Free agency signings

Few, if any, of us can predict the future with any degree of confidence, and Marvin Miller was no exception. Miller was executive director of the Major League Players Association, the players union, when he discussed the likely aftermath of the Seitz labor decision late in 1975.

That ruling, the outcome of grievances filed by Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith, had gone to arbitration. Arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled in favor of the players, which resulted in overturning the reserve clause that had been the underpinning of major league baseball since the start of the 20th century.

With players no longer tied to the team that signed them to their original contract for the duration of their big league career, except if they were traded, team owners feared what Ewing Kauffman, owner of the Kansas City Royals, would be a “scramble for talented players.”¹

And well-to-do clubs would win in the wide open bidding for players that owners thought would position them to win pennants and World Series.

Not so, Miller said. He predicted only a few players would seize on their newfound freedom to exercise the same workplace rights, to seek a better employer and to negotiate a salary that reflected their value, that other Americans enjoyed.

“I don’t start with the assumption that every player is dissatisfied,” he said. “A large number of players want to be precisely where they are. The fact that they could move doesn’t necessarily mean they would.”

He noted that veteran players were established in their homes and in their communities, and they had children in school. They had friends in the cities where they played and business connections.

“They have the same built-in inhibitions against moving that all the rest of us have,” Miller said.

Player unhappiness stemmed from how they were being treated by the club that held the rights to their services.

“In any industry, employees often are taken for granted–and it’s even more so in baseball where players are regarded as property. It’s time baseball started considering the players as people and not as machines,” Miller said.

Knowing that players now could declare themselves free agents might give them leverage and prompt teams to work out issues with them, he said.

Miller was right for the first few years that free agency was in effect. In 1976, the first year, thirty-two free agents signed, and fifty signed in 1977. The totals inched up to ninety-two in 1985, and then free agency exploded.

1986 saw 147 free-agent signings, and the total reached 269 by 1992, 287 by 1997 and peaked at 542 in 2003, according to numbers available at baseball-reference.com

Altogether, in the forty-seven years from 1976 through 2023, major-league baseball had 13,918 free-agent signings. It should be noted that this figure includes duplicates, players who successfully sought free-agent status in more than one season.

This works out to an average of 296 free-agent signings per year.

What an earthquake McNally unleashed by taking a stand against baseball’s entrenched power shortly after he retired from baseball in 1975 and returned to Billings!

1. The Sporting News, November 29, 1975 ↩︎