"Scouting Territories: Making and Managing Baseball's Transnational Labor Market, 1947–65"

This paper examines how the management of so-called "Organized Baseball" approached a shifting labor market from 1947 to 1965, as the aftermath of their crackdown on player mobility brought new problems for the systems of scouting and recruitment through which labor circulated across North America and the Caribbean. It argues that two interrelated responses shaped the trajectory of the baseball business in the following years: a targeted turn toward hiring from Caribbean leagues and black American sporting networks, and an investment in information techniques that promised to make sense of the messy, expanding baseball circuit. Drawing on organizational records ranging from financial statements to scouting reports, it illustrates how the problem of sorting out a multinational, multiracial labor market led management to implement new business practices and devote more resources toward processes that might generate information about all the activity it contained. At the same time, these changes presented a series of hurdles and opportunities that players themselves navigated as they began to establish collective organization. In taking up these questions, the paper contemplates the dynamics of labor, mobility, and information in an international business at midcentury.