Raymond Goetz (1922-2000)

Raymond Goetz was born and raised in Rockford, Illinois, where his parents ran a restaurant and delicatessen. After graduating from high school in 1940, Ray attended Beloit College with an eye on a career in journalism. But like many men (and some women) of his generation, he interrupted his college education and, in August 1943, enlisted in the Navy. He served as a carrier-based bomber pilot in World War II and was honorably discharged from the Navy in May 1947 with the rank of Lieutenant J.G. At that point, he returned to Beloit College but did not graduate. Instead, the University of Chicago School of Law admitted him without an undergraduate degree pursuant to a policy that gave special dispensation to returning veterans. In law school, Ray Goetz served as associate editor of the law review.

After obtaining his law degree in 1950, Goetz practiced labor law on the management side at Seyfarth, Shaw, Fairweather & Geraldson in Chicago. There in April 1951, he met his wife, Elizabeth Morey, and they married in 1952. They had six children between 1953 and 1964. In 1957, Goetz made partner. Although he was very busy and enjoyed his work, law practice was not a sufficient challenge for his intellect and energy. In 1963, he earned an MBA from the University of Chicago. Between 1964 and 1966, he published three labor law articles in the Duke, Northwestern, and Iowa law reviews.

In the fall semester of 1966, Ray Goetz joined the faculty at the University of Kansas School of Law as a visiting professor, where he taught labor law, contracts, advanced labor law, and labor arbitration. The following year, he joined the faculty full-time.

Professor Goetz was relatively slender, stood just under six feet tall, and tried to camouflage his bald pate with a comb-over. But he projected an authoritative presence. He always wore coat and tie to his classes and strode into the well of the classroom with a lively step and a confident air. Once in position, Professor Goetz would peer out into the class, raise his arched eyebrows, and – in his booming voice – interrogate the next student in line about the day’s topic. Goetz was renowned as a no-nonsense practitioner of the Socratic method, and many first year contracts students rued the day they were slotted into his section. Outside of class, however, he was an approachable and gregarious person with varied interests, including writing short stories and collecting modern art. In the early 1980s, he took phased retirement, teaching only in the fall semesters. He fully retired from teaching in 1987.

After joining the law faculty at KU, Goetz hung out his shingle as a labor arbitrator. In 1974, he was admitted to membership in the National Academy of Arbitrators, which he served in various leadership capacities over many years. Although Goetz was in great demand as an arbitrator across a wide range of industries, he was best known to the public as a baseball arbitrator.

In 1979, Major League Baseball and the Baseball Players Association selected Goetz as baseball’s fifth impartial grievance arbitrator. He followed Lewis Gill, Gabriel Alexander, Peter Seitz, and Alexander Porter in that capacity.

In his first baseball case, Arbitrator Goetz ruled that most of the $160,000 in bonuses the Braves had paid to rookie-of-the-year Bob Horner in 1978 constituted part of the player’s salary so that the labor agreement required the Braves to offer Horner a contract worth at least $136,800 for the 1979 season. In the same case, however, Arbitrator Goetz denied Horner’s claim that the Braves’ failure to tender him a proper contract made him a free agent.

In September 1981, Goetz ruled that Commissioner Bowie Kuhn had improperly suspended Texas Rangers’ pitcher Ferguson Jenkins after the future Hall of Famer’s arrest in Toronto on charges of drug possession. Goetz found that suspending Jenkins before he was tried and convicted on the charges violated the collective bargaining agreement. The Jenkins decision was the first in which a baseball arbitrator confronted an issue of discipline for alleged off-duty drug misconduct, and it was the first time an arbitrator had overruled a disciplinary decision of baseball’s commissioner. The Jenkins decision has been cited frequently in subsequent cases involving drugs.

In one of his last decisions as baseball’s grievance arbitrator, Goetz ruled, in the summer of 1983, that players who had been on the disabled list during the 1981 baseball strike were not entitled to be paid. In addition to denying the pay claims of many players, that ruling obligated ten players whose clubs had paid them during the strike to repay their salaries.

The first grievance alleging that the owners had colluded to suppress free agency was initially assigned to Arbitrator Goetz, but he resigned from his post as baseball’s impartial arbitrator before the case reached a hearing. Eventually, Arbitrators Thomas T. Roberts and George Nicolau would rule for the players in subsequent collusion cases.

In 1984, after serving as baseball’s grievance arbitrator for nearly five years, Goetz assumed another preeminent position as the “impartial umpire” – permanent arbitrator – for Ford Motor Company and the United Auto Workers. That year, he was also appointed as one of several baseball salary arbitrators. From 1984 through 1991, Goetz ruled for the clubs ten times and for players eight times. In one of his last salary arbitration cases, Goetz chose starting pitcher Doug Drabek’s final salary offer of $3.35 million over the Pirates’ final offer of $2.3 million. At the time, that salary award set a record.

Over his nearly thirty years as a labor arbitrator, Goetz decided hundreds of cases and served as a permanent arbitrator in many diverse industries including airlines and manufacturing. Goetz was also active in the labor-management bar. For instance, he served as the neutral co-chair of the American Bar Association’s Committee on Labor Arbitration and the Law of Collective Bargaining Agreements and was the president of the Kansas City chapter of the Industrial Relations Research Association.

With his sharp and orderly mind and keen sense of fairness, Raymond Goetz was among the elite labor arbitrators practicing in the late twentieth century. He was also a demanding law professor who – despite an outwardly gruff countenance – served as a great mentor to scores of labor lawyers who went on to practice on both sides of the labor-management divide. He stopped arbitrating in the late 1990s when his health declined, and he died on May 2, 2000, less than two weeks short of his seventy-eighth birthday.