13

Change and Revolution (1960 to 1975)

the sixties were a period of political unrest that unleashed various protest movements that were still active through the 1970s. These reform movements transformed American society. The most significant social movement of the era was the civil rights movement, discussed in chapter 11, but other crusades—including the women’s movement, which sought to end gender discrimination; the antiwar movement, which opposed US involvement in the Vietnam War; and the counterculture and youth movement, which promoted individuality over conformity—also shaped the sixties and seventies. These protest movements left their imprints on the era and on baseball.

In October 1969 center fielder Curt Flood received a call from someone in the St. Louis Cardinals office informing him that he had been traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. Flood, a three-time all-star who had helped lead the Cardinals to the 1967 and 1968 National League pennant and to the 1967 World Series championship, responded with stone-cold silence. He did not want to go from a perennial pennant contender to a team that finished thirty-seven games out of first place. Accustomed to the comforts of Busch Memorial Stadium, which had opened in 1966, he did not want to play in Philadelphia’s antiquated Connie Mack Stadium. And Flood, an African American, did not want to play before Philadelphia’s notoriously belligerent and often racist fans. He was also angry that the call had come from an underling, rather than from general manager Bing Devine.

Frustrated, Flood turned to Marvin Miller, the executive director of the new players’ union, the Major League Baseball Players Association. Miller, who had only recently turned the thirteen-year-old MLBPA into a bona fide labor union, assured Flood that if he wanted to sue Major League Baseball, the union would bear the legal costs, but he warned the ballplayer that because of Major League Baseball’s antitrust exemption and the history of courts favoring baseball team owners, there was not “a chance in hell of winning.” More importantly, Miller advised him that even if he did win, Flood would not benefit from a lawsuit, as he would likely be driven out of baseball. Flood asked Miller if a lawsuit would benefit others, and when Miller informed him that it would help existing and future players, Flood agreed to pursue litigation. “You’re a union-leader’s dream,” Miller remarked as the two planned their strategy.

In December, Flood sent a letter to Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn protesting that he was not “a piece of property to be bought and sold.” Acknowledging that he had received a contract offer from the Phillies, Flood stated that he believed he had the right to consider offers from other teams before making a decision, and he asked the commissioner to inform the other major league teams of his availability for the 1970 season. Citing the reserve clause, Kuhn rejected Flood’s bid for free agency. Flood went ahead with the lawsuit, and in 1972, in the case of Flood v. Kuhn, the United States Supreme Court upheld the reserve clause and rejected Flood’s assertion that he was a free agent. Miller not only correctly predicted the outcome of the case, but he also prophesied Flood’s future. Rejecting the contract from the Phillies, Flood sat out the 1970 season. The Phillies traded Flood to the Washington Senators for the 1971 season, where he would play thirteen games before leaving baseball for good.

Flood later explained that the civil rights movement had inspired him to challenge the reserve clause. His claim is not surprising. The reform movements of the sixties and seventies exerted a substantial influence on baseball, as did other elements from the era. In late 1963 NASA moved its manned space program to Houston from Cape Canaveral, Florida. A year later, because the ball club had been receiving complaints from Colt’s Manufacturing Company which made the Colt .45 revolver, Judge Roy Hofheinz, the president of the Houston Colt .45s, announced that, in honor of NASA, starting in 1965 the team would be known as the Houston Astros. When that season started, the Astros moved into baseball’s first domed stadium—the Astrodome, which was hailed as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” The climate-controlled facility featured a glass roof that allowed sunlight to nurture the ballpark’s natural grass surface. During the season, however, ballplayers discovered that they could not follow fly balls in the glare coming through the glass. To rectify that problem, the sunlight was blocked by painting the roof white—which, unfortunately, killed the grass, and for the rest of the season, the Astros played home games on dead grass that had been painted green. Before the 1966 season began, workmen replaced the grass with an artificial surface called AstroTurf. AstroTurf offered a number of advantages for grounds crews, including less maintenance, better drainage, and truer bounces of ground balls. But AstroTurf also presented a number of disadvantages: It was as hard as concrete and, because it lacked the spring found in natural surfaces, over time it damaged players’ knees. And players found that ground balls traveled faster over the surface. Many ball clubs, however, believed its benefits outweighed its drawbacks. By the midseventies, seven baseball teams that played in outdoor stadiums had replaced natural grass with an artificial surface.

