On the morning of July 14, 1976, two baseball reporters were having breakfast with Charlie Finley, the flamboyant owner of the Oakland Athletics, in the restaurant of the Bellevue-Stratford Hotel in Philadelphia. It was the day after the All-Star Game and days before the hotel was discovered to be the source of the deadly Legionnaires Disease that killed 29 people.
The subject of the breakfast was supposed to be baseball, but Finley couldn’t stop talking about his new hairpiece. He was as proud of it as he was of his team’s three successive World Series championships earlier in the decade.
“Look at those two women,” he said, nodding at a nearby table. “They can’t stop looking over here.”
I looked at the table and said, “Sorry, Charlie. Those are our wives and they’re looking over here to see when we’re going to be finished.”
Finley’s hairpiece and Legionnaires Disease weren’t the only significant developments at the Bellevue-Stratford that week. The day before the game, July 12 – 40 years ago Tuesday – negotiators for the owners and the players reached agreement on the details of the first labor contract that included free agency.
A ruling by baseball’s impartial arbitrator, Peter Seitz, the previous Dec. 23 had effectively created free agency, but details had to be negotiated. Seitz ruled that the renewal clause in the uniform player’s contract was a one-year deal, as the players argued, and not a lifetime guarantee, as the owners contended.
The decision destroyed the reserve system that for the entire history of major league baseball had restricted players to one club unless and until they were traded, sold or released.
The players could have taken the position that the Seitz decision prevailed and they could be free agents every year if they hadn’t signed contracts. That, in fact, is what Finley proposed. Given the opinion of other owners about Finley, there was no chance they would buy into his idea.
Their position came as a great relief to Marvin Miller, the players’ labor leader. “Marvin felt strongly that if everybody was a free agent there would be no bargaining leverage,” Richard Moss, the union’s lawyer, whose argument gained the Seitz decision, said last week. “I thought the best way was for everyone to be able to be a free agent. Marvin was right.”
The two sides did not have an easy time settling on an appropriate amendment to the Seitz decision. Remember, this was back in the days when owners and players fought over every element of the labor contract. In fact, in the midst of those negotiations, the owners locked the players out of spring training until the middle of March.
Negotiations for a new basic agreement began in June, six months before the Seitz decision, but nothing significant happened until after the arbitration decision, though not immediately after.
The owners gained nothing from their lockout, which Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ordered ended March 18, though some believed the owners ordered Kuhn to order them to open training camps. No breakthrough followed, and talks dragged on with no movement on either side.
At some point in June, however, a change in the type of bargaining sessions triggered a change of pace in the talks. Switching from formal sessions to informal talks, the negotiators began to see their way through their differences.
A week before the All-Star Game five negotiators gathered in a New York hotel room and met all day: Miller and Moss for the players and the owners’ representatives, their chief negotiator John Gaherin and two league presidents, Lee MacPhail of the American and Chub Feeney of the National.
The next day, Gaherin and the league presidents flew to Chicago for a meeting with the Player Relations Committee then returned the next day to resume talks. Over the next few days, the two sides made progress until they reached agreement at the Bellevue-Stratford early the morning of July 12.
How did the negotiators arrive at six years as the trigger point at which players could become free agents?
“It was just a number,” Moss said. “There was no magic about it. It seemed to be reasonable.”
Not to the owners initially. They wanted players to have to play for eight seasons in the majors before being eligible for free agency. The players, though held fast to six years, and the owners’ negotiators subsequently had to give in to that figure because the players had the Seitz decision on their side.
The six-year mark has remained for 40 years, both sides finding it workable. They had far more frequent and significant disputes over compensation for lost free agents than term of eligibility.
Two objections to the first free-agency agreement are worth noting.
At the time, the NFL Players Association was stirring in its own desire to attain free agency for its members. Ed Garvey, the young brash leader of the NFL union, harshly criticized – ridiculed – Miller and the baseball union for accepting a limit on what the arbitrator ruled.
With his attack on Miller, though, Garvey exposed his own ignorance and lack of foresight. Worse, Garvey never attained the free agency he sought. To this day, the NFL players don’t have a free-agency system to match or even come close to what baseball players have.
“Essentially it has worked,” Moss said.
