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- Thread starter Sloopy45
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OHSportsFan
Fan of Ohio Sports in Indy
Seriously, it's been this way the last 10 years I've tried following MLB off-seasons.
Every. Single. Signing. Leads me to shake my head. Unbelievable.
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Buckeye513
Stable Genius
With all of the new TV deals kicking in, you might as well tune out.
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35 years ago today the Philadelphia Phillies gave Pete Rose the richest contract in all pro sports, $3.2m for 4 years.
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This.
I don't understand why people begrudge the players for getting their share of the money that is obviously available. How is it better for the game for the owners to get it all?
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The Jankees continue to throw money away. They WAY overpaid for Ellsbury, who is a nice player, but that contract is absurd. Now they give Carlos Beltran, who will be 37 in April, 3 years & $45 million. His biggest asset is big postseason numbers over his career. They're old, and have no pitching, so I doubt they sniff the postseason next year to take advantage of that.
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ScriptOhio
Everybody is somebody else's weirdo.
Free agency was born 40 years ago today
Dec 23, 2015
Free agency is a fact of life in baseball, but it’s a relatively recent fact of life in the context of the game’s 150-year professional history. Indeed, it began only 40 years ago today when baseball arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled, in a landmark decision, that pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally were free agents.
There were precursors, of course. Precursors which muddy the history in the minds of many. Curt Flood’s famous case seeking to allow him to refuse a trade to Philadelphia and, instead, choose his own team is often cited as groundbreaking, but most forget that Flood lost that case. Some people talk about Catfish Hunter leaving the A’s and heading to the Yankees for a million dollar contract following the 1974 season, but that was an oddity based on Charlie Finley neglecting to pay an insurance premium, not anything precedent setting. It’s greatest legacy is a Bob Dylan song that wasn’t good enough to make the “Desire” album.
No, the real watershed moment for free agency came on December 23, 1975, when Seitz ruled that baseball’s infamous “reserve clause” did not allow a club to perpetually retain the services of the players it signed as amateurs or, later, drafted.
The reserve clause was a century-old provision — or set of provisions, really, found in the boilerplate of player contracts and baseball’s official rules — via which owners restricted the right of players to switch teams and, necessarily, killed any bargaining power the player had to increase his salary. Specifically, the player could negotiate only with the club that listed him on its “reserve list.” The only team-switching came via trades, releases or the sale of a contract to another club. The most pernicious part of it was that the clause purported to act in perpetuity. A player could sign 15 single-year contracts or a single multi-year contract (not that those really existed) and never be out of the team’s control. Even if he retired and came back to the game later he was the property of his club. The fact that it extended to retired players ended up being pretty significant and, ultimately, may have sunk the owners.
Following the 1975 season Dodgers pitcher Andy Messersmith couldn’t reach a deal for the following season. This happened frequently in baseball and it is where the reserve clause showed its power: the Dodgers just decided to unilaterally renew Messersmith at the rate they chose. Messersmith and the Major League Baseball Players’ Association filed a grievance. It may have been possible that this grievance would never be heard, of course. Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley was a shrewd businessman and, if he was worried about losing the grievance, he could’ve simply bowled Messersmith over with a big deal for 1976, contingent on Messersmith dropping the case. So the MLBPA decided to hedge its bets and add a second plaintiff.
Dave McNally won 181 games for the Orioles between 1962 and 1974 and, for a time in the early 70s, was part of one of the greatest rotations the game had ever seen. He was declining by the mid-70s, however, and the Orioles traded him to the Montreal Expos for Ken Singleton and Mike Torrez before the 1975 season. In 1975 McNally was clearly toast and he retired in the middle of the season with no intention of returning to the game. Because the Expos still controlled his playing rights even following retirement, however, he had standing to file a grievance. And he did so, joining Messersmith.
.
.
.
Free agency lives on and has made players very, very wealthy. And, for as hard as they fought it and continue to try to limit it, baseball owners have gotten insanely wealthy despite free agency as well. Some might argue that some of that owner wealth is because of free agency and the way in which it allows a team to improve relatively quickly and how it generates interest on the part of fans on a year-round basis. It’s hard to say, really. All that can be said for certain is that players were horrifically underpaid prior to the Seitz decision and their increased salaries afterward didn’t cut into owners’ pocketbooks as much as was feared. One suspects that the idea of labor costs and profits being wholly at odds is a fiction in businesses other than baseball too, but that’s probably the topic of another essay in another forum.
