reserve clause
nounDefinition of reserve clause
: a clause formerly placed in a professional athlete's contract that reserved for the club the exclusive right automatically to renew the contract and that bound the athlete to the club until retirement or until the athlete was traded or released
Examples of reserve clause in a Sentence
Recent Examples on the Web
At the time, the reserve clause, a part of every contract that bound players nearly irrevocably to their teams, was still in effect; free agency, which multiplied the earning power of players by many orders of magnitude, was still in the future. — Bruce Weber, New York Times, "Jim Bouton, Author of Tell-All Baseball Memoir ‘Ball Four,’ Dies at 80," 10 July 2019 His antitrust lawsuit, Robertson v. NBA, destroyed the reserve clause that tied a player to an NBA team in perpetuity. — Dave Clark, Cincinnati.com, "Ex-Bearcat/Royal Robertson No. 7 among ESPN's most influential in NBA," 2 Apr. 2018 Kurt Flood refused to be traded to another team and challenged Major League Baseball's entrenched reserve clause in the courts, paving the way for free-agency and access to big money that successful pro athletes enjoy today. — Byron Mccauley, Cincinnati.com, "McCauley: Imagine sports, history without Muhammad Ali," 26 Sep. 2017These example sentences are selected automatically from various online news sources to reflect current usage of the word 'reserve clause.' Views expressed in the examples do not represent the opinion of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback.
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