NEW YORK — Dick Moss, the lawyer who created free agency for baseball players and won the arbitration case that revolutionized professional athletes’ compensation, has died. He was 93.
Moss died Saturday at a nursing home in Santa Monica, Calif., the Major League Baseball Players Association announced on Sunday. Moss had been in poor health for several years.
Moss, who was hired as general counsel by union executive director Marvin Miller in 1967, handled the case involving pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally in 1975, which led arbitrator Peter Seitz to invalidate the retention clause. The unilateral one-year renewal clause has been included in every contract since 1878 and gave teams control over players by allowing them to extend their contracts indefinitely.
Sports agent Dick Moss photographed at his home in the Pacific Palisades neighborhood of Los Angeles, California on October 18, 1985. Bob Riha Jr./Getty
On December 23, 1975, Seitz ruled that the clause meant only one-year contract renewals, a decision that affected all North American sports and gave birth to collectively bargained free agency in baseball.
“A giant of the industry. He had an impact on the industry like no other in his time,” said pitcher David Cone, a union official and Moss client. “He was a little quirky, but he was a very fun-loving, outgoing guy, a lot of fun to be around. He was the life of the party, a great guy to have a drink with.”
At the time of Seitz’s decision, the average major league salary was just under $45,000 a year, rose to $76,000 in 1977, and will rise 1,000 times that amount to $4.5 million in 2023.
MLB revenues will grow at a moderate rate from $163 million in 1975 to more than $11 billion by 2023, a 70-fold increase.
“The difference between winning and losing was billions, maybe tens of billions of dollars,” Moss said at the company’s 25th anniversary party in December 2000.
Following the advances of baseball players, other sports followed suit, with the NBA winning free agency in 1976 and the NFL winning free agency in 1993, both of which liberalized player unions.
Richard Maurice Moss III was born in Pittsburgh on July 30, 1931. He earned degrees from the University of Pittsburgh and Harvard Law School.
After two years in the Army, Moss worked for a Pittsburgh law firm, became assistant attorney general for Pennsylvania, and in 1963 joined the staff of the United Steelworkers as deputy general counsel, where Miller was assistant to union president David McDonald.
Miller was hired by the baseball union in 1966, and Moss joined six months later. After Miller organized the players into a stalwart group, Moss negotiated the first collective bargaining agreement in 1968, raising the minimum wage from $6,000 to $10,000. A 1970 agreement added grievance arbitration, and a 1973 agreement introduced salary arbitration.
“Marvin was just the right guy for his time,” Moss told The Associated Press in 1991. “The players trusted him. He instilled confidence and respect in them and was like a father figure to them.”
Players demonstrated their resolve with strikes in 1972 and 1973 and a lockout in 1976. Curt Flood’s lawsuit seeking to end baseball’s antitrust exemption was defeated in the U.S. Supreme Court in 1972.
The first major breakthrough came in December 1974, when Seitz ruled in arbitration that Oakland had violated Catfish Hunter’s contract by failing to pay $50,000 into a long-term pension fund and declared Hunter a free agent. The New York Yankees signed Hunter to a five-year contract worth $3.2 million, a testament to the amount of money a player could make without restrictions.
“Dick was a breath of fresh air in baseball when he won the case, the first true free agent to become a free agent without being fired,” said Donald Fair, who worked under Miller and Moss and served as president of the players’ association from 1983 to 2009. “It shows the importance of this restraint.”
When Messersmith and McNally played a season without contracts, the union filed a grievance, and Moss argued the case before Seitz on November 21 and 24, 1975, and December 1. Seitz issued his decision on December 23, ruling that “there is no contractual tie between these players and the Los Angeles and Montreal clubs, respectively. In the absence of such contracts, these clubs have no right or authority to reserve exclusively for the use of these players’ services for a period beyond the ‘renewal years’ of the contracts they have heretofore signed.”
Seitz’s ruling was upheld by U.S. District Judge John W. Oliver in Kansas City, Missouri, and the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit. Moss delivered oral arguments on behalf of the union. Free agency rules were agreed to in a labor contract in July 1976, and the first class of rich free agents included future Hall of Famers Reggie Jackson and Rollie Fingers.
Miller taught his players how to achieve their goals, while Moss developed legal tactics.
“Working together really built a strong foundation,” said former pitcher Steve Rogers, a longtime union official and client of Moss’. “None of what’s happening today would have happened without that strong foundation.”
Moss left the union in July 1977 to become an agent, whose clients included future Hall of Famers Nolan Ryan, Jack Morris and Gary Carter. He helped negotiate Ryan’s first $1 million contract in 1979, and represented Fernando Valenzuela in his first $1 million contract in 1982.
In 1987, he helped expose the owners’ collusive practices by getting the Chicago Cubs to blank out Andre Dawson’s contract and pad it with a $500,000 base salary plus bonuses. The owners lost three grievances and settled with the union in 1990 for $280 million.
In 1992, he helped argue the grievance that led arbitrator George Nicolau to overturn pitcher Steve Howe’s lifetime suspension, his seventh suspension for substance abuse. In both 1989 and 1994, he helped organize the new league without ever taking a team on the field.
He is survived by his third wife, Carol Fleiss, whom he married in 1980, and one daughter, Nancy Moss Efron, from his second marriage to Rollinda. Another daughter, Betsy, from his second marriage, preceded him in death.
