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MLB BASEBALL HISTORY
Professional MLB baseball players had organized several times in baseball history, but they were never able to make the advances that unions in other industries had won for their members. The Major League Baseball Players Association (MLB) had been around for more than thirty years. They hired Marvin Miller, a veteran labor organizer who had fought for the United Steelworkers union for years. When Miller came on board to the MLB and saw what the conditions were, he knew much more was at stake.
For one thing, the minimum salary was $6,000, just a thousand dollars more than it had been in 1947. As he began to collect data, the MLB players were surprised at how poorly they were being paid. This education paved the way for the first collective bargaining agreement in 1968. It provided some modest improvements, but most importantly it gave the MLB players some leverage. For nearly a hundred years, MLB team owners had a “take it or leave it” relationship with players. The union could (and did) file complaints with the National Labor Relations Board when they were treated unfairly. MLB players also won the right to have their grievances heard before an independent arbitrator.
The MLB team owners did not like the union interfering in their business, and they did not like the players standing up to them. Curt Flood, one of the MLB’s premier centerfielders refused to report to training camp in 1969, demanding that the St. Louis Cardinals offer more than a $5000 raise. They relented, but after an unexceptional season, they traded him to Philadelphia. Flood did not want to go. He had strong ties to the community, and filed a suit against Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. Flood argued that the Reserve Clause was illegal, and that he should be allowed to negotiate freely with other teams. The Supreme Court ultimately ruled against him, but it made a lot of MLB players think.
By 1975, two pitchers decided to challenge the reserve clause again. It said that the teams had the right to renew a player's contract for one year. They interpreted that to be recurring, that they could renew it every year. Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith refused to sign their contracts. If the reserve clause bound them for the 1975 season, there was no contract that could be renewed for 1976. An arbitrator upheld their case, and free agency was born.
Players were still bound to a team for the first few years of their career, but after that they could sign with any team. The MLB team owners couldn’t contain their excitement at this, and spent the next five years outbidding and outspending each other. The players were happy, because everyone’s salary was going up. But many MLB team owners were getting upset. When a player left, they got nothing in return. They argued that a team who lost a player should get something in return for compensation. Otherwise, the money they had invested in that player’s development would be lost. The MLB players argued that this would severely limit their freedom. The two sides couldn’t agree, so in the middle of the 1981 season the players walked out.
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