I finally sat down with that classmate I mentioned a while back, the only person I went all through high school and college with, who earns his living as an attorney, largely defending professional athletes against their teams or leagues. As I mentioned, he didn’t want to be quoted or identified, but I think if you follow this stuff over the past few decades, you probably came across his name at some point. We hadn’t spoken for a long while, but I contacted him about the column I wrote for BJOL last summer concerning MLB potentially getting sued by a little person, and we’ve been trying to schedule a lunch since then, which we finally had earlier today.
I don’t know that I have much to report on, but we did discuss the Gaedel situation for a while, and he pointed me to cases where a professional sports league was sued either for discrimination or for violating anti-trust laws, both of which he felt could be applied to a little person being denied the right to play, depending on the precise circumstances. The one that seemed most relevant was that of Greg Neeld, a hockey player with one eye who challenged the NHL’s rule banning one-eyed players from the league, on the grounds that their lack of depth perception presented a danger to other players in the NHL and that, in exposing himself to an injury to his good eye by playing pro hockey, he risked complete blindness himself. The crucial difference between Neeld and my potential plaintiff is that the NHL had a rule on its books to challenge but my friend was unaware that MLB actually has a rule against little people playing in the major leagues. (A link to Neeld’s case can be found at Greatest Hockey Legends) Veeck as in Wreck makes the claim that MLB, or the AL, or someone did proclaim an actual rule barring future little people from the game, but I haven’t checked (and my friend didn’t know about) any such rule. Bill Veeck told a couple of whoppers in the course of that fascinating memoir, and this could have been one of those, assuming I’m even remembering what Veeck claimed correctly.
The legal issues, if I can summarize what I was told without messing it up too badly, rest on the teams conspiring to deny a little person his pursuit of a major league career by adopting a rule (if they have) that is arbitrary and capricious, and if being short is a disability, inherited genetically, which we both seem to think it might be, then perhaps the Americans with Disabilities Act could come into play as well. If they’ve actually got such a rule, my friend felt that opened the door to challenging it, potentially, and if they don’t but nonetheless refuse to allow little people to participate in MLB, that’s a little tougher but still a viable course of action.
My friend told me a little bit about a case that Oscar Pistorius filed against the International Association of Athletic Federations for barring him from competing against able-bodied athletes—the IAAF claimed that Pistorius’s prosthetic limbs gave him an unfair advantage against athletes not so equipped, and Pistorius won his suit, competing in the 2012 Olympic games.
If we could establish that some little person was directly comparable to Pistorius, perhaps the star of some Little Person Baseball League, that might form sort of precedent.
After my column had been printed here, I also thought a little further about the roster-issues I had raised, and it occurred to me that a roster-spot could be justified in one other way: I can imagine that my potential plaintiff in this case against MLB would be an exceptional athlete (by little-people standards, of course) and could be trained to bunt. Of course, you really wouldn’t want him to bunt if he could get on base by walking, but with a fairly quick runner on first base, who would necessitate the first baseman playing close to the bag, this little person may able to direct an occasional bunt on that side of the diamond. He’d be easy to throw out, of course, but the bunt would still serve to advance the runner, and prevent the pitcher from simply soft-tossing a strike too easily. (If you recall, I argued that his strike zone would be so tiny, even the most skilled pitchers in the world couldn’t hit it reliably three times out of six. Some people here disagreed strongly with this contention.) Better still, as my friend offered today over lunch, if he were to sue to play in the AL, he could probably DH effectively. A DH who gets on base even half the time is probably effective, even if he requires a pinch-runner (who could then stay in the game as the DH) every time he succeeds. The roster-spot could then be justified, and as we both agreed, there is no valid roster-spot argument to be made after September 1st.
Of course, he and I chatted about other things besides my BJOL article—we had a lot of events to catch up on, including the odd fact that both of our offices were two blocks from the restaurant we were having our lunch in, in midtown Manhattan, and we’d never run into each other in all the years we worked so close. Another oddity was that the restaurant (which he chose) was built on, or very close to, the exact spot that my father had run a different restaurant in the 1960s, and I kept looking around to try and recognize some artifacts or designs of my dad’s old place. (We ate at Ammos, a Greek restaurant on Vanderbilt Avenue and 45th street, if anyone is familiar with the area. When my dad ran it, it served American food, and was called The Colony.) We agreed to keep in touch, so if there’s anything you’d like me to follow up on here, I’ll do my best, as I continue to seek justice for my (so far) imaginary baseball star illegally prevented from getting on base a very high percentage of the time in MLB.