Is Uniform-Destroying Pitcher Chris Sale Actually a Labor Hero?

Statistically speaking, your job sucks. Every weekday, the average person goes someplace they would rather not go and does something that they would rather not do, for not that much money. This is less depressing if you recall the relative improvements achieved by organized labor. The average person doesn't work six or seven days a week, and generally only works eight hours a day. Of course, some jobs do not suck at all. But whether your gig sucks or not, there are certain rights you can take for granted. For example, you're not going to get traded to a company in a different state for a facilities manager and some human resources prospects.

Chris Sale probably wasn't thinking about organized labor when he went after his team's jerseys with a knife on Saturday afternoon. At first glance, the White Sox pitcher's one-man disco demolition night will not remind you of the struggles of Mother Jones or the Haymarket Martyrs or even Curt Flood. His five-game suspension is not exactly a great sacrifice in the context of labor wars. But hiding behind Sale's gloriously immature workplace vandalism is a downright feudal labor practice: the sports trade.

Baseball has been good to Chris Sale. The lanky lefty will have made $50 million by the time he turns 30, and he works eight months out of the year. The theater of celebrity labor, however, is less about the condition of the actual individual than the underlying ideas. Sale and most other top-level pro athletes are comically overpaid, which makes it hard to see them as victims. Their eight- and nine-figure contracts make up for the necessary and deranged commitment, the punishing travel schedules, and the asphyxiating public scrutiny. But there's also a precariousness in sports success few other workers face: the fact that Sale, who has seemingly been on the trade block for the past two years, could legally be sold—for cash or barter—to another company, and there's nothing he can do about it.

This vulnerability is the principal byproduct of baseball's notorious reserve clause. When a MLB team signs a player, they acquire exclusive and permanent rights to employ that player, a claim of dubious legality protected by the game's antitrust exemption. The reserve clause not only yokes a player to their employer; it also turns that player into an instrument of exchange.

Without the control guaranteed by the reserve clause, trades would only work if all the players involved consent to the move. The reserve clause has taken some serious hits—the 10/5 rule, the advent of no-trade clauses in free-agent contracts, the arbitration system—but it's still going strong. And because baseball is the oldest of American pro sports, its Gilded Age labor legacy is written into the practices of nearly every professional team sport. Chris Sale might not have been thinking about 1880s labor practices when he freaked out on Saturday, but they were thinking about him.

So while Sale's sabotage initially scans as a tantrum—well-compensated adult man told to put on his big-boy pants (or, in this case, a very ugly shirt), responds by cutting up said pants—it is also worthy of consideration as an act of labor protest. Sale reportedly found the throwback jerseys uncomfortable, and saw the team's insistence on wearing them as marketing taking precedence over winning games. This is not exactly Ned Ludd smashing up weaving frames, but at least Sale sort of maybe meant something like that.

This isn't the first time Florida native Sale has gone Florida Man. In 2015, he unsuccessfully stormed the Kansas City Royals clubhouse to confront Yordano Ventura. In separate incidents this season, he goofily went to war with management over Drake LaRoche, and struck himself in the head with a baseball repeatedly out of frustration. If you want to be charitable, Sale is high strung. If you want to be uncharitable, he is a glowering Zack Snyder remake of Nuke LaLoosh.

But Sale's bust-ups are more than just temper tantrums. Sale lashes out when he feels like his main dudes are in danger, be it from Ventura's chin music, his own poor pitching, or The Man.

As baseball's trading deadline draws near, rumors about the White Sox starting a long-overdue gut rehab are swirling like hot dog wrappers in the wind at U.S. Cellular Field. In Sale and Jose Quintana, Chicago GM Rick Hahn holds a pocket pair of affordable, above-average starters—in Sale's case, way above average. By pulling Sale from his Saturday start on short notice, the White Sox immediately touched off speculation that a deal was imminent.

Of course, Sale wasn't traded, but you don't have to be Dr. Phil to suspect a connection between a rumored trade and his cut-up act. Sale clearly loves his teammates and his job, in spite of his beef with management. In that light, his shirt-killing reads less like brattiness and more like a misguided but sincere expression of solidarity. If you feel like your boss is the enemy, cutting up your work clothes sends an unmistakable message.

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