Free Agents prior to 75

[fredbeene]

Were there really free agents prior to 1975?
I see it in the game when playing any season (saying 1954).
I guess i didn't understand there were free agent signings back then???

[Syd Thrift]

Originally Posted by fredbeene

Were there really free agents prior to 1975?
I see it in the game when playing any season (saying 1954).
I guess i didn't understand there were free agent signings back then???

There is a reserve clause system in the game that you can implement which for the most part does a good job of recreating the "feel". Even prior to the breaking of the reserve clause, though, there absolutely were "free agents". They were all players that another team had released or guys not yet signed to a contract with the reserve clause attached (mostly amateur players, although the game doesn't really work as well at least IME with a wide-open system like that so I keep the draft) but yes, absolutely, there were free agents.

What there weren't, of course, were guys who'd been with one team for six years who wanted to test the market. The reserve clause - which, in arbitration, was found to actually not be a thing but instead just something the players didn't understand well enough to challenge - basically said, "if you don't sign a contract, the last one you signed counts for this year" (the bit where it didn't actually exist is that the owners interpreted that to mean "so if a guy does this for, say, three years straight, we just keep using the last year he did sign", to which the arbitrator said "lol no"). So the Don Drysdales and Sandy Koufaxes of the world either re-signed and played or held out and didn't (and in their case they both held out together, which freaked out the owners and led them to add in the no-collusion clause that they eventually broke in the 80s, but I digress). *That* is 100% in the game, at least to the extent that you don't have to worry about guys being out of contract, with the reserve-era rules turned on.