The Reserve Clause and How It Ended: Curt Flood, Messersmith and McNally

By 4Baseball Staff · November 5, 2026 · 12 min read

How a single paragraph in the player contract bound ballplayers to one club for life, why Curt Flood lost his Supreme Court case in 1972, and how two pitchers and an arbitrator ended the reserve clause in 1975.

For almost a century, a major-league ballplayer who signed a contract did not own the right to leave. The paragraph in the standard player agreement that did the work was known as the reserve clause. In practice it meant that a club could renew a player's contract every winter, on terms the club set, for as long as the club wanted him. A player who disliked the offer could accept it, retire or sit out. He could not sell his services to anyone else. The only way a player changed teams was for his club to trade, sell or release him.

The clause did not die in a courtroom. The man who took it to the Supreme Court, the St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood, lost in 1972 by a vote of five to three. It died three years later in an arbitrator's hearing room, after two pitchers, Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, went through 1975 without signing and then argued that the club's rights had run out. The arbitrator agreed. Nothing about the sport's economics was the same afterward.

This article follows the story in order: what the clause said and why owners defended it, the century of legal protection, who Flood was and why he refused to report, the trial and the Supreme Court, the Messersmith and McNally grievance, the December 1975 decision, and what survives of the old system. The numbers about the players come from the historical record through the 2025 season; the legal history is the documented public record.

What the clause actually did

The clause lived in the standard player contract, in a paragraph that gave the club the right to renew the agreement for the following year. The owners read the paragraph as including its own renewal. If the contract could be renewed for one year, and the renewed contract contained the same paragraph, then it could be renewed again, and again, with no end. In effect the club held a lifelong option on the player's labor, while the player held nothing.

The practice began in the National League in 1879, when club owners agreed among themselves to reserve a handful of players each, so that rival clubs would not bid for them. The list of reserved players grew until, by the late 1880s, nearly everyone on a roster was covered, and the clause moved from a private understanding among owners into the printed contract.

The owners defended the arrangement with two arguments. First, they said it kept competitive balance: without it, rich clubs would hoard the best players and the game would become a contest between a few teams. Second, they said it protected their investment in developing players. Neither argument was frivolous, and variants of both have returned in every labor discussion since. But the system also did something the owners seldom mentioned. It suppressed salaries. A player with one possible employer had no leverage, and the club could pay him what it chose.

The effects were concrete. A star who held out for more money could be told to take the offer or stay home, and the club could set a salary for the next year with no competing bid to worry about. For the longer arc of how those salaries grew once the clause was gone, see the history of baseball salaries.

A century of challenges that failed

Players tried to break the system early. In 1890 a group of stars formed the Players' League, a rival circuit run partly by the players themselves, and the experiment collapsed after a single season. In 1914 and 1915 the Federal League, an outside rival, signed major leaguers away and then sued. A federal judge, Kenesaw Mountain Landis, declined to rule quickly, the parties settled, and Landis later became the sport's first commissioner.

One of the Federal League clubs, the Baltimore Terrapins, brought a separate antitrust suit that reached the Supreme Court. In 1922, in Federal Baseball Club v. National League, the Court held that the business of staging baseball games was not interstate commerce and so did not fall under the federal antitrust law. The opinion, written by Justice Oliver Wendell Holmes, gave baseball a protection that no other sport enjoyed. The Court reaffirmed the ruling in 1953, in Toolson v. New York Yankees, saying that if the exemption was to be changed, Congress should be the body to change it.

Players kept trying. In 1949 the outfielder Danny Gardella sued after he was banned for jumping to the Mexican League. A federal appeals court let his case go forward, and baseball settled it quietly rather than risk a ruling. The pattern repeated: when a case threatened the exemption, the owners found a way to avoid the final decision.

Marvin Miller changes the odds

What shifted the balance was an organization. In 1966 the players hired Marvin Miller, an economist who had worked for the United Steelworkers, as the first full-time head of the Major League Baseball Players Association. Before Miller, the association was little more than a benevolent society that the owners helped fund. Miller set about building a real union. He got the players to understand their pension and their contracts, negotiated the first basic agreement in 1968, and in 1970 won a grievance procedure that allowed disputes to go to an outside arbitrator rather than to the commissioner, who was employed by the owners.

That last change is the hinge of the whole story. A grievance procedure with an independent decision-maker meant that, for the first time, the meaning of the contract could be tested in front of someone who did not work for the owners. It did not help Flood, whose case was in the courts. It was what made Messersmith and McNally possible. For the broader history of the union's battles, see the history of baseball collective bargaining and the article on the Players Association.

Curt Flood: the player

Curt Flood was born on January 18, 1938, in Houston and grew up in Oakland, California. He reached the majors with Cincinnati in 1956, appearing in five games, and became a regular for the St. Louis Cardinals in 1958 after a trade. The historical record credits him with 1,759 games, 1,861 hits, 85 home runs and a .293 career average.

He was an outfielder of real distinction, a center fielder who won seven consecutive Gold Gloves from 1963 through 1969 and who was an All-Star in 1964, 1966 and 1968. His best years came in the middle of the decade.

He played on the Cardinals teams that won the World Series in 1964 and 1967 and lost it in 1968. In the postseason he batted .221 in 21 games (19 hits in 86 at-bats). He was a respected, durable and popular player, which is why his decision shocked people. A marginal player with a grievance is easy to dismiss. A seven-time Gold Glove winner at the peak of his career is not.

The trade and the letter

On October 7, 1969, the Cardinals traded Flood to the Philadelphia Phillies in a deal that sent him, the catcher Tim McCarver and two others east for Dick Allen and two others. Flood, then 31, did not want to go. Philadelphia was a struggling club in an aging ballpark, and he had a life and a business in St. Louis. Under the system he had no say.

He decided to refuse. In a letter to the commissioner, Bowie Kuhn, dated December 24, 1969, he wrote that he did not consider himself a piece of property to be bought and sold, and he asked to be declared a free agent. Kuhn refused. In January 1970 Flood filed suit against Kuhn and the major leagues, with Arthur Goldberg, a former Supreme Court justice, as his lawyer.

The stakes were plain: if he lost, he might never play in the major leagues again. The Players Association supported the suit, but Miller warned him about the odds. Those who testified on his behalf at the trial included Jackie Robinson, Hank Greenberg and the owner Bill Veeck, each a figure with a reputation in the game.

Flood v. Kuhn, 1970 to 1972

The case moved through the federal courts in three steps. The trial was held in New York in the spring of 1970, and in August the federal judge ruled against Flood. A federal appeals court affirmed the ruling in 1971. The Supreme Court heard arguments in March 1972 and ruled on June 5.

The Supreme Court's opinion, written by Justice Harry Blackmun, is one of the oddest in its history. It opened with a long, affectionate passage about baseball and its heroes. It then called the sport's antitrust exemption an anomaly and an aberration, but held that the Court would leave the matter to Congress, which had known about the exemption for fifty years and had not acted. The decision was five to three: Justice Lewis Powell sat out the case because he owned stock in a company with a baseball connection. Justices William Douglas, William Brennan and Thurgood Marshall dissented, and Marshall, joined by Brennan, wrote that the Court should have overruled the earlier decisions.

Flood had lost, and his playing career ended in the process. He sat out the 1970 season. In 1971 he signed with the Washington Senators, played in 13 games, hit .200 and quit in April. He left the United States for a time and lived in Europe. He died on January 20, 1997, in Los Angeles at the age of 59.

What Flood's loss accomplished

It would be easy to call Flood's case a failure, and in the narrow sense it was. But the loss made a record. The trial put the reserve clause on public trial, with testimony from the sport's most famous names. The Supreme Court wrote that the exemption was an aberration and sent the question to Congress, which left a different route open: collective bargaining. It also prompted the first player strike, in April 1972, over pensions rather than the clause. Miller and the players had learned how to hold together.

The Hall of Fame has not elected Flood. He appeared on the Baseball Writers' ballot 15 times, in 1977, 1978, 1979 and every year from 1985 through 1996, and his highest total was 71 votes in 1996, when 353 were needed. The Veterans Committee also considered him in 2003, 2005 and 2007; in 2007 he received 14 votes of the 84 cast. Whether Flood's batting numbers alone merit Cooperstown is a matter of argument, and the case for him has always rested more on what he did off the field.

Messersmith and McNally

The Supreme Court had said the problem was for Congress. The union found a way to make it a problem for an arbitrator. The idea was simple and depended on the wording of the clause.

