Danny Gardella, who died Sunday at age 85, was a former New York Giant whose antitrust suit against Major League Baseball in 1949 represented an early, if aborted, attempt at free agency.

The legal undoing of the reserve clause, which bound players to their clubs for life, would take another generation to achieve.

A journeyman player for years, Gardella went from his shipyard semipro team to the Giants in 1944 as a wartime replacement player. In 1945, his only full season in the majors, he hit .280 and slugged 18 home runs. As a fielder, he was less than impressive and “patrolled the outfield in his own inimitable tanglefoot style,” according to Arthur Daley of the New York Times.

With veteran players set to return from service in World War II, Gardella and 17 other major leaguers signed with the upstart Mexican league. The move violated baseball’s reserve clause, which stipulated that once a player had signed with a team, the team owned that player’s services for life unless it sold or released him. Commissioner Happy Chandler banned Gardella from playing in the major leagues for five years.

At first, Gardella ignored the controversy. He and the other major league “jumping beans,” as newspapers dubbed them, performed way above their previous levels. Gardella was hitting .346 when the Times ran a story under the headline “Inflation – Mexican Style.”

After the Mexican league began to falter, Gardella went to Havana and became the home-run king of the Cuban League before returning to the semipro circuit back in the states. One day in 1947, Gardella was playing for the semipro Gulf Oilers against the Cleveland Buckeyes, a team of barnstorming Negro Leaguers. A telegram arrived at the ballpark from Commissioner Chandler: Any player caught on the same diamond as Gardella would be banned permanently from the big leagues.

Disgusted, Gardella left the game. Within weeks, he had found a lawyer and filed a $300,000 lawsuit, charging that baseball had deprived him of the right to make a living. He found a job working as a hospital orderly.

Reaction was intense. People inside and outside the game realized that if Gardella won, the reserve clause would disappear, meaning that baseball teams would be forced to compete for players’ services by offering them higher salaries.

After a U.S. Court of Appeals upheld his right to go forward with the suit in 1949, Rep. A.S. Herlong of Florida charged that the suit “could well sound the death knell for the sport that has kindled the fires of ambition in the breasts of so many thousands of young Americans.” Dodgers president Branch Rickey predicted that “without the reserve clause baseball cannot endure.”

In a charge that rankled Gardella for decades, Rickey added that opponents of the reserve clause were persons of “avowed Communist tendencies.” Even the Times feared that “the muscular little fellow, like Samson, may yet push over the columns on which a noble structure once rested.”

Despite the urgings of some teammates and editorial writers, Gardella persisted. He had supporters. A New York state senator and an assemblyman introduced legislation to invalidate the reserve clause in New York, charging that the current system was “akin to peonage.”

There matters stood until October 1949. While the Yankees were crushing the Dodgers in the World Series, Gardella decided to take a cash settlement and a promise that he could play for the Cardinals in return for dropping the suit. The $60,000 he received, although split with his lawyer, was more than 10 times his annual salary with the Giants.

Gardella’s turn with the Cardinals was less impressive. In one at-bat, he flied out and was soon released. Gardella briefly threatened more legal action, then dropped his threats. He was out of baseball. The reserve clause held until the early 1970s, when free agency finally emerged. It would be difficult to find anyone today to defend the reserve clause.

Gardella grew up in the Bronx, the son of a mason whose specialty was fancy inlaid marble floors for banks. He began his baseball career at age 17, when he joined his older brother Al on a minor league team in West Virginia. Al Gardella had an even briefer career with the 1945 Giants, appearing in 16 games; he followed Danny to Mexico and later managed in the minor leagues.

After he settled with baseball and was unceremoniously booted into retirement, Gardella settled in Yonkers and spent the rest of his career “working at just about every blue-collar company in Westchester,” his son told the Journal-News, a Westchester newspaper.

He was frequently interviewed by sportswriters as an ancestor of free agency, and he never failed to rail against the reserve. “It had the odor of peonage, even slavery,” he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994.

Also part of every interview was his one brush with Babe Ruth, when they played outfield together in a Mexican league game. Ruth asked Gardella if he had any chewing tobacco. Gardella replied he had a cigar. Ruth took half and chewed it up. It was a small thing, but in retrospect a golden moment for a player whose baseball memories were filtered through a haze of litigation.

Danny Gardella

Born February 26, 1920, in Manhattan; died Sunday in Yonkers of congestive heart failure; survived by ten children and 27 grandchildren.