It might... but I'm not sure why we should "fear" that. As bkeich notes, there are a lot of things in professional sports that are, or should be, anathema in a society that claims to respect individual freedoms. The drafts? Open-ended, non-guaranteed contracts that tie a 16-year-old Latino kid, or an 18-year-old American kid, to one employer for as much 13 to 16 years? (Seven years in the minors before minor-league fa, six seasons of "service time" - which could take substantially more than six years, given minor league options.)
Also - reducing (or eliminating) the number of years a player is bound under a non-guaranteed contract will not result in "eternal free agents." It would result in multi-year guaranteed contracts; players would not all become free agents every fall - clubs would just have to commit to pay players for all the seasons they want to purchase control of their services. For a rookie, that could be a four-year contract with specified salaries based on the ML minimum in year 1, and rational multiples of that amount in years 2 through 4 (or whatever length). There would be solutions - and "different" is not necessarily "bad."
But do we - any of us - really approve of a system that says, "You work for us, and nobody else in the industry, for the next 15 years - but we won't commit to not just terminate you with little or no recourse at any time, for whatever reason we see fit. We'll pay you sub-minimum wages for the first five years or so, and after that, we might promote you to a position that pays a living wage... or we might not."
Yeah, it's better than "You work for us for the rest of your life, unless we sell you to somebody else. We reserve the right to separate you from your family (parents, wife, kids) and to sell them off, as we see fit. We won't pay you, but we will provide (sort of) living quarters, and enough food and clothing to keep you fit to work." It's better than that - but that's a pretty low bar, eh?
