2026 Theses Doctoral

Organizing Baseball: Reworking the Transnational Circuit, 1946–1965

Brown, Evan D.

This dissertation examines the social and economic transformation of professional baseball across North America and the Caribbean, following the movement of people, information, and capital as a loose transnational circuit became a multinational organization. It calls attention to the organizing processes which secured the market power of the sport’s dominant institution amid change and contestation. From the 1940s to the 1960s, struggles over labor markets, racial desegregation, information management, antimonopoly politics, and broadcast revenues reshaped a fractious cartel into a model that defined the emerging sports industry.

This dissertation shows how challenges to the reserve system that structured sporting labor spurred this development. Asserting control required leagues to win a contest over mobility that rewired the circuits of leagues across the North American continent and around the Caribbean basin into a hierarchical pipeline. Recruitment required new investments and information techniques to extract value from networks of players, managers, and scouts. Legal and regulatory scrutiny demanded political engagement that produced new instruments of market advantage. Securing territorial control and tapping broadcast revenues set a booming trajectory for the industry—one which propelled athletes to organize for their own share of the reinforced monopolies that continue to structure North American sport.

This study establishes its original perspective through organizational records that offer an inside-out picture of the disputes and deep patterns that produced new ways of doing business. Memoranda and meeting minutes provide a qualitative view of conflicts and priorities. It also draws on rare financial reports that provide quantitative footing at key junctures of the argument. In doing so, it outlines a method whose attention to business structure and labor markets complements the lively social, cultural, and political controversies of more typical sporting narratives.