Virtual Event
November 13 2024
Time 12 PM
Registration for this event is via Eventbrite

The paper is based on the third chapter of Brown’s Columbia University dissertation in progress. It follows management grappling with a changing baseball labor market over the 1950s. It argues that their own crackdown on labor mobility (previous chapter), in combination with labor market expansion through racial desegregation and international recruitment, heaped pressure on the systems of scouting and information used to make baseball’s messy labor pool legible and profitable. While fretting over a growing share of revenues going to players, management experimented with techniques that promised to identify which player contracts would return on investment or generate abstract terms of evaluation that could carry across a multiracial, multinational labor market better than a network of judgments passed through intermediaries. This grew especially important as management took aim at the fringes of the labor market, targeting players from marginalized social fractions in an effort to keep down the cost of labor recruitment.

Peter Dreier of Occidental College will provide an introductory comment.

Advance registration via Eventbrite is required; everyone who is registered will receive the paper.