Tacoma Baseball Club Sued for Back Pay
Players from the disbanded Tacoma team attach the club’s property to recover unpaid salaries.
The story, cleaned up
A cleaned-up reading of the newspaper page: spelling and layout repaired, one story lifted off a crowded page. It follows the original closely but it is not a transcription. The original page is below; read it if a detail matters.
V. L. Work, late manager of the Tacoma baseball team, brought suit yesterday in the superior court of King County for himself and the other players of the team to recover from the Tacoma club an unpaid balance of $657.31, due for salaries and transportation. Attachments were levied upon all the property of the club and are now in the hands of the sheriff of Pierce County. The former Tacoma team is at present playing in Missoula, Montana, where it went at the close of the Pacific Northwest League season. For convenience in taking the matter into court, all the other players assigned their claims to Work, and he brought suit through Attorney Frank B. Wissing. When the league disbanded, sixteen days' pay was due on the month of August. The chief target at which the attachment is aimed is a certified check of $1,900, now in possession of the National Bank of Commerce of Tacoma, deposited at the first of the season as a guarantee that the club would play out the season and fulfill its obligations.
“The chief target at which the attachment is aimed is a certified check of $1,900, now in possession of the National Bank of Commerce of Tacoma.”
Professional sports teams struggling to pay their players is a tale as old as the league itself. While the legal maneuvers of the 1890s centered on physical property attachments, today’s disputes over athlete compensation and contract enforcement continue to highlight the tension between labor and capital in the sports entertainment industry.
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