Via Bloomberg, a look at how Black baseball players integrated White leagues and brought with them a different philosophy that helped shift the power dynamics between teams and talent:

No matter what happens before Major League Baseball’s trade deadline in a few weeks, it’s almost certain that the Los Angeles Angels’ Shohei Ohtani, a pending free agent, will become a very wealthy man. Talks abound of the pitcher-slugger superstar landing a multiyear contract worth $600 million.

While it’s tempting to credit deep-pocketed teams for this state of affairs, pay packages like this one arguably trace their origins to a model of free agency taken from an unacknowledged source: the Negro Leagues.

Professional baseball dates back to 1876, with the founding of the National League. In its first few years, bidding wars for talented players drove up salaries to the point where they accounted for two-thirds of operating costs. Eager to maintain profitability, team owners created the reserve clause, which required that players remain with the team that first signed them for the rest of their careers. It was either that or quit baseball altogether.

As a consequence, salaries remained modest. In 1882, the average player made $1,375 a year, roughly equivalent to $41,000 in today’s dollars.

Players couldn’t challenge the cartel, but other owners could by creating competing leagues. Between 1880 and 1920, upstarts like the American Association undermined the National League’s dominance, luring players with promises of higher salaries. The head of the National League described these rival leagues as “wreckers” who sought to “debauch our reserved players.”

Though athletes briefly jacked up their salaries, the competing leagues eventually joined forces, adopting their own reserve contracts and agreeing to respect each other’s restrictions. The National League eventually absorbed most of the teams in the other leagues. In 1922, a landmark Supreme Court case declared that baseball was not subject to antitrust law, cementing this arrangement.

But a very different model for compensation in baseball had taken root outside of the big leagues. The Negro Leagues, founded in the 1920s, gave free rein to market forces. Player contracts in the Negro League were rarely written down, making them hard to enforce. And written or not, they only ran for a single year. Players held all the cards, jumping from one team to another, depending on who would pay the most.

Black players, in other words, were the first free agents in baseball, with stars like Satchel Paige changing teams many times over, sometimes in the middle of the season. And when each regular season ended in the US, Paige and his fellow athletes headed to Mexico and the Dominican Republic to play in leagues there as well – an option not available to White players because the reserve clauses forbid them from pursuing such off-season opportunities.

It was not a coincidence, then, that most of the first voices challenging the reserve system happened to be African American players desegregating baseball. Jackie Robinson gave testimony to Congress declaring that players “should in some way be able to express themselves as to whether or not they want to play for a certain ball club.”

Robinson mentored other African American players, including a star named Curt Flood, who followed the same path, eventually landing with the St. Louis Cardinals.

Flood had a life outside of baseball, pursuing a parallel career as a portrait painter and photographer with his own art studio in St. Louis. This may help explain why, when the Cardinals tried to trade him without his consent, he decided to fight back, even if it meant that he might be banned from baseball.

In a 1969 letter to MLB Commissioner Bowie Kuhn, Flood opened with this memorable line: “After 12 years in the major leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of my wishes.” He then filed a lawsuit that would go one step further, arguing that the reserve contract was a violation of the 13th Amendment, which abolished slavery at the end of the Civil War.

As his legal challenge wound through the courts, Flood pressed a separate case in the court of public opinion, giving numerous television and radio interviews to highlight the injustices of the reserve clause. Though the Supreme Court eventually ruled against him in a 1972 opinion that has only gotten more dubious with age, Flood’s crusade paved the way for a sea change in public opinion that encouraged other players to challenge the system.

In 1975, two White players — Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally –- invoked their right to have their grievances over the reserve clause heard before an arbitrator.

This proved a canny strategy. By this time, public opinion had turned against the reserve system, and the arbitrator sided with the players. The binding decision opened the door to a dramatic transformation in players’ contracts – and salaries. In 1976, the average salary stood at $51,501, or approximately $275,000 in today’s money. A year after the decision, average salaries increased 15.3%, then another 47.7% the following year –- and 31.3% the year after that.

This could have bankrupted the owners, but new sources of revenue came to the rescue. While ticket sales only increased 5% from 1981 to 1985, television revenues grew 211% during the same period. Other income streams, such as merchandising, helped close the gap.

But the new system also ushered in a more dubious practice. Unlike free agents like Satchel Paige, players did more than negotiate higher salaries. They also demanded long-term contracts that ensured they would be paid for years, no matter their performance.

With talks of Ohtani getting the highest Major League Baseball payout ever, he may become the latest, most extreme expression of a trend that started with Black baseball players fighting against a system that sought to give teams an upper hand over the talent.