new York — Dick Moss, the lawyer who won the arbitration case that gave baseball free agency and revolutionized how professional athletes were paid, has died. He was 93.
Moss died Saturday at a nursing home in Santa Monica, California, the Major League Baseball Players Association announced Sunday. He had been in failing health for several years.
Hired by union executive director Marvin Miller as general counsel in 1967, Moss argued the 1975 case of pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally that led arbitrator Peter Seitz to strike down the reserve clause. This one-year, unilateral renewal provision had been included in every contract since 1878 and had given teams control over players by ensuring that the deals could be extended in perpetuity.
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Seitz ruled on December 23, 1975, that the clause carried only a one-year renewal. This decision had repercussions throughout all sports in North America and led to collective bargaining of free agency in baseball.
“A titan of the industry. He impacted the industry at that time like few others,” said David Cone, a pitcher on the union’s board and a Moss client. “A little eccentric, but a lot of fun, a great personality, a fun guy to hang out with. The life of the party, a great guy to have a drink with.”
At the time of Seitz’s decision, the average salary in Major League Baseball was just under $45,000. It rose to $76,000 in 1977 and by 2023 it was $4.5 million, a 1,000-fold increase.
MLB revenues have grown at a slower pace, from $163 million in 1975 to more than $11 billion in 2023, a 70-fold increase.
“The difference between winning and losing was billions of dollars, maybe tens of billions of dollars,” Moss said at a party for his 25th birthday in December 2000.
Baseball players’ gains were closely followed by other sports, with unions gaining liberalized free agency rights in the NBA in 1976 and the NFL in 1993.
Richard Maurice Moss III was born in Pittsburgh on July 30, 1931. He received degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard Law School.
After two years in the Army, Moss worked for a Pittsburgh law firm, became an assistant attorney general of Pennsylvania and in 1963 joined the United Steelworkers as associate general counsel on a staff where Miller was an assistant to union president David McDonald.
Miller was hired by the baseball union in 1966, and Moss joined six months later. While Miller organized the players into a tenacious unit, Moss negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement in 1968, raising the minimum wage from $6,000 to $10,000. The 1970 agreement added grievance arbitration, and the 1973 agreement instituted salary arbitration.
“Marvin was really the perfect man for that era,” Moss told The Associated Press in 1991. “The players trusted him. They had confidence and respect for him, and he was kind of a father figure to them.”
The players showed their determination in strikes in 1972 and 1973 and a lockout in 1976. A lawsuit brought by Curt Flood seeking to end baseball’s antitrust exemption was lost in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972.
The first big breakthrough came in December 1974, when Seitz ruled in arbitration that Oakland had breached Catfish Hunter’s contract by failing to pay $50,000 into a long-term annuity fund, and he declared Hunter a free agent. The New York Yankees signed him to a five-year, $3.2 million contract, a sign of what players could earn without restrictions.
“Dick was able to win this case by establishing something new for baseball, the first true free agent who did not become a released player,” said Donald Fehr, who worked under Miller and Moss and then led the players’ association from 1983 to 2009. “The extent of the restraint was demonstrated.”
When Messersmith and McNally played seasons without contracts, the union filed grievances, and Moss argued the cases before Seitz on November 21 and 24 and December 1, 1975. Seitz rendered his decision on December 23, ruling that there was “no contractual relationship between these players and the Los Angeles and Montreal clubs, respectively. In the absence of such a contract, their clubs had no right or power… to reserve their services for their exclusive use for a period beyond the ‘renewal year’ in the contracts which these players had hitherto signed.”
Seitz’s decision was upheld by U.S. District Judge John W. Oliver in Kansas City, Missouri, and by the 8th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals, where Moss led oral arguments on behalf of the union. Free agency rules were agreed to in the July 1976 labor contract, and the first class of free agents to make a fortune included future Hall of Famers Reggie Jackson and Rollie Fingers.
Miller educated the players on how to achieve their goals and Moss developed the legal tactics.
“It was precisely by working in tandem that we were able to build a solid foundation,” said former pitcher Steve Rogers, a Moss client and longtime union official. “None of what’s happening today exists without a solid foundation.”
Moss left the union in July 1977 to become an agent, and his clients included future Hall of Famers Nolan Ryan, Jack Morris and Gary Carter. He negotiated Ryan’s first $1 million annual salary deal in 1979 and argued the case that won Fernando Valenzuela his first $1 million salary in arbitration in 1982.
In 1987, he helped expose the owners’ collusive activities by offering the Chicago Cubs a blank contract for Andre Dawson, which the team supplemented with a $500,000 base salary plus bonus opportunities. The owners lost three grievances and settled with the union in 1990 for $280 million.
In 1992, he helped defend the grievance that led arbitrator George Nicolau to overturn Steve Howe’s life ban, the pitcher’s seventh suspension for substance abuse. In 1989 and 1994, he worked to organize a new league without ever having teams on a field.
He is survived by his third wife, Carol Freis, whom he married in 1980, and a daughter from his second marriage to Rolinda, Nancy Moss Ephron. Another daughter from his second marriage, Betsy, predeceased him.
