The Start of a Revolution: The Seitz Decision
An IBWAA member reviews the decision that began MLB free agency
IBWAA members love to write about baseball. So much so, we've decided to create our own newsletter about it! Subscribe to Here's the Pitch to expand your love of baseball, discover new voices, and support independent writing. Original content six days a week, straight to your inbox and straight from the hearts of baseball fans.
Pregame Pepper
Did you know…
. . . Late Friday, the baseball world lost the incomparable Rickey Henderson. Over a 25-year (!!) career, Henderson accumulated more than 3,000 hits and had a career .401 OBP. Henderson is most well-known as the all-time leader in stolen bases with 1,406 stolen bases, 468 more than any player in the history of the game. If you would add together the total of the last NINE MLB steals leaders, you would only have 458 total - less than Rickey is ahead of the next guy on the leaderboard. Rickey also leads the game’s history with 2,295 runs scored. Rest in power to the greatest leadoff hitter in the history of the game.
. . . As we head toward Christmas, Rickey was born on Christmas Day, one of three Hall of Famers born on the day - Pud Galvin and Nellie Fox are the other two. The player with the longest MLB tenure born on Christmas Day now that Rickey has passed is still living. Manny Trillo spent 17 years as a utility infielder for seven MLB clubs. His career statistics may not be elite (11.3 career bWAR, 1,780 games played, 6,573 plate appearances, a .263/.316/.345 career slash line, and 61 home runs and 56 stolen bases over his career), but he won three Gold Gloves and made four All-Star teams.
Leading Off
The Start of a Revolution: The Seitz Decision
By Bill Pruden
With Juan Soto’s recently completed $765 million contract coming just a year after Shohei Ohtani inked his own $700 million deal, it’s easy to forget that such contracts and the bidding wars they represent have not always been a part of baseball off-seasons. In fact, it was 49 years ago today, December 23, 1975, when the baseball world was turned upside down as arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally were free agents.
It was a holiday gift that would keep on giving, ushering in the free agency we now know, a new normal that has not only altered the whole compensation structure of Major League Baseball (MLB) but also created a whole new off-season sport as the annual hot-stove league that once focused on trades, now watches transfixed the chase for free agent acquisitions that can transform a team, not to mention an individual player’s financial status. It is a process that can change the fortunes – literally – of players and teams alike. The door to this process was opened on that December day almost half a century ago.
The decision was the culmination of an effort spearheaded by Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) Executive Director Marvin Miller to gain greater freedom for MLB players, who, by virtue of baseball’s long-established and legally recognized reserve clause, were bound to a single team, unable to negotiate with or play for another unless their contract was traded to another team in which case, yes, they could play for that one but still no other. It was, in the eyes of some, a form of slavery, a situation that quite simply left the players with no alternative if they wanted to continue to play.
But from the moment he assumed his role with the MLBPA Miller began to push against these strictures. He helped Curt Flood in his ultimately unsuccessful 1972 legal challenge to the reserve clause, an effort whose end result notwithstanding, did much to raise the consciousness of both the players and the public. And later that year under Miller’s leadership, the players held their first strike, an effort that resulted in an increase in the players’ pension fund.
All of these were forerunners to his plan to have Messersmith and McNally test the reserve clause by playing for a year at the same salary as the previous year, their tie to their current teams a product of the continuing tie created by the reserve clause. But the players contended that the reserve clause-based relationship was only good for one year and so that after the 1975 season they were free agents. It was that issue that was up for arbitration.
Central to that arbitration proceeding was Peter Seitz, a lawyer and well-respected member of the American Arbitration Association. His wide-ranging experience included serving on the Association’s labor-management panel which in 1965-66 had studied collective-bargaining procedures in New York City. He was a member of the National Wage Stabilization Board as well as counsel and assistant to the director of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service as well as serving as the director of industrial relations for the US Department of Defense. He also served as an arbitrator for the National Basketball Association and the Basketball Players Association.
Seitz had, in fact, made his first mark in the baseball world earlier that fall. And no small mark it was when less than a month before his ruling in the Messersmith and McNally cases, on November 26, Seitz ruled Oakland A’s pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter a free agent after determining that A’s Owner Charles O. Finley failure to fulfill a provision in the two-year contract they had signed the previous year had rendered the contract void. To anyone who was watching closely, Seitz’s ruling offered a hint of what might lie ahead. Not only did the decision open the door to the New York Yankees owner George Steinbrenner offering a preview of what was to come when he made Hunter MLB’s first million-dollar free agent, signing the righthander to a five-year, $3.35 contract, but Seitz’s ruling made clear that he was not afraid to go against MLB’s ownership fraternity. Yet, with Finley being an outsider among his peers, it could have been taken as simply an aberration.
When the announcement in the Messersmith and McNally case came on December 23, only a week after Hunter had signed with the Yankees, and with Seitz casting the tie-breaking vote (The arbitration board hearing the case was officially composed of three members - a representative of the players union, Marvin Miller, a representative of the owners, MLB Player Relations Committee Chief negotiator John Gaherin, and a neutral arbitrator, Seitz, agreed upon by the two opposing parties, although paid by the owners.), it was clear that not only was he an independent analyst, but baseball would never be the same. Indeed, in a revolutionary ruling, after assessing the evidence, Seitz determined that the reserve clause was, as Miller and the MLBPA asserted, not one that operated in perpetuity, but was good for only one year, thus leaving the pitching duo, like Hunter just weeks before them, free to offer their services to any team.
It was a stunning reversal for which, unsurprisingly, Seitz paid no small price, being fired by the owners in its aftermath. That did not alter the decision, one that was upheld by both the US District Court in Western Missouri and the Eighth Circuit Court of Appeals. Not only were McNally and Messersmith officially granted free agency on March 16, 1976, but once the appeals had been exhausted, baseball’s owners, recognizing the ramifications of the ruling, reached an agreement with the Players Association that allowed players with six years of MLB service to become free agents. A new era had arrived and the world of professional baseball would never be the same. If you have any doubts, just ask Shohei Ohtani or Juan Soto.
Bill Pruden is a high school history and government teacher who has been a baseball fan for over six decades. He has been writing about the game--primarily through SABR sponsored platforms, but also in some historical works--for about a decade. His email address is: courtwatchernc@aol.com.
Extra Innings
This will be the last Here’s the Pitch until Friday, Dec. 27. Enjoy the holiday of your choice (or more than one!) over the next few days, and we look ahead to an exciting season of IBWAA member content in our newsletter in 2025!
For your viewing pleasure, here are the Savannah Bananas with a unique take on a Christmas wish: