But sixty years ago, free agency didn’t exist and teams had all the power when it came to player contracts.
So who can Los Angeles Dodgers stars Shohei Ohtani, Edwin Diaz and Kyle Tucker thank for paving the way for their combined $1 billion contracts? None other than their predecessors for the Boys in Blue.
From strikeouts to holdouts
In 1966, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale would go on to pitch for the defending World Series champion Dodgers.
The only problem for the future Hall of Famers, however, was their compensation.
As detailed by The Los Angeles Times in 2016, the players were offered a small raise from 1966: from $85,000 to $100,000 for Koufax, and from $80,000 to $85,000 for Drysdale.
These numbers may seem small by today’s numbers, but they were in line with the pay in the majors.
Nevertheless, the pair of pitchers was determined not to let the team play them against each other in contract negotiations.
So they banded together and aimed for a collective sum of $1 million over three years, and they demanded that the team negotiate with their agent, and not directly with them.
When that request was denied, they sat out spring training for a month, and doing it together was a new concept at the time.
“Nobody, that I know of, ever thought about two pitchers working together,” Vin Scully said The times in 2016.
Did the plan work?
Koufax and Drysdale didn’t get everything they wanted, but they did get significant raises.
“Koufax got $125,000. Drysdale got $110,000,” The times reported.
But more than that, they showed baseball the potential of player solidarity.
Marvin Miller, executive director of the Major League Baseball Player’s Association, took over his role a few weeks after the robbery, but over the next decade he built a behemoth that empowered a workforce that had until then been dominated by ownership.
So with a possible lockout looming after this season, think of Koufax and Drysdale as the duo that paved the way for player empowerment.
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