"It was the Emancipation Proclamation of baseball. When the reserve clause was overturned, it disallowed the owners from signing perpetual one-year contracts to ballplayers, thereby keeping them in the organization for eternity. So, basically, it allowed us to go from plantation to plantation based on the highest bid of the plantation owner. And the owners got very upset about that because it inflated salaries, and then ticket prices went up, and television revenue went up, and they found out they were making more money, and they found out, "Wow, we had a $1.5 million franchise, now we have a $150 million franchise." So, they made money, the players made money. The only people that got hurt were the American public, the fans, the integrity of baseball, and, eventually, the planet Earth."

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Added on April 10, 2026
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Original Language: English

Sources

Bill Lee

https://en.wikiquote.org/wiki/Baseball_(TV_series)