I believe that Rod Fort penned this at The Sports Economist way back in the day a year after Simon Rottenberg, the father of Sports Economics, had passed.
In 1956, the Journal of Political Economy published Simon Rottenberg’s seminal piece in sports economics, “The Baseball Players’ Labor Market.” In researching a commemorative piece on the impact of that paper on all of us that think about sports business and economics, his wife Annette informed me that Professor Rottenberg passed away in January 2004.
I feel awful about this for two reasons. First, it was never my pleasure to make his acquaintance. Second, how could I not know that this giant, whose broad shoulders nearly all of us working on sports stand on, had died over a year ago?
The post is listed as being written by "Guest", but I think it was Rod. Please correct me if I'm wrong.
I learned about Professor Rottenberg's death from reading that post on TSE. How weird, I thought, that he would pass in obscurity even to Sports Economists. But he did.
Moreover, this Wikipedia page on Sports Economics mentions Professor Rottenberg, but there is no link to his Wiki page, and for good reason; there isn't one. Here is the link to the Wiki search result on his name.
Professor Rottenberg, among other things, gave us the "Invariance Hypothesis." It basically states the distribution of baseball players among teams does not depend on who has the right to determine where a player can play. That right lies with the player with free agency but lies with his team under the reserve clause.
MLB said the reserve clause was needed to promote competitive balance. Rottenberg reasoned that the reserve clause had no effect on competitive balance, but would instead depress player salaries and increase teams' profits.
If a player has the right to choose where he plays, you negotiate with him (through an agent) make it worth his while. If his team has that right, then you negotiate with the team and make it worth its while.
Sound familiar? The Invariance Hypothesis is very similar to The Coase Theorem, published a few years after Rottenberg's paper. "Guest" (Rod?) writes at TSE:
The invariance principle essentially says the same thing as the weak form of the Coase Theorem, but it is significant that Rottenberg published it fully four years before Coase. He used it to different purpose than Coase, but the logic is there first nonetheless.
Yup. Coase rightfully won a Nobel for his work. Professor Rottenberg, whose death we didn't discover for a year and who has no Wikipedia page is being forgotten outside the Sports Econ world.
Update 12/21/2022: I was not wrong. The Sports Economist post cited above was written by Rod Fort. Here is a link to the Internet Archive Wayback Machine that has the original post. Scroll down to the June 19th post that shows it was posted by Rod Fort. Below is a screen shot.