hawkplay Dick Moss, Who Helped Usher In Baseball Free Agency, Dies at 93
Dick Moss, a labor lawyer whohawkplay, with Marvin Miller, the powerful leader of the union that represents baseball players, set the stage for the sport’s free agency revolution, died on Saturday in Santa Monica, Calif. He was 93.
His death, at an assisted living facility, was confirmed by his daughter Nancy Moss Ephron.
Moss joined the Major League Baseball Players Association in 1967 as general counsel after serving as associate general counsel for the United Steelworkers of America, where he had worked with Miller, the union’s chief economist. With the players association, the two men would take annual trips to spring training to educate the athletes about trade-union thinking.
In 1968, the union negotiated the first collective-bargaining agreement in baseball, and two years later, players gained the right to air grievances before an arbitrator.
But the union’s holy grail — getting rid of the reserve clause, which bound players to teams unless they were traded or released or their contracts were sold — would take more time.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMoss worked closely with Curt Flood, the great outfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals, who challenged the reserve clause by refusing to report to the Philadelphia Phillies when the Cardinals traded him after the 1969 season. He sued for his freedom in federal court.
But he lost at each level, including in the United States Supreme Court, where his case was argued by Arthur J. Goldberg, who had stepped down as an associate justice of the court to become the U.S. ambassador to the United Nations.
It was far from the legal death of the reserve clause that Flood and the union had wanted. But it raised the issue of players’ being prevented from seeking full market value for their services.
Moss and Flood, who died in 1997, became close friends.
“They both had a vision of a new world at a time when the whole civil rights thing was happening,” Judy Pace Flood, an actress and Flood’s former wife, said in an interview. “They were buddies — Dick was the father buddy, and Curt was the kid buddy — and they were dynamic people who knew right from wrong.”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTIn 1974, the union intervened when Charles O. Finley, the cantankerous owner of the Oakland Athletics, refused to pay his star pitcher Jim Hunter, who was known as Catfish, $50,000 — half Hunter’s salary — to buy a deferred annuity from an insurance company. The union called it a default of Hunter’s contract, and Moss sent Finley a telegram declaring it was terminated.
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Moss argued the case in front of Peter Seitz, baseball’s independent arbitrator. In December 1974, Seitz ruled that Hunter was a free agent.
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Learn more about our process.Within weeks, Catfish Hunter signed a five-year, $3.25 million contract with the Yankees (about $21 million in today’s currency), a boost well beyond his $100,000 contract with the A’s. While it was a sign of multimillion-dollar salaries to come, the ruling affected only Hunter.
But Donald Fehr, who from 1983 to 2009 was the union’s acting executive director and then executive director, said the case was crucial to the push for free agency.
“Once that is staring you in the face,” he said in an interview, referring to the Seitz decision, “how does any thinking judge or arbitrator look at that and say the system was anything other than a travesty?”
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMoss argued a more critical free agency case in 1975.
That year, the pitchers Andy Messersmith, of the Los Angeles Dodgers, and Dave McNally, of the Montreal Expos, refused to sign contracts that had terms they disliked. (McNally had been traded from the Baltimore Orioles after the 1974 season.)
Their teams responded by unilaterally renewing their deals on the 1974 terms. Miller said that once the 1975 season had ended, the teams had no contractual ties left with the two pitchers. The union filed a grievance.
Moss argued the case, again in front of Seitz, who ruled in favor of the players. The teams, he said, had “no right or power” to retain the pitchers’ services beyond the renewal year that had already been fulfilled.
The ruling was upheld in federal court — Moss argued for the players in the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit in St. Louis — and free agency rules were introduced in a collective bargaining agreement in 1976.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTTwenty-five years after the Seitz ruling, Moss reflected on its impact on baseball, in which many players are now paid tens of millions of dollars a season.
“The difference between winning and losing can be stated in billions and billions of dollars,” he said at a 25th-anniversary party at his home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles. “I don’t think you can find another labor-arbitration case that can say that.”
Richard Myron Moss was born on July 30, 1931, in Pittsburgh and grew up there and in Beaver Falls, Pa. (as a fan of the Pittsburgh Pirates). His father, Nathan Moss, owned several businesses, including a jazz club. His mother, Celia (Rosenblatt) Moss, was the director of social service and home care at Montefiore Hospital in Pittsburgh.
Moss graduated from the University of Pittsburgh with a bachelor’s degree in 1952 and earned his law degree from Harvard Law School in 1955. He served in the Army for two years before working for a law firm in Pittsburgh. After a short stint as an assistant attorney general of Pennsylvania, he went to work for the steelworkers union in 1960 and stayed until 1966. He joined the players association the next year.
In 1977, he stepped down from the union to become a sports agent; his clients included the pitcher Nolan Ryan, for whom he negotiated baseball’s first $1 million annual salary, with the Houston Astros, in 1979 (the equivalent of $4.35 million today).
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Before two arbitrators found that baseball owners had held down salaries in a collusive conspiracy during the 1980s, Moss helped illustrate the teams’ actions in 1987 by offering the Chicago Cubs a contract to sign one of his clients, the outfielder Andre Dawson, with the dollar amount left blank. The Cubs’ general manager, Dallas Green, wrote in $650,000, but only $500,000 of it was guaranteed, well below Dawson’s market value. Moss had conceived the plan with the knowledge of the union, Fehr said.
Moss told The New York Times in 2004 that when he gave Green the contract, “he feigned interest” in it, adding, “But he was delighted.”
Fehr said that Moss’s plan — and Dawson’s agreeing to participate — “demonstrated in a graphic way that this wasn’t about competitive balance but about holding down salaries.”
The two arbitrators, George Nicolau and Thomas Roberts, determined that the owners had conspired to tamp down salaries after the 1985, 1986 and 1987 seasons. The owners agreed to settle the case by paying players $280 million in damages. Dawson’s award, with interest, was $3.2 million.
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SKIP ADVERTISEMENTMoss last worked as an agent in 2009.
In addition to his daughter, Ephron, he is survived by his wife, Carol Freis, and two grandsons. Another daughter, Betsy Moss, died in 1985. His marriage to Rolinda Hurwick ended in divorce.
In 1994, Moss helped found a potential rival to Major League Baseball, the United Baseball League. Its formation was announced during the baseball players’ strike that began that year in August, leading to the cancellation of the postseason. The UBL founders promised profit-sharing and an equity plan for cities and players as well as cheaper tickets for fans.
“People are looking for alternatives to the traditional baseball that has produced the kind of disaster it did this year,” Moss said. “I think a lot of people view the fact that there wasn’t a World Series this year as a violation of public trust.”
But the planned eight-city league folded its operations in 1996 before playing a game.hawkplay