Marvin Miller, the founding Executive Director of the MLBPA, wrote in his book, A Whole Different Ball Game, that "It dawned on me, as a terrifying possibility, that the owners might suddenly wake up one day and realize that yearly free agency was the best possible thing for them; that is, if all the players became free agents at the end of each year, the market would be flooded, and salaries would be held down..... I realized it would be in the in the interests of players to stagger free agency so that every year there would be, say, three or four players available at a particular position and many teams to compete for their services."
In fact, there was only one baseball owner who shared Miller's view. That was controversial Oakland Athletics owner Charles Finley, who suggested back in the 1970's that teams would be better off if all players were allowed to become free agents.
Miller wrote: "There was Finley, maybe the only original thinker in the group, saying, 'Hey, what's the problem? Let them be free agents every year. It will flood the market with players; it'll keep salaries down.' It was so logical, so obvious, that to this day I can't understand why other owners didn't think of it. All I can imagine is that they had such a fixation on power, such an abhorrence of the idea of the players winning any kind of freedom, that they refused to consider an idea that clearly was in their own economic interest."
