reserve and sell the players of a disbanding club. He did claim, however, that a club had a right, with the player's consent, to sell its claim upon his future services, for in so doing he declared that the club was simply "compounding the value of those future services."
I have pondered a great deal over our short talk, and I think I know what Mr. Rogers meant by that specious phrase. He meant that a club which has a legal claim by contract upon the future service of a player may accept a cash consideration for the release of that claim at any time before the expiration of the term of contract; and in that I agree with him perfectly. I am sure he did not mean that a club may sell its claim on the future service of a player when that claim rests not on a legal contract, but simply on the reserve-rule. For such a purpose that rule never gave a claim. It invested the club with a questionable right of reservation for one purpose only,—namely, to retain the services of the player; not at all to sell him. The true consideration in such a sale is not the release of the claim, but the future service of the player. It proceeds, therefore, not from the selling club, but from the player; yet the former takes the cash. Every dollar received by the club in such a transaction is taken from the pocket of the player; for if the buying club could afford to pay that sum as a bonus, it could just as well have paid it to the player in the form of increased salary. The whole thing is a conspiracy, pure and simple, on the part of the clubs, by which they are making money rightfully belonging to the players. Even were we to admit, for the sake of argument, that the reserve-rule does give a right to sell, we naturally ask, What consideration did the club ever advance to the player for this right? What did the Chicago Club ever give Kelly in return for the right to control his future services? Absolutely nothing; and yet that club sells that right, so cheaply acquired, for ten thousand dollars! But, I repeat, it never gave such a right, and any such claim by one set of men of a right of property in another is as unnatural to-day as it was a quarter of a century ago. The rule is a special statute of "base-ball law," made for a special purpose: it is of doubtful right when confined to that purpose, and it is of certain and unqualified wrong when applied to any other.
In the case of a sale with the player's consent at a time when he is under contract, the case is complicated. The club may properly sell its contract-claim, but in every such case the same wrongful element will be found to enter. The buying club pays a much larger price than the contract-claim is worth, because it expects to acquire also the right to reserve or sell. The case, analyzed, is this: the amount actually paid for the contract-claim is rightfully given, while every dollar in excess is
