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The names you so often hear associated with the end of Major League Baseball’s reserve clause are players Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, as well as MLB Players Association executive director Marvin Miller, for encouraging this challenge to be made in the first place. Those players didn’t argue their own case in front of an arbitrator, however: that job went to Dick Moss, who had been hired by Miller as the union’s general counsel in 1967, and won his most famous and vital case eight years later, representing Messersmith and McNally, but in reality, far more players than just those two. His is a name worth remembering, too.
Moss passed away on Saturday, at the age of 93. According to the Associated Press report, Moss had “been in poor health for several years,” and was at an assisted living facility at the time of his passing.
A thing that’s vital to remember is that Marvin Miller’s background was in economics, not as a labor lawyer. Miller gets a ton of deserved credit for his role in shaping the players union from what it was — which was a union in basically name only — from the time of his arrival in 1967 until his exit in 1982. To do that, though, he needed help on the legal side, which was where Moss came in. Miller understood the economics of labor unions, the consequences of action and inaction, of letting the owners continue to get away with their behavior, and, maybe most importantly, how to get all of that across to the players who had voted him in as their executive director. The legal strategies, however, knowing where to attack, where the players would have a strong defense, that was Moss’ side of things. There is no victory in 1975 without the two of them working together to figure out the loophole in language that would bring about the end of MLB’s reserve clause, which in turn enabled free agency to exist.
The repercussions go well beyond MLB, which, obviously, was never the same after this, not when players were allowed to choose their own teams, not when salaries finally began to rise. Every collective bargaining agreement since has been a reaction to this moment in time, in one way or another. MLB’s first collective bargaining agreement, signed in 1968, was the first in North American sports; the 1975 banishment of the reserve clause would stand as a basis for future agreements in other leagues, in the same way that CBA did.
Moss would leave the Players Association in 1977 to become an agent, now that that sort of thing was even needed by the players. The most famous of the contracts he negotiated in that time was Andre Dawson’s 1987 deal with the Cubs: as collusion was ongoing, Dawson wasn’t receiving any offers despite winning six Gold Gloves, three Silver Sluggers, making three all-star teams, and picking up MVP votes in five different seasons before then. Dawson had been around for a while, but he wasn’t ancient or anything: he was entering his age-32 season, and teams weren’t as concerned about players falling off a cliff as they got older back in the 80s as they are today.
Moss devised a strategy, which was to offer the Cubs — the team Dawson wanted to play for the most — a blank contract that the team could fill in with the terms of their choosing. Well, “blank” isn’t fully accurate: it was the standard MLB contract, just pre-signed and dated by Dawson, although with the salary field left blank. The Cubs chose to pay Dawson all of $500,000 (plus some room for bonuses that could and did bring it up to about $700,000), after he had been paid over $1 million by the Expos per season starting in 1982, when they had him for $1.2 million. They also got back to him the very next day after Moss had submitted the blank contract and left the compensation up to Chicago: this made it very clear that it wasn’t that Dawson was undesirable, it’s just that none of the teams wanted to negotiate with him, nor pay him anywhere near what he was worth.
Behaviors like this would end up backfiring on teams in the long run, since the Players Association would file collusion grievances that they’d win, once again changing the course of MLB history in the process. Moss’ role in this major turn wasn’t as significant as his first go as the PA’s general counsel, but he was still a part of it, nonetheless.
Moss, beginning in 1994, focused on introducing a third major league, which was named the United Baseball League, or just the United League. It was certainly ambitious, as, after its initial planned expansion, it would not just have teams in North America, but overseas in Japan and Korea, as well. The league never actually got off of the ground, however, and closed up shop in 1996: getting going when MLB was embroiled in a strike of its own making would have been a good place to start, but it just didn’t work out. Moss isn’t the only name you know from among its key figures, though: Curt Flood was named commissioner, and economist Andrew Zimbalist, who has certainly stuck around baseball for decades, was one of its founders.
It’s a shame things didn’t work out since, as to be expected from a league founded by Moss and with Flood as commissioner, it was planned to be player-forward. From the Los Angeles Times’ story on the league’s announcement in 1994: “Players will receive 35% of a team’s pretax profit and 10% of expansion fees and the capital gains profit from team sales. All of that money will go into a general fund, with the players determining how it is to be used.” That’s still, obviously, quite the chunk of change for the owners, but 35 percent pre-tax profit being guaranteed, and 10 percent of expansion fees for a league looking to jump from eight to 16 teams over three years isn’t nothing. It all being pooled together for the players to figure out what to do with it is the most intriguing part, of course, since it gives them a level of agency you don’t see even now.
Who knows how it would have been tweaked over the years, since the league never actually ended up being anything besides a proposal and announcement. I respect the ambition, though: there’s room for more leagues than exist, but MLB is also designed to be able to crush anything that arrives to compete with it, keeping that room from ever being filled.
The United League wasn’t Moss’ first attempt at forming a new league; the first, attempted in 1989, actually drew MLB’s ire, with the league threatening legal action if any players who weren’t free agents were signed by The Baseball League — that was its name, yes — which was planning to field teams for a 1990 season. MLB was mad because union head Donald Fehr had said that it wasn’t just free agents as MLB envisioned them that were eligible, but any unsigned player, whether they had put in their six years of service with an MLB club or not — meaning, players who were still pre-arbitration eligible or arb-eligible, so long as they hadn’t yet signed a deal for the 1990 season. The league, believing they owned even the potential rights of any player they might decide to sign, disagreed in a way that would involve lawyers if necessary.
Like with the United League, it didn’t end up mattering, since no games were ever played and the league folded. What’s clear from all of this, though, is that Moss had a way of getting on the bad side of MLB, in a variety of roles: lawyer, agent, and even potential competition. It’s hard not to respect that kind of career.
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