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In North American professional sports, the ''reserve clause'' was part of a player contract that stated upon the contract's expiration, the rights to the player were to be retained by the team. This meant the player was not free to enter into another contract with another team. Once signed to a contract, a player could be reassigned, traded, sold, or released at the team's whim. The only negotiating leverage that most players had was to hold out at contract time, refusing to play unless their conditions were met. The player was bound to either negotiate a new contract to play another year for the same team, or ask to be released or traded. The player had no freedom to change teams unless he was given his unconditional release. Unconditional release is when a team no longer needs that player. In the days of the reserve clause, this was the only way a player could be a free agent.〔(【引用サイトリンク】url=http://www.baseball-reference.com/bullpen/reserve_clause )〕 Once common in sports, the clause was abolished in baseball in 1975. The reserve clause system has, for the most part, been replaced by free agency. ==History and baseball== In the late 19th century, baseball in America became popular enough that its major teams began to be businesses worth considerable amounts of money, and the players began to be paid sums that were well above the wages earned by common workers. To keep player salary demands in check, team owners promulgated a standardized contract for the players, in which the major variable was salary. The players unsuccessfully tried to fight the growing ''reserve system'' by forming a union, the Brotherhood, and founding their own Players League in 1890, but the PL lasted just one season. For the next 80 years, the ''reserve system'' ruled the game. In this era, all player contracts were for one year. There were no long-term contracts as there are today, because the reserve clause negated the need for them. The Reserve Clause's inception was in 1879, when it was proposed as an unofficial rule known as "the Five Man Rule." It would allow teams to reserve players for each season, unless a player opted out of his contract and did not play in the league for a year. While the rule was not secret, teams started to sign other teams' "reserved players," thus encroaching the rule. These controversies caused the National League to instate the rule officially on December 6, 1879. Teams realized that if players were free to go from team to team then salaries would escalate dramatically. Therefore, they seldom granted players (at least valuable ones) a release, but retained their rights, or traded them to other teams for the rights to other players, or sold them outright for cash. Players thus had a choice only of signing for what their team offered them, or "holding out" (refusing to play, and therefore, not being paid). Under the Sherman Antitrust Act of 1890, two or more non-affiliated companies in any other interstate business were prohibited from colluding with each other to fix prices or establish schedules or rates. Enforcement of the Act reached its apotheosis in 1910 when the Supreme Court affirmed the government's order to dissolve the Standard Oil conglomerate. Yet it was argued that to keep baseball (the only large-scale professional sport in America during the 1920s) prosperous, granting it immunity from the Sherman Act was in the best interests of the game and the nation. Thus, the United States Supreme Court had held in 1922 in ''Federal Baseball Club v. National League'' (259 U.S. 200) that baseball was an "amusement", and that organizing a schedule of games between independently owned and operated clubs operating in various states, and engaging in activities incidental thereto, did not constitute "interstate commerce" and that therefore antitrust laws did not apply to such activity, a ruling that, as of now, has never been overturned, despite efforts to do in Toolson v. New York Yankees and Flood v. Kuhn. This pass on "trust-busting" essentially codified the reserve clause for many years, and gave what came to be known as Major League Baseball unprecedented power over both players and the independent organizations of the National Association of Professional Baseball Leagues (NAPBL). MLB could dictate not only how and where professional players could move between major league clubs, but as they took the opportunity of the Great Depression to establish systems of farm teams of players wholly owned by the parent clubs placed on 'independent' teams from the NA leagues around the country, they developed a way of expanding control of contracts of virtually the entire pool of professional baseball players. When other team sports, particularly ice hockey, football, and basketball developed professional leagues, their owners essentially emulated baseball's reserve clause. This system stood almost unchallenged, other than by the occasional holdout, for many years. In October 1969, St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Curt Flood unsuccessfully challenged his trade to the Philadelphia Phillies. Flood sacrificed the remainder of his playing career to pursue this litigation. Flood's case established that the reserve clause was a legitimate basis for negotiation in collective bargaining between players and owners, and that the historic baseball antitrust exemption was valid for baseball only and not applicable to any other sport. Curt Flood unsuccessfully challenged the reserve clause in 1970, but Marvin Miller helped overturn it five years later in 1975. Removing the reserve clause from player contracts became the primary goal of negotiations between the Major League Baseball Players Association and the owners. The reserve clause was struck down in 1975 when arbitrator Peter Seitz ruled that since pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally played for one season without a contract, they could become free agents. This decision essentially dismantled the reserve clause and opened the door to widespread free agency within North American professional baseball. Other sports soon followed suit. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Reserve clause」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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