Two Pitchers, One Season, No Contract
Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally did something that sounds simple but changed everything: they played baseball without signing a contract. Not because they were holdouts or rebels. They were testing the law.
It was 1975, and the reserve clause—a rule that let teams control a player’s rights indefinitely, even after his contract expired—had governed baseball for nearly a century. You signed with a team, and that team owned your services for life, unless they traded you or released you. Free agency didn’t exist. Neither did leverage.
Messersmith was a pitcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers. McNally was a pitcher for the Montreal Expos. Both had played out their contracts the previous season. Instead of signing new deals, they played the entire 1975 season as unsigned players. The teams expected them to fold. They didn’t.
The Arbitrator’s Pen Changes Everything
On December 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz issued his ruling. He was part of a three-person panel: John Gaherin representing Major League Baseball, Marvin Miller representing the players’ union, and Seitz as the neutral arbiter. The decision was split, but Seitz’s vote was decisive.
Seitz ruled that teams could reserve a player for only one additional year after his contract expired—not forever. The reserve clause was dead.
The owners fired him the next day. Literally. They removed him from the arbitration panel on December 24, 1975, and never brought him back. But the decision stuck. Federal courts upheld it in February 1976, and on March 16, 1976, both Messersmith and McNally became free agents. They could negotiate with any team.
The ruling didn’t immediately flood the market with free agents. It took a few years for teams to adjust. But it fundamentally rewired how baseball worked. Players now had power. Contracts had expiration dates that actually meant something. Salaries, which had been stagnant for decades, began to climb.
Why This Still Matters Today
Fifty years later, the Messersmith-McNally decision is the reason Juan Soto can sign a $765 million contract with the Mets. It’s why Shohei Ohtani can choose the Dodgers. It’s why a pitcher who throws 97 mph knows his value isn’t whatever a single team decides to offer.
The reserve clause had created a system where teams held all the cards. A player couldn’t leave, couldn’t test the market, couldn’t improve his situation by proving himself elsewhere. He was bound to his team’s city, salary, and whims. If he wanted more money, his only leverage was sitting out—and even then, the team could just wait him out.
Marvin Miller, the union leader who pushed this fight for years, understood what was at stake. He knew that without free agency, players would never share equitably in baseball’s revenues. The 1975 decision gave him the legal foundation to build that case over the next several years.
Today’s salary structure—where top players earn eight figures annually, where contracts are negotiated openly, where a team can’t simply renew your deal forever at its discretion—traces directly back to what Peter Seitz wrote on that December day. Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally played one season without contracts not out of principle, but because they had lawyers and a union willing to fight. And they won.
The owners’ decision to fire Seitz the next morning was a gesture of defiance that changed nothing. The ruling was final. Baseball would never again own its players the way it had for the previous century.
The number: On December 23, 1975, arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that the reserve clause—which let teams control players forever—was illegal; teams could only reserve a player for one additional year after his contract expired.
