Clipping:Criticism of McKnight
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| Date | Wednesday, February 10, 1886 |
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| Text | [from the Baltimore correspondent] What a dear, delightful time is being had this winter over players. Barkley, Orr, Roseman and Burch have now become famous enough to entitle them to seats in Congress. In all these cases it is a strange thing that the president of the Association should get mixed up with it every time, and as often make it a muddle. The League sometimes disagrees about the mode of securing players—the “big four” case, for instance—but their president and secretary never seems to have any trouble of this kind, or, indeed, any other kind. The whole difficulty appears to be that the Association official volunteers, or otherwise gives too much advice to managers and players in the preliminaries to a contract. In doing so he may be overstepping the requirements of his constitutional duty. It would seem that ll he is called upon to do in such cases is to act on the contracts when presented to him, and not advance hypothetical positions and then give instructions as to what would be his decision on them. The duty seems very simple, and that it, when a contract is presented to see that it “be in the form adopted by the Association, and that the player is eligible to contract under the provisions of the National Agreement. If it is, all that is to be done is to record the fact and notify the other parties interested; if it is not, he withholds the certificate and the notification. If the Association managers want advice and instruction concerning their own laws then why not employ counsel... That source could then be sought for legal advice in such cases and probably matters would run more smoothly. As it is, the official, not having a legal turn of mind, gets things mixed and causes disturbances in the camp of his own association. The picture now presented to the country is a certain lot of managers all wrangling among themselves and only united in one thing and that is “pitching into” the president. A house divided against itself must fall and so it is fortunate that there is one point upon which they can all agree and thus save the general structure from the annihilation promised by the proverb. With an able jurist permanently employed so that he would become familiar with the rules and regulations of base ball, there might never have been a Metropolitan case, a Barkley case, a Roseman and Orr case, or a Burch case, and all the immense wear and tear on the managerial mind might have been saved. |
| Source | Sporting Life |
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| Submitted by | Richard Hershberger |
| Origin | Initial Hershberger Clippings |
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