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Supreme Court Inside Baseball

By "Milbarge" and "Fitz-Hume"

Via How Appealing, I saw this interesting Legal Times story about a pretty wonky little essay.

The back story: In their Supreme Court expose The Brethren, Bob Woodward and Scott Armstrong relate a story about Flood v. Kuhn. Flood upheld baseball's "reserve clause" over a challenge on antitrust grounds. Anyway, Justice Blackmun's opinion starts out with a lengthy history of baseball and a long list of the game's great players. It's right up there with "Poor Joshua!" among Justice Blackmun's stranger discourses.

In The Brethren, Woodward and Armstrong write that Blackmun originally circulated a draft, got some comments, and added a few names to the list of baseball greats. According to the writers, Justice Thurgood Marshall noted that there were no black ballplayers on the list, so Blackmun added three. The story has persisted for decades as an example of (at best) Blackmun's thoughtlessness about race.

However, as the Legal Times article reports, there is a new essay by Professor Ross Davies calling the Woodward-Armstrong account into question. Davies has extensively studied Justice Blackmun's papers and finds no indication that there was ever an early, all-white list of players circulated to the other Justices. Therefore, Davies asserts, there was nothing for Justice Marshall to criticize, and the story from The Brethren is false. The essay is a quick read and makes a strong case. I'll leave it for Woodward and Armstrong to defend their work as they see fit.

But reading Davies's analysis, I thought of another piece of evidence he could have marshaled, and I'm surprised he didn't mention it. He writes that Blackmun used a baseball encyclopedia in making his list. He established statistical cut-offs to measure greatness and included the players who made the grade. (When the drafts circulated, Blackmun added a few names in response to suggestions or politicking from the other chambers.)

So why doesn't someone find a baseball encyclopedia, reverse-engineer Blackmun's standards, and see if the black players in the final opinion (Jackie Robinson, Satchel Paige, and Roy Campanella) made the initial cut? I'm not enough of a stat geek to pull this off, but a baseball fan/number cruncher should be able to figure out Blackmun's method pretty easily. (In fact, it may be preserved in his papers.)

I suppose if Justice Blackmun's standard was amorphous and hard to pin down, it might be difficult to know why any particular player was included or not. (Apparently Mel Ott's exclusion was a genuine error, but others may be harder to figure out.) But if it's reasonable easy to determine what Blackmun's personal hall of fame voting metric was, I think it would be just as easy to see whether the black players were inside or outside the hallowed group. If they're above the line, and virtually everyone else above the line is listed in Flood, that's strong evidence they were included all along. But if they were below Blackmun's line, and virtually no one else below the line is on the list, either he imposed his own affirmative action, or did so only at Justice Marshall's suggestion.

In any event, retracing Justice Blackmun's steps in compiling the original list would seem like an obvious and manageable task, and would get us a little closer to an answer to the controversy Davies writes about.

Full post as published by Begging the Question on July 23, 2008 (boomark / email).