Swing and a miss: Former MLB player reflects on agreement that left many without larger pensions

By the numbers, baseball is a game of failure.

The ability to hit .300, to average three hits for every 10 at-bats is the standard by which the best hitters in Major League Baseball (MLB) have historically been judged. Besides this, what else can a person do three times out of 10 (30%) and be considered highly successful?

“Oh, it is a game of failure, but also how you deal with failure,” said Nampa resident Rudy Meoli, a former shortstop who helped contribute to the first three no-hitters tossed by teammate Nolan Ryan with the California Angels in 1973 and ’74. “Hit .300 and you’re heading for the Hall of Fame. In golf, you hit one out of three, you’re not even playing.”

But failure in baseball can also happen off the field, as it did in 1980. A change to the league’s Collective Bargaining Agreement (CBA) to help avert a strike left hundreds of former players without the opportunity to receive a traditional MLB pension.

In reaching the CBA that year, the union failed to retroactively include all those who played between 1949 and 1979, many with less than four years of service, but who had still met what has now become the 43-game threshold, beginning in 1980, to be eligible for a player pension.

Instead, those squeezed out of the agreement receive non-qualified retirement payments “based on a complicated formula that had to have been calculated by an actuary,” said Doug Gladstone, a passionate players’ advocate and author of “A Bitter Cup of Coffee; How MLB and The Players Association Threw 874 Retirees a Curve.”

“These men are being penalized for playing the game they loved at the wrong time,” Gladstone said.

Forty-five years later, that total has dwindled to 503 former players left stranded on third base by the league they once helped develop into the financial behemoth it is today.

“It was just wrong what they did, and I don’t know how they figured out the plan,” Meoli said. “How they did not figure that so many of us belonged as part of the agreement, and that for a lot of us it came at the tail end of our careers. I just don’t get it.”

Despite appearing in 310 games over the course of six seasons (1971-1979), Meoli, by MLB calculations, does not qualify for pension benefits.

“Guys had second jobs, and those then who were not on a major league roster after the decision were just told, ‘That’s it, you’re out,’” he said. “Unless you were on a big league roster, you didn’t qualify.”

Instead, Meoli and the others receive $718.75 for every 43 game days of service accrued, up to the maximum of $11,500 yearly before taxes. And like the pain of taking a called third strike in the bottom of the ninth inning, the payment cannot be passed on to a surviving spouse or designated beneficiary. Plus, they are ineligible to be covered under the league’s health plan.

“I don’t know if MLB sees us as second-class citizens, but I think they basically screwed over a bunch of guys that were part of the reason they got to the CBA they reached in 1980,” Meoli said. “They just disregarded us all like we weren’t needed anymore and that was just wrong.”

Throughout the game’s history, slightly more than 20,000 players have reached “The Show” as it is known. Of these, according to the Baseball Almanac, a mere 176 have achieved a career batting average of .300 or better based on 1,000 games played and 1,000 plate appearances.

During the height of Meoli’s playing days, the average annual baseball salary was in the ballpark of $15,000. In 1969, after hitting a blistering .563 in high school in Southern California, Meoli was drafted by the Angels.

“My dad basically told me to get in the farm system and in the winter go to school,” he said. “My contract back then called for $8,000 for education, plus a signing bonus of $10,000. That’s a lot of money today if you do the math.”

Ironically, Meoli’s first minor league assignment was in the Gem State and the Rookie League in Idaho Falls, where he hit .351.

“I do find it kind of strange because Idaho Falls was the first place I ever went,” he said. “I only traveled around Southern California back then when I was coming out of high school.”

The compensation was simple. The team paid for his hotel and he received $500 monthly.

“It might be true now that everyone makes a ton of money playing professionally, but it wasn’t true back then,” he said. “The numbers today just don’t make any sense. There is so much money flying around.”

To help illustrate, the Los Angeles Dodgers, winners of last year’s World Series, operate an annual payroll that exceeds $500 million. And this past offseason, free-agent outfielder Juan Soto jumped from one New York borough to another, leaving the Yankees for the Mets by signing a 15-year, $765 million deal, the biggest player contract in sports history. The minimum yearly player salary in 2025 is now $760,000.

“Today’s money doesn’t even amaze me because it is so ridiculous you can’t wrap your head around it,” Meoli said. “Back in the day, if you got hurt, you had to keep playing. These guys are making so much these days they just take days off.”

As the league continues to cash in, the current pension plan, Gladstone estimates, totals more than $4 billion, and vested retirees can earn a pension as high as $275,000. “MLB is loath to divvy up anymore of the collective pie,” he said.

Overseeing the plan is Tony Clark, who through free agency, played with five teams during the course of his 15-year career. For the past 12 years, he has served as the executive director of the MLB Players’ Association.

To date, Clark has never officially commented on these non-vested retirees. Gladstone simply calls Clark an “unexceptional labor leader,” one who he believes is “stiffing” 503 non-vested players who played before the CBA was reached in 1980.

“The majority of these pre-1980 players walked the picket lines and went without paychecks so that free agency could be ushered in,” Gladstone said. “You would think that someone who has availed himself of the free agency process as much as Clark has would have more than a little sympathy for those pre-1980 guys, most of whom didn’t play when teams were shelling out big-time contracts.”

Not bitter, but still hopeful that MLB will one day rectify this pension problem, Meoli’s recollection of how the CBA agreement was reached 45 years ago remains sharp.
“I remember Marvin Miller who represented the player’s union saying, ‘MLB will do the right thing,’ and apparently they didn’t,” Meoli said. “Every guy I have ever talked to about it is totally pissed off. It’s not OK, and a lot of guys I played with are in the same situation. They played in the major leagues and basically got nothing.”
Except the memories of having played at baseball’s highest level.

Suiting up for the Angels, Meoli teamed with two future Hall of Fame (HOF) inductees: Ryan, who tossed a record seven no-hitters in his career, and Frank Robinson, still the only player to win the MVP award in both leagues.

In 1979, with the Philadelphia Phillies, Meoli played alongside eventual HOF honorees Pete Rose, Mike Schmidt and lefty Steve Carlton, winner of four Cy Young Awards.
On May 17 that year, in what has been billed as one of the wildest and highest scoring games in MLB history, Meoli, twice represented the winning run at third base for the Phillies, a 23-22 win over the Chicago Cubs at Wrigley Field. In 10 innings, the teams combined for 45 runs and 50 hits, including 11 home runs.

Meoli was stranded at third both times, in what would be his final MLB season. A year later, 1980, with the new CBA, the Phillies won the World Series.

“I was flipping TV channels one day and I saw this game was listed as one of the 20 Greatest Games of all time in MLB history,” Meoli said laughing. “It was great seeing it and knowing I was there.”

After his playing career, Meoli ventured into the business world, manufacturing, patenting and selling camping products for RVs, while also operating an electronics company for 13 years.

“Playing professional baseball taught me how to manage people,” he said. “How to bring people together and make things work. You need others to help you get to where you want to go. A lot like a baseball team.”

An Idaho resident since 2019, today he spends as much time as he can fishing and golfing, harboring no regrets about his MLB career.

“I met a lot of really great players in my time and had some great relationships,” Meoli said. “In 1973 in Kansas City, Nolan threw his first no-hitter, and two days later I had my best day at the plate, going three-for-five with six RBI and an inside-the-park home run. It was a great and interesting time when I played. It was quite the ride.”