In today’s Major League Baseball, contracts worth hundreds of millions of dollars are the norm for star players.
But 60 years ago, free agency didn’t exist, and teams held 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 collective $1 billion in contracts? None other than their predecessors for the Boys in Blue.
From Strikeouts to Holdouts
In 1966, Sandy Koufax and Don Drysdale were set to pitch for the defending World Series champion Dodgers.
The only issue for the future Hall of Famers, though, was their compensation.
As detailed by The Los Angeles Times in 2016, the players were offered slight raises coming into 1966: From $85,000 to $100,000 for Koufax, and from $80,000 to $85,000 for Drysdale.
Those figures may seem small by today’s numbers, but they were in line with pay across the majors.
Despite that, the pair of pitchers were determined to not let the team play them against each other in contract negotiations.
So they banded together and sought a collective $1 million over three years, and they demanded the team negotiate with their agent, not with them directly.
When that request was turned down, they held out of spring training for a month, and the two of them doing so together was a novel concept at the time.
“No one, to my knowledge, had ever thought about two pitchers teaming up,” Vin Scully told 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.
Major League Baseball Player’s Association Executive Director Marvin Miller took over his role a couple of weeks into the holdout, but in the next decade, he built up a behemoth, empowering the labor force that had, until that point, been controlled by ownership.
So as a possible lockout looms after this season, remember Koufax and Drysdale as the duo who paved the way for player empowerment.