Marvin Miller, the executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association, turned the organization into a bona fide labor union. National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Cooperstown, N.Y.

Like America, baseball endured a period of turmoil in the 1960s. In the fifties, five economically troubled baseball teams had left their traditional homes for greener pastures. As baseball franchises became less grounded in their home cities, owners of losing teams discovered that the easiest way to attract more fans was to move the team. Because of the novelty of watching a major league game and the pride of living in a major league city, even second-rate teams initially drew well in new cities. But if that team did not improve quickly, in a few years many of the new fans became discouraged.

Although the Braves initially seemed to strike gold in Milwaukee, by the 1960s the club was in decline. After 1961 Milwaukee did not finish higher than fifth place, and attendance suffered. In 1954 the Braves became the first National League team to draw two million fans, but in 1962 attendance slipped below a million and in 1965 the team barely attracted a half million fans. In the meantime, civic leaders in Atlanta were seeking a major league baseball team. The Georgia city had just built a new multipurpose stadium, which had already attracted an NFL expansion team. City leaders believed that a major league baseball team would solidify Atlanta’s status as a major league city. In 1965 the Braves attempted to move to Atlanta during the middle of the season. Although the National League blocked the midseason move, it allowed the Braves to move to Atlanta in time to start the 1966 season.

The Kansas City Athletics were also in trouble. The team was abysmal, both on the field and at the gate, when it left Philadelphia in 1955, and it did not improve in Kansas City. By the mid-1960s, the A’s began to investigate other possible locations. After considering Seattle, New Orleans, and Dallas–Fort Worth, in 1964 the team owner, Charles O. Finley, signed an agreement with the state of Kentucky to move the Athletics to Louisville. He had planned to change the team’s name to the Kentucky Colonels, which would have allowed the club to continue to use the “KC” logo it had adopted in 1963. But the American League, fearing that Louisville was no longer a major market, vetoed the move. The A’s did not stop looking for a new home and, at the conclusion of the 1967 season, the American League allowed the team to move to Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco, where they would play in the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum, a new multipurpose stadium built for pro football’s Oakland Raiders. Beginning in 1968, the A’s would also make that stadium home.

The loss of teams in Milwaukee and Kansas City upset political and business leaders in both cities. Kansas City, which had already approved the construction of a new baseball stadium, sued the American League. Fearing the lawsuit might threaten baseball’s antitrust exemption, Major League Baseball agreed to expand to twenty-four teams in 1969. To replace the Athletics, the American League added a new team, the Kansas City Royals. It also placed a team—the Seattle Pilots—in the Pacific Northwest. The National League was expected to put expansion teams in Milwaukee and Buffalo, but instead it added the San Diego Padres in Southern California and the Montreal Expos in Canada. At the time, Montreal was Canada’s largest city, and it had once been the home of the Brooklyn Dodgers’ top farm club. Named after Montreal’s recently held World’s Fair, Expo ’67, the Expos were the first major league team located outside of the United States.

Remembering the struggles of the twelve-team National League of the 1890s, both leagues split into two divisions. And with the creation of an Eastern Division and Western Division in each league, Major League Baseball established a new postseason playoff series—the League Championship Series—with the series winner from each league meeting in the World Series. When the LCS began in 1969, a team had to win three games out of five to advance to the World Series, but starting in 1985 the series was extended to a best-of-seven series.

Table 13.1. Major League Baseball, 1969

American League
Eastern Division	Western Division
Baltimore Orioles	California Angels
Boston Red Sox	Chicago White Sox
Cleveland Indians	Kansas City Royals
Detroit Tigers	Minnesota Twins
New York Yankees	Oakland Athletics
Washington Senators	Seattle Pilots

National League
Eastern Division	Western Division
Chicago Cubs	Atlanta Braves
Montreal Expos	Cincinnati Reds
New York Mets	Houston Astros
Philadelphia Phillies	Los Angeles Dodgers
Pittsburgh Pirates	San Diego Padres
St. Louis Cardinals	San Francisco Giants

