General
Dick Moss, Who Helped Usher in Baseball Free Agency, Dies at 93
A labor lawyer, he was crucial to toppling a decades-old system that bound players to teams year after year, setting the stage for their rich contracts of today.
Dick Moss, a labor lawyer who, 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.
Moss 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.
