Dangerous Danny Gardella

The first-ever biography of an unlikely baseball pioneer.

While baseball's postwar years are often called the "Golden Age" of the sport, it was also an era when the reserve clause bound players to their teams and suppressed their rights and wages. Into these conditions came Danny Gardella, the first player to openly resist this bondage and the first to legally fight the reserve clause, setting the stage for Curt Flood and Marvin Miller's challenge over two decades later.

In Dangerous Danny Gardella: Baseball's Neglected Trailblazer for Today's Millionaire Athletes, Robert Elias tells the story of this little-known yet remarkable working-class ballplayer who stood up to Major League Baseball and laid the foundation for free agency. Elias recounts Gardella's humble beginnings, his struggles to establish himself as a professional baseball player, his entertaining antics on and off the field, and his jump from Organized Baseball to the Mexican League that was the spark not only to challenge the reserve clause, but for creating America's most powerful labor union, the MLB Player's Association.

Gardella was an unlikely hero: a Renaissance man who played ball and wrote poetry, a Golden Gloves boxer and Broadway performer, a weight training pioneer and vaudeville singer. His remarkable life, full of twists and turns, tells the hidden history of the struggle for free agency, delivering a new perspective on America's Golden Age of Baseball.