As it stands, free agency is now 40. And, for all of the complaining some folks still do about it, it looks really good for its age.
Entire article: http://mlb.nbcsports.com/2015/12/23/free-agency-was-born-40-years-ago-today/
Dec 23, 2015
Free agency is a fact of life in baseball, but it’s a relatively recent fact of life in the context of the game’s 150-year professional history. Indeed, it began only 40 years ago today when baseball arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled, in a landmark decision, that pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally were free agents.
There were precursors, of course. Precursors which muddy the history in the minds of many. Curt Flood’s famous case seeking to allow him to refuse a trade to Philadelphia and, instead, choose his own team is often cited as groundbreaking, but most forget that Flood lost that case. Some people talk about Catfish Hunter leaving the A’s and heading to the Yankees for a million dollar contract following the 1974 season, but that was an oddity based on Charlie Finley neglecting to pay an insurance premium, not anything precedent setting. It’s greatest legacy is a Bob Dylan song that wasn’t good enough to make the “Desire” album.
No, the real watershed moment for free agency came on December 23, 1975, when Seitz ruled that baseball’s infamous “reserve clause” did not allow a club to perpetually retain the services of the players it signed as amateurs or, later, drafted.
The reserve clause was a century-old provision — or set of provisions, really, found in the boilerplate of player contracts and baseball’s official rules — via which owners restricted the right of players to switch teams and, necessarily, killed any bargaining power the player had to increase his salary. Specifically, the player could negotiate only with the club that listed him on its “reserve list.” The only team-switching came via trades, releases or the sale of a contract to another club. The most pernicious part of it was that the clause purported to act in perpetuity. A player could sign 15 single-year contracts or a single multi-year contract (not that those really existed) and never be out of the team’s control. Even if he retired and came back to the game later he was the property of his club. The fact that it extended to retired players ended up being pretty significant and, ultimately, may have sunk the owners.
Following the 1975 season Dodgers pitcher Andy Messersmith couldn’t reach a deal for the following season. This happened frequently in baseball and it is where the reserve clause showed its power: the Dodgers just decided to unilaterally renew Messersmith at the rate they chose. Messersmith and the Major League Baseball Players’ Association filed a grievance. It may have been possible that this grievance would never be heard, of course. Dodgers owner Walter O’Malley was a shrewd businessman and, if he was worried about losing the grievance, he could’ve simply bowled Messersmith over with a big deal for 1976, contingent on Messersmith dropping the case. So the MLBPA decided to hedge its bets and add a second plaintiff.
Dave McNally won 181 games for the Orioles between 1962 and 1974 and, for a time in the early 70s, was part of one of the greatest rotations the game had ever seen. He was declining by the mid-70s, however, and the Orioles traded him to the Montreal Expos for Ken Singleton and Mike Torrez before the 1975 season. In 1975 McNally was clearly toast and he retired in the middle of the season with no intention of returning to the game. Because the Expos still controlled his playing rights even following retirement, however, he had standing to file a grievance. And he did so, joining Messersmith.
.
.
.
Free agency lives on and has made players very, very wealthy. And, for as hard as they fought it and continue to try to limit it, baseball owners have gotten insanely wealthy despite free agency as well. Some might argue that some of that owner wealth is because of free agency and the way in which it allows a team to improve relatively quickly and how it generates interest on the part of fans on a year-round basis. It’s hard to say, really. All that can be said for certain is that players were horrifically underpaid prior to the Seitz decision and their increased salaries afterward didn’t cut into owners’ pocketbooks as much as was feared. One suspects that the idea of labor costs and profits being wholly at odds is a fiction in businesses other than baseball too, but that’s probably the topic of another essay in another forum.
As it stands, free agency is now 40. And, for all of the complaining some folks still do about it, it looks really good for its age.
Entire article: http://mlb.nbcsports.com/2015/12/23/free-agency-was-born-40-years-ago-today/
Last edited:
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