January 16, 1970—St. Louis Cardinals centerfielder Curt Flood, dismayed at a trade that took him away from a city where he had put down roots and sent him to another he thought racist, filed suit against major league baseball for a system that made him feel like “a well-paid slave”—the reserve clause, which prevented a player from moving to another team unless he were traded.
The resulting case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, led, in the popular mind, to the end of the reserve clause. You can practically hear the exhausted sigh of baseball historian Bill James when he writes, “It’s a confusion of history, vaguely equivalent to thinking that Frederick Douglass wrote the Emancipation Proclamation or that Axis Sally bombed Pearl Harbor.”
Point taken. But there’s another analogy, tried out by George F. Will in the closing years of Flood’s difficult life, that makes sense: the seven-time Gold Glove winner was “Dred Scott in spikes.”
That makes more sense—bringing to mind another case that came not long before an event that changed everything—and another Supreme Court decision decided in the most antediluvian, inane, unjust way imaginable. Both cases also originated in Missouri, a one-time slave state that became central to the tortured history of race and labor relations in this country.
Flood has also been likened to Jackie Robinson, but here the comparison becomes—poignantly—harder to sustain. When it comes to trailblazers, Flood stands somewhere between Robinson and Bernice Gera.
Bernice Gera? Who’s that? That’s what I wondered, too, until I came across a fine piece by Nora Ephron, back when she was a fine, droll, often original essayist rather than a derivative—and not particularly good—writer-director. Ephron demonstrated how pressure so broke Gera that, having won the legal fight to become to first woman to umpire in professional baseball, she quit after one minor-league game because of total non-cooperation from male umps.
Robinson, of course, belongs to American legend, a man who took the very worst flung at him and managed not just to withstand his critics, but win over a number of the most grudging ones—a magnificent player bloodied, yet unbowed.
Unlike Robinson, Flood cracked under the unrelenting pressure he faced and never reaped the benefit of the challenge he initiated. Unlike Gera, he saw his challenge through to the very end.
History is not merely a matter of immense, impersonal forces but of men and women of large, often colliding virtues and faults. Flood’s own catalogue of these brings into focus the question of how America—and not merely the American pastime—measures heroes, and of how ordinary people struggle under the burden of greatness.
The common language of baseball diehards is statistics (which, of course, is one reason why the widespread incursion of steroids into the game has been so catastrophic—it warps any possible comparison of player data across time). Flood’s career-shortened offensive and defensive numbers are, like those of Yankee catcher Thurman Munson, good enough to make a case for his greatness, but have only left them on the cusp of entrance into Cooperstown.
You can go to any baseball statistical record and find out all you want about Flood’s relevant overall numbers. They won’t tell you a thing about the clubhouse presence that made him a central figure in the great Cardinal team of the Sixties, though, nor of the qualities that made him push against history, nor of the following four men who ensured that he was broken against it:
* August Busch, owner of the Cardinals, was a fine man in many ways—he made his team the dominant squad of the mid-to-late Sixties, after all, simply by signing the best he could find—including African-Americans, at a time when many baseball owners were careful about not signing too many. But he could not abide either labor unions or players with contract demands. Flood’s bid for a $100,000 contract before the start of the 1969 season put him in the latter category. The Cardinals’ dramatic fall, from seventh-game losers in the ’68 World Series to a fourth-place finish in their own division the next year, impelled Busch to begin dismantling his team. He had no compunctions, then, about trading Flood (along with Tim McCarver and pitcher Joe Hoerner), to Philadelphia.
* Bowie Kuhn, commissioner of baseball, received a letter from Flood dated Dec. 24, 1969, requesting that he make known to other major league clubs besides the Phillies Flood’s availability. Inability to consider offers from other teams, Flood wrote, “violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several states.” No chance that Kuhn would intervene on behalf of Flood—in fact, as much as anything else, Marvin Miller, Dick Moss, and Arthur Goldberg, who drafted the letter for Flood, sent it to the baseball commissioner to expose the collusion of this former National League attorney with the baseball owners whose bidding he followed.
* Harry Blackmun has been acclaimed in recent years for his votes concerning Roe v. Wade and the death penalty. His majority opinion upholding a lower court’s ruling against Flood, however, was patently absurd—never more so than when he included Eppa Rixey, a marginal Hall of Famer who pitched for the Cincinnati Red, in his absurdly long, arbitrary, and trivial list of famous players “celebrated for one reason or another” in order to secure the vote of Justice Potter Stewart, a Reds fan.
* Ted Williams might have been arguably the greatest hitter of all time, but it was Flood’s misfortune to have him as a manager. After sitting out the 1970 season in Europe rather than joining the Phillies, Flood attempted to make a comeback with Williams’ Washington Senators. Flood was feeling impatient and stressed-out over his inability to shake off the rust after a year’s layoff, but Williams was decidedly unsympathetic to his sensitive player. Particularly after he found a black funeral wreath in his locker at Yankee Stadium, Flood became increasingly unglued, drinking heavily. At last, after only batting .200 after 13 games, the outfielder had a nervous breakdown and bolted the team, flying to Europe.
I should amend my statement earlier that Flood “cracked.” He did, but he didn’t give up. Despite the fact that few great major league players openly supported him, despite the private sympathy many had for his lawsuit, and despite a bankruptcy case (brought on by his divorce and losses in his photography business), he pursued the case to the bitter end. Several years later, rulings in favor of Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally finally opened the door to baseball free agency, and Catfish Hunter became the first impact free agent.