But baseball had still not returned to stability. Civic leaders in Milwaukee, disappointed at not receiving an expansion team, convinced the Chicago White Sox to play a number of home games in Milwaukee in 1968 and 1969. The handful of games played in the city (roughly 12 percent of the White Sox home schedule) represented more than a third of Chicago’s home attendance in both years. In 1969 the Milwaukee group, led by car dealer Allan Huber “Bud” Selig, reached a deal with the White Sox to buy the club and move it to Wisconsin. The American League, however, not wanting to abandon what was still the country’s second-largest city, blocked the sale. In the meantime, the Seattle Pilots were experiencing severe problems in the Pacific Northwest. The team was undercapitalized, and although the city had begun the process of building a new domed stadium, it would not be ready for years. Sick’s Stadium, the minor league ballpark the Pilots settled on for the interim, was inadequate for a major league team. After one season, the Pilots declared bankruptcy and the team was put up for sale. Without a loan of $600,000 from the American League, the Pilots would not have been able to conduct spring training in 1970. In April, only a week before the start of the new season, the group of businessmen who had attempted to buy the White Sox purchased the Pilots, renamed them the Milwaukee Brewers, and moved them to Wisconsin.

The Washington Senators were also experiencing financial difficulty. Washington had not won a pennant since the original American League Senators finished in first place in 1933. When the 1971 season ended, Senators owner Bob Short announced that the team would move to Dallas–Fort Worth for the 1972 season. Short renamed the team, which would play halfway between Dallas and Fort Worth in the suburban community of Arlington, the Texas Rangers. In order to balance out the divisions geographically, the Rangers joined the American League’s Western Division, while the Brewers switched to the East. The Senators’ move had at least one negative effect on baseball: Without a team in Washington, DC, Major League Baseball could no longer stage an annual season-opening ceremony in which the president threw out the first pitch. Only on rare occasions would the president be available to travel to Baltimore or another city for Opening Day.

In the 1970s, differences developed between the National League and the American League. The game played by National League teams stressed speed and defense, while the American League relied on power and home runs. This was partly due to the facilities in which each league played. By 1971, half the stadiums in the National League—including the Astrodome, Candlestick Park, and new multiuse stadiums in St. Louis, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Cincinnati—featured an artificial playing surface, while all twelve American League teams still played on grass. (Artificial surface would finally appear in the American League with the opening of Royals Stadium in Kansas City in 1973 and the establishment of expansion franchises in Seattle and Toronto in 1977.) A rule change was also responsible for the different styles of play. As most pitchers are poor hitters, in 1973 the American League adopted the designated hitter, a tenth player who would come to bat for the pitcher. The designated hitter rule also provided a roster spot for aging sluggers who had become too old and slow to play defense. When New York Yankee Ron Blomberg came to bat at Fenway Park in Boston on April 6, 1973, he became the first designated hitter in baseball history. In the National League, however, pitchers continued to take their turn at bat.

Another difference between the two leagues emerged in 1977. Threatened by a lawsuit from the city of Seattle, the American League added two more teams. To appease officials in the Pacific Northwest, the league placed the Seattle Mariners in its Western Division. The Mariners would play in the American League’s first domed stadium, the Kingdome. To remain balanced, the American League added a team to its Eastern Division, the Toronto Blue Jays. The Blue Jays became the American League’s first team outside the United States, although Toronto had nearly become a National League city when the Giants threatened to move there in 1976. Many people looked to the National League to follow suit by adding new teams to Washington, DC, and New Orleans. The nation’s capital, which was still looking for a team to replace the Senators, had nearly lured the Padres to Washington in 1974, but McDonald’s founder Ray Kroc stepped forward to buy the team and keep it in San Diego. And New Orleans had just opened a domed stadium called the Louisiana Superdome, which—although it had been built for the New Orleans Saints of the NFL—could also hold sixty-five thousand fans for baseball. But the National League resisted all pressure to expand and continued to operate as a twelve-team league. With the expansion of the American League to fourteen clubs in 1977, baseball had returned to a state of stability not seen since the early fifties. Owners realized that constantly shifting teams from one city to another would hurt baseball, and after 1977, baseball clubs were strongly discouraged from moving. As a result, the major league baseball map remained unchanged from 1977 through 1992.

