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Major League Baseball owners have long been used to doing things to their own advantage. Throughout baseball history, owners have held the upper hand against players. In the days before free agency, owners used a reserve clause that bound players to their original teams for the entire length of their career. Ballplayers had no real options if they wanted to play in the majors. They could play for the club that drafted or traded for them, or they could retire and do something else.

The reserve clause was the result of a Supreme Court decision in the 1920s which freed Major League Baseball of anti-trust laws. But in the 1970s, smart men like Players’ Union chief Marvin Miller and brave men like St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood won the right for baseball players to play out their contracts and sign as free agents with any team they wanted. Players who were born in Cincinnati, for example, were therefore able to negotiate with their hometown team, the Reds. Players stuck behind a superstar at the same position were allowed to play out their existing contract and then sign with a team that could find more at-bats for them. Miller time-released his free agents onto the market, setting up a demand for his growing supply. The owners stumbled and bumbled, signing free agents with the zeal of lastminute Christmas shoppers. They bought everyone in sight, signing starting pitchers with scant track records to ten-year contracts.

Baseball players saw their average salaries quadruple after the introduction of free agency, and by the mid-1980s, the average annual salary for a Major League player was $473,496. Was that progress? Well, when Curt Flood made $90,000 in 1969, he was one of the highest paid players in the game. Only a handful of superstars had six-figure salaries at that time. Owners in the 1980s needed a plan to keep their fellow owners in check, and fiscally responsible. So they made a tacit agreement to “watch” their spending. Following the 1985 season, thirty-five free agents were available on the open market, but only four switched teams. It was obvious that owners were intentionally limiting, if not altogether abstaining from, signing free agents. Even Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, a notorious spendthrift, restrained himself from signing catcher Carlton Fisk, reportedly taking his offer off the table after talking to White Sox owner Jerry Reinsdorf. The Player’s Association filed a suit charging collusion, but the owners were feeling quite smug. After all, no one could force them to sign players and increase their payroll, right? And even if an arbitrator ruled against them and fined the owners millions, it would just reduce the amount they would have to pay the next crop of free agents. After the 1986 season, three dozen more players became free agents, and again, it became nearly impossible for any of them to receive legitimate contract offers.

The 1987 American League Red Book, an official record book published by Major League Baseball, states that “For the fourth time in the last five years, the American League set a new, all-time sports league attendance record in 1986. In setting the new record, the League passed the twenty-five million mark for the first time. The 1986 season was the first time ever that all fourteen teams went over the one million mark in attendance. Five teams went over two million fans. The Kansas City Royals won the World Series in 1985, and drew a team record of 2,320,794 fans.” In 1985, the Cleveland Indians doubled their attendance. The Texas Rangers had an increase of 600,000 fans passing through their turnstiles from the previous year. The rosy picture was similar in the National League, and baseball’s overall profits rose 15%. Under these conditions, a seemingly win-win proposition for owners, players, and fans, would owners really continue to collude to keep players’ salaries down?

Yankees’ ace Ron Guidry was thirty-six years old in the 1986 season, a free agent looking for a new contract. He had made $975,000 in 1986, a season in which he pitched 192 innings,