What the owners wanted, more than anything else, was a way to control player salaries. The problem was that they’d already proven untrustworthy in their recent attempts to do this. In the 1980s, team owners were directly instructed by MLB commissioner Peter Ueberroth to collude. Ueberroth’s private advisement was for owners to communally agree not to offer any free agent a contract that reflected the player’s actual market value, killing any possibility of a bidding war that could escalate salaries. The most infamous example was Andre Dawson, an all-star free agent who signed a $500,000
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