Robert Smith

I mean, it's a lot.

Well, so is it a lot or a little?

It's a lot of money relative to somebody with a normal job today, but it's like, I don't know, 30 times less than a star baseball player would make today.

And so let's think about why.

Why were top players in baseball making so much less in 1969?

Well, part of it is baseball was just a smaller game then.

It's a more lucrative game today.

There is more money overall.

The pie is bigger.

Broadcasting, merchandising, everything, advertising.

But there's another reason, a reason that's, you know—

the center of today's show, and that is the players didn't have very much leverage because of the reserve clause, because they couldn't go play for other teams.

So as a result, they were getting a smaller share of the money that was coming into the game, a smaller share of the pie.

It was somewhere back around 2010.

There was, in fact, this scandal where Google and Apple and a few other companies had these secret deals not to recruit each other's employees.

It wasn't quite as stringent as the reserve clause, but it was definitely illegal.

And they had to pay hundreds of millions of dollars because you can't do that.

So this is why Kurt Flood wanted to sue baseball.

And when he was thinking about doing this, trying to make his decision, he talked to the head of the Baseball Players Union, which had only recently become a full-fledged official union.

And the head of the union tells Flood that there have been a couple of similar court cases in past decades and that the players always lost.