Position Players by WAR: Free Agency
Baseball Prehistory | Deadball Era | Liveball Era | Post-War
Expansion | Free Agency | Modern Era
The Expansion Era saw the Major Leagues spread west and go from 16 teams to 24 26 by 1977:
The pitching mound had been lowered, the designated hitter added, and baseball was looking like the modern game save for one thing: Free Agency. In the 19th century, players started getting paid more than the average worker. In order to control salaries, baseball created the Reserve Clause in 1879 which said that even if a player’s contract expired, the team that contract was with still retained rights to their services. Players were given one-year contracts, and if they refused to sign, they couldn’t sign with another team.
The Federal League was formed in 1914 to compete with the Major Leagues, but only lasted two seasons. After 1915, the Major Leagues bought out most of the owners of the Federal Leagues, giving them ownership in Major League teams, or other considerations. The owner of one of those teams, the Baltimore Terrapins, refused to be bought out and brought suit against the National League under the Sherman Anti-trust Act. That came to a head in 1922 in Federal Baseball Club vs. National League which created the MLB Anti-Trust exemption. Apparently because baseball was an amusement, it didn’t fall under the same rules for interstate commerce.
That all changed in 1975 when an arbitrator struck down the reserve clause and granted Free Agency to two pitchers: Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally. From 1976, Free Agency was born, and players were no longer bound by the Reserve Clause.
A quick synopsis: in 1969, Curt Flood fought against being traded. He gave up his career in baseball. He believed that the Reserve Clause was cause for collective bargaining, and the first collective bargaining agreement between MLB and the Major League Baseball Players Association was reached by Marvin Miller in 1970. That started the ball rolling for Free Agency to be granted by the arbitrator in 1975.
Here are the players who came out of that era:
And the second half:
Who jumps out to you?
Player list (career WAR in parentheses):
References:
- Fangraphs Career WAR Leaders
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No one jumps out at me, because the graphs are too small to read, and don’t expand to a visible size once you click on them.
I believe this can be addressed by right-clicking on the image and then opening it in a new tab or window.
Or for Mac users, just drag in onto your desktop. Then you can zoom.
ps – Joshua: the Boston dot is the wrong color. 😉
ps ps – Unfortunately Andre Dawson is also in the HOF from this era.
Woops. I will fix that dot, and Dawson. Hrmph. Was the data I collected from 1990 or something?
Yeah, sorry about that. I’ve tried a dozen ways to get it to just link to the image, but the way WordPress is set up, it just hasn’t worked. If anyone has any ideas, let me know!