The protest movements of the sixties and seventies also left their mark on the game. By the midsixties, many young people began to see themselves as alienated from their parents’ generation, and, with their rejection of materialism, a generation gap appeared. As young people encouraged each other to express their individuality through dress, music, and behavior, a counterculture emerged. Many in the younger generation wore long hair, facial hair, colorful clothing, and even beads. The counterculture created its own set of values, which often included drug use and “free love.” Baseball did not experience the same countercultural wave as society at large, but elements of the counterculture still infiltrated the game. While many stars, including Mickey Mantle and Roger Maris, wore crew cuts, other players—like Joe Pepitone of the Yankees, whose locks hung over his ears, and Oscar Gamble of the Indians, whose Afro burst out from underneath his cap—expressed their individuality through their hairstyles. Illegal drug use was not uncommon among ballplayers. Red Sox pitcher Bill Lee, an admitted marijuana smoker, was nicknamed “Spaceman” by his teammates, while Dock Ellis of the Pirates later claimed that he was high on LSD when he threw a no-hitter against the Padres in 1970. But the influence of the counterculture was perhaps best captured through the Athletics and their eccentric owner, Charles O. Finley.

Finley, a wealthy insurance agent from Gary, Indiana, purchased the Kansas City Athletics in 1960. Upon buying the team, Finley vowed that the Athletics, a club that had finished last in the eight-team American League, would not finish in eighth place in 1961. Finley kept that promise—with two new teams added to the American League in 1961, Kansas City finished in ninth place. In order to attract fans, Finley changed the color of the A’s uniforms. Traditionally baseball clubs wore crisp white uniforms at home and gray uniforms on the road, while baseball caps, stockings, undersleeves, and trim had always been blue, black, or red. When the Athletics took the field in 1963 wearing bright gold uniforms with Kelly green caps, stockings, undershirts, and trim, opposing players compared the uniforms to that of a softball team. But the colorful uniforms worn by the A’s would eventually revolutionize the look of many major league teams, who would adopt brightly colored—some might say gaudy—uniforms in the 1970s. The flashy uniforms would be taken to their extreme when Bill Veeck, who reentered baseball when he bought the Chicago White Sox the previous year, outfitted his team in short pants in 1976. The shorts, which were unpopular with the players because they made sliding very difficult, were quietly abandoned midseason.

Finley promoted the counterculture in other ways, too. Rock music had experienced a surge of popularity among young people with the arrival in America of the Beatles. With Beatlemania sweeping the country in 1964, Finley personally paid $150,000—almost $5,000 a minute—for the Beatles to play a concert at Kansas City’s Municipal Stadium, the home of the Athletics. In the seventies, he encouraged the A’s to grow long hair, and in 1972 he promised a bonus to his poorly paid players if they grew facial hair. Eager for a few extra bucks, the entire squad sported mustaches that year.

A strong supporter of the designated hitter rule, Finley attempted to get Major League Baseball to adopt other innovations. His pet project was his attempt to convince baseball to create a designated runner position: a runner who would step in for the slowest player in the lineup each time he got on base without forcing him out of the game. To prove his point, in 1974 Finley added world-class sprinter Herb Washington to his roster. Playing under the existing substitution rules, in a little more than a full season in the majors, Washington appeared in 105 games, stealing thirty-one bases and scoring thirty-three runs without ever coming to bat. Nonetheless, the other major league teams—perhaps discouraged when Washington was picked off first base in the bottom of the ninth inning of Game 2 of the 1974 World Series—remained unconvinced. And in an era when tennis was transitioning from white to fluorescent-colored tennis balls, Finley tried to change the color of baseballs. Believing that batters had difficulty following white baseballs, Finley obtained permission from Major League Baseball to experiment with orange baseballs in two 1973 spring training games. Although the human eye can recognize orange more quickly than it can most other colors, the orange baseballs proved even more challenging for hitters than white ones. Unable to distinguish the orange leather from the red stitching while the ball was in flight, batters could not detect the ball’s spin, and therefore could not determine if the pitch was a curveball.