Andy Messersmith was a right-hander for the Los Angeles Dodgers. In his career he went 130-99 with a 2.86 earned run average, and he went 20-6 with a 2.59 ERA in 1974. In 1975 he went 19-14 with a 2.29 ERA and 321 2/3 innings, and won a Gold Glove. He also asked the Dodgers for a no-trade clause, which the club refused, and so he did not sign a contract for 1975. The Dodgers simply renewed his deal under the clause, and he pitched the whole season on the renewal.

Dave McNally was a left-hander who had won 20 games four years in a row for the Baltimore Orioles from 1968 through 1971, going 22-10, 20-7, 24-9 and 21-5. He was traded to the Montreal Expos before the 1975 season, went 3-6 with a 5.24 ERA in 12 games and retired in the middle of the year. McNally also had not signed for 1975. Because he had retired, he had little to gain personally, and he agreed to take part in the case so that Messersmith would not stand alone.

The argument was this. Under the contract, a club could renew a player's contract for one year. A player who played the renewed year without signing had fulfilled that one year. If the clause allowed a renewal only for one year, then at the end of 1975 the players were not bound to their old clubs and could negotiate with anyone. The union filed a grievance in October 1975.

The arbitrator speaks

Peter Seitz, a veteran labor arbitrator, was the impartial member of the three-person panel, alongside the owners' representative and the union's. He had decided one case that mattered a year before: in December 1974 he declared the pitcher Catfish Hunter a free agent because his owner, Charlie Finley, had failed to make a payment required by the contract. Hunter signed with the Yankees and went 23-14 in 1975. That ruling was about a contract breach and not the clause, but it let the market see what free agency was worth.

On December 23, 1975, Seitz ruled in favor of Messersmith and McNally. He decided that the reserve clause allowed a club to renew a contract for one additional year, not forever, and that the players were therefore free of the Dodgers and the Expos. His decision reads as a narrow ruling on contract wording. The owners treated it as a catastrophe. They fired Seitz the same day.

They appealed to the federal courts, and the courts upheld the ruling. Early in 1976 a federal district judge in Kansas City confirmed Seitz's decision, and an appeals court agreed shortly afterward. In March 1976 the commissioner closed the spring training camps in a dispute over what would replace the clause, and reopened them within weeks. By July 1976 the owners and players had signed a new basic agreement. Under its terms a player with six years of major-league service could become a free agent after the season. The first class of free agents was available that winter, and Reggie Jackson signed with the Yankees. Messersmith signed with the Atlanta Braves for 1976, where he went 11-11 with a 3.04 ERA, and he pitched in the majors through 1979.

What survived

The clause ended in the sense that the perpetual renewal ended. But the owners kept a good deal of control. The system that emerged in 1976 and has been revised in each agreement since gives clubs control of a player's rights for his first six years of major-league service. Young players are paid at or near the minimum, then become eligible for salary arbitration after about three years, and finally for free agency. Only after six years does a player choose his employer. That structure is the reserve system in a time-limited form, and it is the reason the draft and the minor leagues are the center of a club's economics. For how the machinery works today, see how free agency works and where it came from.

The antitrust exemption survived too, in part. In 1998 Congress passed the Curt Flood Act, which gave major-league players the same antitrust protection in employment matters that other professionals have, but left the exemption in place for other parts of the business. The Act was named for a man who had died in 1997 and never saw the law.

Common questions

What was the reserve clause? A paragraph in the standard player contract that let the club renew a player's contract each year, with the club setting the terms, which the owners read as lasting indefinitely.

Did Curt Flood win his lawsuit? No. The Supreme Court ruled against him five to three on June 5, 1972, and he never played in the majors again after 1971.

Who ended the reserve clause? An arbitrator, Peter Seitz, on December 23, 1975, in the grievance brought by Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally.

Is there still a reserve clause? Not the old kind. Clubs still hold a player's rights for his first six years of service, and the details are set by the collective bargaining agreement, which changes. Check the Players Association and the commissioner's office for the current terms.

Why did McNally join the case? He had retired in 1975, and he joined so that Messersmith would not be the only name on the grievance. Neither player had signed a new contract for 1975.

Where to go next

If you want the larger story, start with the history of baseball collective bargaining and then see how pay moved afterward in the history of baseball salaries. For the mechanics of today's market, read how free agency works, and see the business and labor topic page for current stories.