It has worked for the players. Following the first year of free agency, their average salary rose nearly 50 percent, from $51,501 to $76,066. Today it has eclipsed $4 million. Don’t fret for the owners, though. Industry revenue has grown to exceed $9 billion.
All of this would be startling, unfathomable news to Bowie Kuhn, the former baseball commissioner, who raised the other serious objection to baseball’s free agency. Kuhn warned against free agency, declaring it would mark the ruination of the game.
Kuhn, in fact, regretted that he didn’t pull the Messersmith-McNally case out of the grievance procedure and deal with it himself. Had he tried to snatch the case from the arbitrator, he would have failed and looked more foolish than he already did.
The union would have filed a grievance against Kuhn’s greedy grab and would have won.
As for Kuhn’s crying wolf and lamenting the demise of baseball with the advent of free agency, it’s been 40 years and it hasn’t happened. Baseball has flourished as never before and is awash in money.
There’s so much money, owners and players haven’t fought to a work stoppage in two decades. They are negotiating this year for a new labor contract, and the more enlightened people on both sides know they have to avoid a fierce fight.
Each side might want improvements, but they’re all making too much money to get greedy and dumb. Some cross-eyed owners still dream of a payroll cap, but that’s where their greed comes in. Less money for the players in the form of a payroll cap (more commonly but incorrectly called a salary cap) would mean more for the owners, but a misguided attempt to attain a cap would trigger a labor war and kill labor’s golden goose.
WRITE 100 TIMES “FLOOD DIDN’T CREATE FREE AGENCY”
As difficult as it was for players to achieve free agency, for some inexplicable reason, it is difficult for some otherwise presumable intelligent people to understand where it came from.
Most of the misguided souls believe free agency stems from Curt Flood’s 1970 lawsuit against Major League Baseball and its reserve system. Catfish Hunter’s 1974 breach-of -contract lawsuit against Charlie Finley, the Oakland Athletics, also has been cited. Both are wrong, and if Marvin Miller were alive, he would say so. He said it to me more than once.
The public editor of The New York Times had an opportunity to ask Miller about it directly in 2012 when Miller told me he would welcome a call from the editor, Arthur Brisbane. I gave Brisbane Miller’s telephone number, but Brisbane never called him. I guess all editors aren’t good reporters.
Brisbane became involved when the Times, which runs daily corrections, refused to correct a Richard Sandomir television column on Flood. The Times has been especially careless in its treatment of Flood and free agency.
In 2006 the Times ran a review by David Margolick of a book about Flood.
Writing about the Flood lawsuit, Margolick said, “Catfish Hunter, Andy Messersmith, Dave McNally and Reggie Jackson quickly marched into the opening Flood had cleared, earning what then seemed like staggering sums. And the process only intensified. ‘Opening the Floodgates’ may be a bad pun, but in this case it’s true.”
But it was not true. Miller wrote a letter to the Times pointing out the review’s mistakes, but the newspaper didn’t publish it.
Had Flood won his case, baseball history would have been different and the Flood case could have been linked to the resulting free agency. But Flood lost his lawsuit, all the way up to the United States Supreme Court. Miller and Moss won the Messersmith-McNally grievance that created free agency. With the Flood lawsuit, there was no free agency. Without the Seitz decision, there would have been no free agency.
The Flood case did not prompt Miller and Moss to seek unsigned players to file a grievance. Seitz, in his ruling, did not rely on the Flood case; nor was he influenced by it. He acted on the renewal clause in the uniform player’s contract.
Seitz also decided the Hunter case, which had as much to do with free agency as Jose Reyes’ suspension for domestic violence.
In my extensive attempt to get the Times to correct the Sandomir column, I wrote to Greg Brock, the Times’ corrections editor. This was part of his reply:
“If the Catfish Hunter case is one of these queries, you should go ahead and take that up with the public editor. I spent an enormous amount of time – too much – on that one. I talked to about 8 editors. We do not think that is correctable. That is the final decision and we’re not going to debate it and discuss it further. So there is no point in sending me back a lengthy rebuttal. Again, you can appeal to the public editor.”
I wonder if Brock has ever learned the difference between free agency and breach of contract.