitcher to manipulate the ball in an unnatural way." According to MLB's rule book, any "foreign substance" is banned in addition to the practice of rubbing the ball with something like sandpaper to alter its flight.

Famous pitcher Nolan Ryan once talked about what he considered a gray area in cheating. He said in an interview on ESPN, "Using pine tar to help your curveball, stuff like that, those are things that are done in the game that are accepted as part of the game." While the pitcher didn't admit to cheating, Ryan explained that he was not opposed to using similar tactics.

After widespread reports of pitchers cheating, MLB decided to fight back by using some impressive technology. In 2021, the league told all its teams "that it will begin using its Statcast data to analyze increases in spin rate, specifically for pitchers suspected of doctoring baseballs," the New York Post reported. The league also hoped this would help create more action in the sport beyond just walks, strikeouts, and home runs.

The Houston Astros concluded their underdog story in MLB by going from one of the worst teams in the league in 2013 to winning the World Series in 2017. But three years later, the Astros became the embarrassment of MLB. In 2020, "a scathing report by Major League Baseball exposed the Astros as cheaters, trashing their reputation, ousting their leaders and igniting the sport's biggest scandal since the steroid revelations of the 2000s," The New York Times reported. 

The Astros were caught stealing signs of their opposition. Specifically, managers and players were involved in "a brazen scheme to illegally use electronics to steal opposing catchers' signs and tip off their own batters to what pitch was coming," which took place in 2017 and 2018. As punishment, the four people involved, including the team's general manager at the time, Jeff Luhnow, lost their jobs in the league. Another career casualty was Carlos Beltrán's manager position with the New York Mets. He'd been a senior player with the Astros and was allegedly a mastermind of the scheme, per The Athletic.

Many felt the one-year suspensions for Luhnow and manager AJ Hinch and no punishment for the Astros players were too light of a reaction to a scandal that so clearly undermined the integrity of the game. "I think if you watch the players, watch their faces when they have to deal with this issue publicly, they have paid a price," MLB commissioner Rob Manfred told ESPN about his decision.

In the early days of MLB, the league dealt with an embarrassing scandal in the biggest event of the season, the World Series. In the 1919 championship, "eight players from the Chicago White Sox conspired with professional gamblers to rig the outcome of the World Series, enabling the underdog Cincinnati Reds — and bettors in the know — to win," The New York Times recapped. At the time, the White Sox were the heavy favorites. 

After losing several games of the best-of-nine series, some of the players apparently wanted their money. When they didn't receive the amounts promised by the gamblers, the team vowed to try and start winning games. This worked for two games but "backing out of a deal with gangsters proved difficult ... and several of the players later hinted at having received threats against their families," History reported. In game eight, the White Sox lost and gave the Reds its first World Series victory.

Speculation began that something seemed wrong about the entire series, and months after the last game, an article came out titled, "Is Big League Baseball Being Run for Gamblers, With Players in the Deal?" The owner of the White Sox denied the allegations, but the focus turned back on the team when a regular-season game the following year was proven to be rigged. Eight players were indicted for conspiracy and banned for life from the league. The players were then forever known as the Black Sox.

Early on, baseball became intertwined with politics when a case made it all the way to the Supreme Court. In the 1922 case "Federal Baseball Club v. National League," the justices ruled that "baseball, at its highest level, was an exhibition and not subject to the Constitution's Commerce Clause," as recapped by the Constitution Center. 

This controversial decision had long-standing repercussions in business because professional baseball was then exempt from the Sherman Antitrust Act, which was passed in 1890 to help stop "monopolistic business practices." As a result of the ruling, professional baseball teams could then "collude to suppress wages and dictate the fortunes of member clubs in ways that would be illegal in other big business spheres," per The Washington Post.

Supreme Court Justice Samuel A. Alito Jr. spoke in 2008 about the decision, which critics condemned as a result of the "Justices' affection for baseball," per the Society for American Baseball Research. Even judges who were later appointed on the Supreme Court felt that the ruling was a bad call. Other cases were brought to court several times in the decades following the landmark case, but the decision remained. In 2022, a lawsuit once again challenged the "Federal Baseball" case. Major league franchises had terminated their affiliations with dozens of minor league teams, and four of those teams, including the Staten Island Yankees, argued that MLB violated the Sherman Antitrust Act by deciding privately "which franchises survive and which do not," per The Washington Post.