Before the start of the 1968 season, Finley moved the Athletics to Oakland, across the bay from San Francisco and only five miles from Berkeley, a major center of the counterculture. Finley never quite accepted the name Athletics because it was too closely associated with former team owner Connie Mack. In 1971 Finley officially changed the club’s name to the Oakland A’s, banishing the word Athletics from team uniforms, pennants, programs, and all signage at the Oakland–Alameda County Coliseum. The club would not resume using the name Athletics until after Finley sold the team in 1981. In Oakland, Finley finally put together a winning team. With stars like right fielder Reggie Jackson, starting pitcher Jim “Catfish” Hunter, and closer Rollie Fingers, the A’s won five straight division titles between 1971 and 1975, as well as the 1972, 1973, and 1974 World Series.

Although limited in its impact, the women’s movement of the sixties and seventies also exerted an influence on baseball. In 1963 journalist Betty Friedan wrote The Feminine Mystique, in which she argued that suburban domesticity left women with feelings of emptiness and no sense of accomplishment. To escape the mystique, Friedan advised women to seek independent careers. Friedan’s influence can be seen in baseball, as four different women owned major league teams in the last four decades of the twentieth century. Two of them—Jean Yawkey of the Red Sox in 1976 and Joan Kroc of the Padres in 1984—inherited their teams when their husbands died, but two other women became club owners on their own. Joan Whitney Payson, who held a small stake in the Giants, had voted against the team’s move to San Francisco in 1957. She subsequently sold her share and worked to acquire a replacement team. When the National League awarded an expansion team to New York in 1962, it named her the owner. Cincinnati auto dealer Marge Schott purchased a controlling interest in the Reds in 1984. Schott became one of the most visible and vocal owners in baseball, but, unfortunately, not always with positive results. In 1999, after she made flattering comments about Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, Major League Baseball finally forced her out of the game. Women also have achieved success as baseball executives. Katy Feeney, the daughter of former National League president Charles “Chub” Feeney, took a temporary secretarial job in the National League office in 1977 and eventually ascended to the position of senior vice president of Major League Baseball.

American women seemed to be on the verge of making major gains in the seventies. When Congress passed the Education Amendments of 1972, Title IX banned sexual discrimination in educational programs receiving federal assistance, requiring public schools and universities to offer equal educational and athletic opportunities to students of both genders. One unexpected benefit of Title IX was the explosion of female high school and college athletic programs. And with more women engaged in amateur athletics, interest in professional opportunities naturally increased. In 1972, Congress also approved the Equal Rights Amendment (ERA), which stated that “[e]quality of rights under the law shall not be denied or abridged by the United States or by any State on account of sex.” In order to become a part of the US Constitution, the amendment needed to be ratified by thirty-eight states within seven years. At first the amendment’s adoption appeared certain, as thirty states ratified it in its first two years, but by the end of the decade, support for the ERA cooled. Only thirty-five states approved it before the deadline expired.

As with the ERA, women were not totally successful in achieving their goals. In 1977, a woman named Pam Postema obtained a job as a minor league umpire. Although she had the opportunity to call a few major league spring training games, Postema never was promoted to the major leagues. After twelve years in the minors, including six at the Triple-A level, Postema was fired. Claiming gender discrimination, Postema sued and reached an out-of-court settlement with her former employer, the Pacific Coast League. A decade later, a second woman, Ria Cortesio, also became a minor league umpire. Like Postema, Cortesio called a major league spring training game, but after nine years in the minors, she was also fired without being promoted to the major leagues.

More than two decades after the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League ceased operating, women returned to the diamond. In 1976 two icons of women’s sports, Billie Jean King and Joan Joyce, along with sports promoter Dennis Murphy, established the International Women’s Professional Softball Association (IWPS). Joyce had been the star pitcher on a perennial national amateur champion softball team, while King, a top-ranked tennis player, was probably the most famous female athlete in the world. King also had a connection to baseball, as her brother, Randy Moffitt, was a relief pitcher for the Giants. The IWPS first began play in 1976 with ten teams and a 120-game schedule made up of sixty doubleheaders. The league, however, failed to attract much interest. Among other problems, it suffered from a lack of competition, as Joyce’s team, the Connecticut Falcons, won all four league championships and all but one of the league’s world series games. By 1979 only six teams remained. In early 1980 the league’s chief corporate sponsor, the BIC Corporation, withdrew its support, and the IWPS, like the ERA, quietly died.

