A Comparative Study of the Uniform Player's Contracts between American and Korean Professional Baseball

The purpose of this study is to compare and contrast how contents of the Uniform Player's Contract between MLB and KBO are similar or different and to examine what restrictive contents against players between these two contracts exist. It was found by literatures and cases that there existed negative perspectives toward each uniform players contract and some provisions of two contracts contained restrictive clauses. Based on the literatures and cases, this study used qualitative document analysis to examine the detailed contents of the two contracts. The document analysis was proceeded by five stages of data sources, constructing a protocol and data collection, data coding, data analysis, and report. This study found that there exist similar and different contents within common provisions between the Uniform Player's Contracts of MLB and KBO. There are provisions including the restrictive clause in the Uniform Player's Contract of MLB and KBO. There are more provisions including the restrictive clauses in the Uniform Player's Contract of KBO than that of MLB. American and Korean UPC include a total of 18 common provisions from a total of 31 of MLB's UPC and a total of 34 KBO's UPC. This clearly established that about 50% of the provisions between American and Korean UPC are in common. Out of these 18 common provisions, 6 provisions include similar content while 12 are different. The Korean UPC includes 9 provisions with restrictive clauses, whereas the American UPC includes 5. It may be noted that the Korean UPC includes more restrictive clauses than the American UPC. Especially, among these 9 restrictive clauses of the Korean UPC, the contents of 3 provisions, condition, disputes, and effectiveness of contract, differ widely from those of the American UPC and are more restrictive to the Korean players than to the American players. The following are some suggestions: The first, to limit the power of the commissioner, the commissioner and KBO committee should be elected by a third party who is not involved with the club owners: The second, the Korean baseball's Uniform Player's Contract should be negotiated and designed by players and owners together like the American contract: The third, the players need an arbitrative system to which they can appeal their grievances.