Baseball Players Used to Work Construction in the Off-Season. Then One Court Case Changed Everything.

In 1969, Curt Flood was one of the best center fielders in baseball. A three-time All-Star, a Gold Glove winner, a key piece of the St. Louis Cardinals teams that won two World Series titles in the 1960s. By any measure, he was a star.

When the Cardinals traded him to the Philadelphia Phillies that winter, Flood refused to go. And then he did something almost no professional athlete had ever done before: he sued Major League Baseball.

The case he filed would take years to resolve, ultimately go against him, and effectively end his playing career. But the argument he made — that professional baseball players were human beings with the right to choose their employer, not property to be bought and sold at a team's discretion — planted a seed that would eventually transform the economics of American professional sports entirely.

To understand why that mattered, you have to understand just how little power, and how little money, baseball players had for most of the sport's history.

The Reserve Clause and the Cage It Built

From the late nineteenth century onward, Major League Baseball operated under something called the reserve clause. Buried in every player's contract, it gave teams the exclusive and perpetual right to renew that contract year after year — essentially binding a player to a single franchise for the entirety of his career, unless the team chose to trade or release him.

Players had no meaningful leverage. They could negotiate their salary within whatever range the team was willing to offer, and if they didn't like it, their options were to accept, hold out and lose pay, or walk away from the sport entirely. Jumping to another team simply wasn't allowed. The reserve clause had survived multiple legal challenges over the decades, partly because the Supreme Court had granted baseball an antitrust exemption in a 1922 ruling that most legal scholars today regard as an embarrassing historical anomaly.

The practical result was suppressed wages on a massive scale. In the early decades of the twentieth century, even marquee players earned salaries that look startling by modern standards. Babe Ruth's famous 1930 salary of $80,000 — at the time, higher than President Herbert Hoover's — was an extraordinary outlier. Most players earned a fraction of that. Many supplemented their income with off-season work: factory jobs, sales positions, manual labor. The baseball career was often a few good years of modest pay followed by a return to ordinary working life.

By the late 1960s, the average MLB salary was around $19,000 per year — roughly equivalent to $160,000 in today's dollars. Comfortable, perhaps, but nowhere near wealthy. Players who spent a decade in the majors often retired with little financial cushion.

Flood, Messersmith, and the Crack in the Foundation

Curt Flood's lawsuit, filed in 1970, argued that the reserve clause violated federal antitrust law and his rights as a worker. The Supreme Court ruled against him in 1972, but the justices acknowledged in their opinion that baseball's antitrust exemption was an "aberration" and an "anomaly" — essentially inviting Congress or the courts to revisit the question.

The real crack came three years later, through the sport's grievance arbitration process rather than the courts. In 1975, pitchers Andy Messersmith of the Los Angeles Dodgers and Dave McNally of the Montreal Expos played out their contracts without signing new ones and then declared themselves free agents. The players' union took the case to arbitrator Peter Seitz.

Seitz ruled in the players' favor. The reserve clause, he found, did not bind a player permanently — it entitled teams to renew a contract once, not forever. With that decision, the foundation of the old system collapsed.

MLB owners, panicked, fired Seitz immediately. It didn't matter. The ruling stood, and in 1976, the first true free agency system in Major League Baseball was established. Players with sufficient service time could now offer their services to any team willing to pay for them.

The Numbers Tell the Story

What followed was one of the most dramatic economic shifts in American sports history.

In 1976, the average MLB salary was around $51,000. By 1985, it had climbed past $370,000. By 2000, it had crossed $1.9 million. Today, the league average sits above $4.2 million annually, and top-tier contracts routinely run into the hundreds of millions of dollars. Shohei Ohtani's 10-year, $700 million deal with the Los Angeles Dodgers, signed in 2023, is the largest contract in the history of professional sports.

The transformation wasn't just about money for its own sake. It fundamentally changed the relationship between player and franchise, between athlete and employer. Stars became brands. Agents became power brokers. Small-market teams began struggling to retain homegrown talent. The entire architecture of how baseball — and eventually all American professional sports — operated was rebuilt around the concept of player mobility and market value.

What Flood Understood

Curt Flood never played in the major leagues again after his lawsuit. He spent years abroad, returned to the US in declining health, and died in 1997 at the age of 59. He never saw the full financial revolution his stand helped set in motion.

But he understood something that the owners of his era refused to accept: that the labor producing the product had value, and that a system designed to suppress that value indefinitely was not going to hold forever.

The players of the 1920s who worked summers in construction and winters in retail weren't less talented than the athletes signing nine-figure contracts today. They were simply operating in a system rigged against them — one that took decades of legal pressure, union organizing, and individual courage to finally break open.

Baseball's salary history isn't just a sports story. It's a story about power, labor rights, and what happens when a locked system finally unlocks.