While baseball was not immune to the effects of the counterculture movement and the women’s movement, it perhaps best reflected the radicalism of the 1960s and 1970s by pursuing its own protest movement—the players’ rights movement. Although there had been several unsuccessful attempts to create players’ unions in the first half of the twentieth century, major league players had largely been unorganized since the collapse of the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players in the 1890s. In the 1950s, ballplayers formed the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA), electing Cleveland Indians pitcher Bob Feller the group’s first president in 1956. At first Major League Baseball welcomed the creation of the MLBPA, even agreeing to stage a second all-star game each year from 1959 to 1962 to subsidize the association’s pension fund. As issues between the players and owners grew more complicated, however, the MLBPA hired Marvin Miller in 1966 to become the organization’s executive director.

Miller was born in New York City two weeks after the United States entered World War I. With a father who was a member of the Amalgamated Clothing Workers of America and a mother who was one of the first members of the United Federation of Teachers, Miller learned the importance of labor unions at an early age. He was still a child when he participated in his first picket line. After graduating from New York University with a degree in economics in 1938, Miller worked as a hearing officer for the National War Labor Board. After the war he took jobs negotiating for the International Association of Machinists and the United Auto Workers before becoming the chief economic adviser to the United Steelworkers in 1950. As executive director for the MLBPA, Miller turned the players’ association into a bona fide labor union. Red Barber, baseball’s pioneer radio broadcaster, once called Miller—along with Babe Ruth and Jackie Robinson—“one of the two or three most important men in baseball history.” Yet, as of 2017, he still has not been named to baseball’s Hall of Fame.

When Miller first took over the MLBPA, ballplayers, many of whom were young and inexperienced in life, tended to believe that they were lucky to be allowed to play baseball for a living. Miller sought to change this perception. He established a program to educate players about the fundamentals of organizing and union solidarity. He also took steps to shore up the union’s financing by implementing a group licensing program. Miller succeeded in removing morality clauses from players’ contracts, representing players who belonged to minority groups, and winning recognition of mental issues suffered by players. During his tenure, Miller brought base salaries to new levels. In 1968 he negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement in professional sports history. The agreement raised the minimum salary of major league players, which had been $6,000 since the 1940s, to $10,000. In 1970 Miller negotiated the right of players to seek arbitration to resolve grievances. When baseball club owners refused to increase their contribution to the players’ pension fund, the MLBPA organized its first strike. The 1972 Major League Baseball strike, which lasted thirteen days, delayed the start of the season; after eighty-six games were canceled, the owners gave into the demands of the union.

The players’ union, however, set as its ultimate goal the elimination of the ninety-year-old reserve clause, which kept salaries down by binding players to the same team for their entire career. In 1970 Miller and the MLBPA supported Curt Flood in his unsuccessful suit against Commissioner Bowie Kuhn. The impact of the reserve clause became apparent in 1974, when Oakland A’s owner Charles Finley failed to make a $50,000 payment into an insurance annuity fund as required by the contract of starting pitcher Catfish Hunter. Hunter took the matter to arbitration, and the arbitrator ruled that because Finley had violated his contract, Hunter was a free agent who was welcome to offer his services to the highest bidder. Hunter agreed to a $3.35 million, five-year contract with the New York Yankees, demonstrating to everyone the income potential of ballplayers not bound by the reserve clause.

The following year, pitchers Andy Messersmith of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dave McNally of the Montreal Expos did not sign new contracts. Instead, because of the reserve clause, they played the entire season under the terms of their expired contracts. When the 1975 season ended, however, both players declared themselves free agents. When Kuhn disagreed, Messersmith and McNally took the matter to arbitration, and in December, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the reserve clause bound a player for only one season—the reserve year—and that because they had played the reserve year without signing new contracts, both Messersmith and McNally were, in fact, free agents. Major League Baseball appealed the Seitz decision, but in February 1976 a US District Court upheld the ruling.

Later that year, after Major League Baseball’s appeals were exhausted, the players’ union and Major League Baseball signed a new collective bargaining agreement that recognized free agency. Under the new agreement, a player who had six or more years of major league experience would become a free agent one year after his contract expired. In effect, the reserve clause continued to stand, as it does today, but it held a player to his team for only one year; then, after “playing out his option,” a player was free to sign a contract with any major league team. After ninety-six years of impeding free agency, the reserve clause would no longer hold down players’ salaries. Baseball was about to face its own revolution—this one financial.