by Dan Reines
What followed from his actions were the DH, and interleague play, and the death of the doubleheader. What followed were 25-year-old kids pissed off about their paltry $5 million a year salaries, and 45-year-old dads who can't afford to bring their kids to a ballgame, and the 1997 World Champion Florida Marlins. And what followed was an army of old coots intent on boring me at bars, slapping their chests and spouting crap like "Man, these punk kids are all in it for the money. Back in the day, guys played because they loved the game. Hell -- I'd take Juan Marichal with a stomach flu over Greg Maddux at his peak..." Please. Marichal can bite my ass.
Oh yeah, no question, Curt Flood killed baseball. And all I can think to say is, baseball had it coming.
Here's the history, for those who may not know who the hell I'm talking about. Curtis Charles Flood, who died of throat cancer last year at age 59, was a ballplayer, the centerfielder for the St. Louis Cardinals throughout the '60s. Good player, too: .293 career average, hit .300 six times, was a seven-time Gold Glove winner -- and this during the era of Mays, Mantle, and Clemente. By the time his career with the Cardinals ended, he was earning a remarkable-for-the-times $90,000 a year, more than any other non-pitching, non-power-hitting player of his day.
But when the Cards traded him as part of a seven-player deal to the woeful Philadelphia Phillies after the 1969 season, Flood balked. He had a home in St. Louis, where he'd lived for 12 years, and a thriving off-season business as an artist and photographer. (Fun fact to impress your friends: Hanging in the home of Martin Luther King's widow is a Curt Flood painting of MLK.) The last thing Flood wanted was to uproot his family and move 1,500 miles away. So he sued baseball for $4.1 million, charging that the league's reserve clause violated federal antitrust laws.
The reserve clause: Baseball's version of a property deed. The reserve clause
(not an *actual* clause in any players' contracts) held that once a player
signed with a team, that team owned that player for life, or until the team
traded the player, at which point the *new* team owned the player for life.
Period. Flood, an African American, famously -- and rightly -- compared the
situation to slavery. ("I've been asked how a $90,000-a-year ballplayer can
be a slave," he wrote in a 1970 Sport magazine article. "I've answered that
even a well-paid slave is still a slave.") Put it this way: You got a resume?
Then you're a step up on a ballplayer under the reserve clause. Because the
moment you stuff that watermarked CV into a cotton envelope and send it out
to "someone else's" boss, you're doing something that no major league player
had ever been allowed to do before Curt Flood stood the hell up and said, "Enough!"
You're taking an interest in your own career.
"Player trades are commonplace," Flood wrote in his 1971 autobiography, "The Way It Is". "The unusual aspect of this one was that I refused to accept it. It violated the logic and integrity of my existence. I was not a consignment of goods. I was a man, the rightful proprietor of my own person and my own talents."
The lawsuit consumed the next two seasons
and part of a third. Flood sat out 1970, choosing to paint in Denmark rather
than play ball in Philadelphia. In 
1971,
the suit having sapped his funds, he accepted a trade to the Washington Senators,
who gave him a $110,000, one-year deal with a no-trade clause.
A year away from the game turned out to be too much, though, and Flood called
it quits after batting just .200 in 13 games. On June 19, 1972, the Supreme
Court shot down his challenge to the reserve clause,
5-3.
But the process Flood started by refusing that trade was irreversible. In 1975, an arbitrator granted free agency to pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, effectively putting an end to the reserve clause. ("The Supreme Court decided not to give it to me, so they gave it to two white guys," Flood said later. "I think that's what they were waiting for.") Two years after that, Reggie Jackson went took a bucket of money to move from Baltimore to New York City, and the era of free agency was in full effect: players bouncing from team to team, teams bouncing from city to city (or threatening to), Vince Coleman dropping a cherry bomb on a 3-year-old girl...
So yeah, Curt Flood -- and the free agency he fathered -- ruined what had been a beautiful, beautiful game. But you've got to ask yourself: Ruined for whom? Not for the players, obviously, and not the agents, that's for damn sure. Who then? Whose baseball has been ruined by free agency?
The fans? Yeah, maybe. Pirates fans, for example, can't be too thrilled about free agency. But how about up in Toronto, home of Roger Clemens, Canadian Hero? Home of the fabulous SkyDome, the only stadium that comes with a sunroof? What, you didn't think fancy toys like that just sprang up from nowhere, did you? SkyDome, Camden Yards, the Jake--these palaces exist because the owners "had" to build them, to attract your dollar, to pay all those outrageous salaries. (And don't talk to me about rising ticket prices -- you know you still sneak down from the cheap seats, just like the rest of us.) Thank God for Curt Flood, or all those Jays fans would be suffering through these pathetic seasons at Exhibition Stadium. Now at least they have a Hard Rock Cafe to distract them...
And how about those Marlins fans, for that matter? Sure, they're all pretty annoyed with free agency now that it's destroying a championship team, but where was the whining when it was buying one? You think Joe FishFan plans on removing that World Series t-shirt from the hot vinyl on the passenger seat of his '82 Trans Am? No way, baby. That championship belongs to Florida, and no one can take it away from them. (Besides, you can't cruise shirtless on vinyl seats.) No, free agency's a wash with the fans. It just depends on which side of the deal you're on, that's all.
I know, I know. What about the loyalty? Can't tell the players without a scorecard, right? Well guess what: More ballplayers switched clubs in 1934, four full decades before the advent of free agency, than did in 1994. You could look it up. Besides, to begrudge a man the right to steer his own destiny just because "you've" got too much of your self-esteem invested in the outcome of a kid's game is not only criminal, it's pathetic.
Which brings us to the only people who actually do have a reason to resent Curt Flood: The owners. And not just for the way free agency has taxed their wallets, either, but for the toll it's taken on their egos as well. "The reserve clause exists for two reasons," Flood told a meeting of player representatives in San Juan, Puerto Rico, during the winter of 1970. "One, to cut down the money the ballplayers get; and two, to give a feeling of power to men who like to play God over other people's lives." For seven decades, the baseball owners had their collective foot on the necks of every major leaguer who ever played. Curt Flood had the balls to finally knock them on their asses, and for that, they'll always curse his memory.
So Curt Flood ruined baseball as we knew it. God bless Curt Flood.
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