Flood encountered more troubles by decade’s end, as financial losses and alcoholism took a toll on him. But eventually he quit drinking. He refused to feel sorry for himself and found solace in his last decade in remarriage to actress Judy Pace. Ironically, by the time of his death in 1997, this one-time star was largely forgotten by the baseball millionaires who gained the most from his challenge.
The resulting case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court, led, in the popular mind, to the end of the reserve clause. You can practically hear the exhausted sigh of baseball historian Bill James when he writes, “It’s a confusion of history, vaguely equivalent to thinking that Frederick Douglass wrote the Emancipation Proclamation or that Axis Sally bombed Pearl Harbor.”
Point taken. But there’s another analogy, tried out by George F. Will in the closing years of Flood’s difficult life, that makes sense: the seven-time Gold Glove winner was “Dred Scott in spikes.”
That makes more sense—bringing to mind another case that came not long before an event that changed everything—and another Supreme Court decision decided in the most antediluvian, inane, unjust way imaginable. Both cases also originated in Missouri, a one-time slave state that became central to the tortured history of race and labor relations in this country.
Flood has also been likened to Jackie Robinson, but here the comparison becomes—poignantly—harder to sustain. When it comes to trailblazers, Flood stands somewhere between Robinson and Bernice Gera.
Bernice Gera? Who’s that? That’s what I wondered, too, until I came across a fine piece by Nora Ephron, back when she was a fine, droll, often original essayist rather than a derivative—and not particularly good—writer-director. Ephron demonstrated how pressure so broke Gera that, having won the legal fight to become to first woman to umpire in professional baseball, she quit after one minor-league game because of total non-cooperation from male umps.
Robinson, of course, belongs to American legend, a man who took the very worst flung at him and managed not just to withstand his critics, but win over a number of the most grudging ones—a magnificent player bloodied, yet unbowed.
Unlike Robinson, Flood cracked under the unrelenting pressure he faced and never reaped the benefit of the challenge he initiated. Unlike Gera, he saw his challenge through to the very end.
History is not merely a matter of immense, impersonal forces but of men and women of large, often colliding virtues and faults. Flood’s own catalogue of these brings into focus the question of how America—and not merely the American pastime—measures heroes, and of how ordinary people struggle under the burden of greatness.
The common language of baseball diehards is statistics (which, of course, is one reason why the widespread incursion of steroids into the game has been so catastrophic—it warps any possible comparison of player data across time). Flood’s career-shortened offensive and defensive numbers are, like those of Yankee catcher Thurman Munson, good enough to make a case for his greatness, but have only left them on the cusp of entrance into Cooperstown.
You can go to any baseball statistical record and find out all you want about Flood’s relevant overall numbers. They won’t tell you a thing about the clubhouse presence that made him a central figure in the great Cardinal team of the Sixties, though, nor of the qualities that made him push against history, nor of the following four men who ensured that he was broken against it:
* August Busch, owner of the Cardinals, was a fine man in many ways—he made his team the dominant squad of the mid-to-late Sixties, after all, simply by signing the best he could find—including African-Americans, at a time when many baseball owners were careful about not signing too many. But he could not abide either labor unions or players with contract demands. Flood’s bid for a $100,000 contract before the start of the 1969 season put him in the latter category. The Cardinals’ dramatic fall, from seventh-game losers in the ’68 World Series to a fourth-place finish in their own division the next year, impelled Busch to begin dismantling his team. He had no compunctions, then, about trading Flood (along with Tim McCarver and pitcher Joe Hoerner), to Philadelphia.
* Bowie Kuhn, commissioner of baseball, received a letter from Flood dated Dec. 24, 1969, requesting that he make known to other major league clubs besides the Phillies Flood’s availability. Inability to consider offers from other teams, Flood wrote, “violates my basic rights as a citizen and is inconsistent with the laws of the United States and of the several states.” No chance that Kuhn would intervene on behalf of Flood—in fact, as much as anything else, Marvin Miller, Dick Moss, and Arthur Goldberg, who drafted the letter for Flood, sent it to the baseball commissioner to expose the collusion of this former National League attorney with the baseball owners whose bidding he followed.
* Harry Blackmun has been acclaimed in recent years for his votes concerning Roe v. Wade and the death penalty. His majority opinion upholding a lower court’s ruling against Flood, however, was patently absurd—never more so than when he included Eppa Rixey, a marginal Hall of Famer who pitched for the Cincinnati Red, in his absurdly long, arbitrary, and trivial list of famous players “celebrated for one reason or another” in order to secure the vote of Justice Potter Stewart, a Reds fan.
* Ted Williams might have been arguably the greatest hitter of all time, but it was Flood’s misfortune to have him as a manager. After sitting out the 1970 season in Europe rather than joining the Phillies, Flood attempted to make a comeback with Williams’ Washington Senators. Flood was feeling impatient and stressed-out over his inability to shake off the rust after a year’s layoff, but Williams was decidedly unsympathetic to his sensitive player. Particularly after he found a black funeral wreath in his locker at Yankee Stadium, Flood became increasingly unglued, drinking heavily. At last, after only batting .200 after 13 games, the outfielder had a nervous breakdown and bolted the team, flying to Europe.
I should amend my statement earlier that Flood “cracked.” He did, but he didn’t give up. Despite the fact that few great major league players openly supported him, despite the private sympathy many had for his lawsuit, and despite a bankruptcy case (brought on by his divorce and losses in his photography business), he pursued the case to the bitter end. Several years later, rulings in favor of Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally finally opened the door to baseball free agency, and Catfish Hunter became the first impact free agent.
Flood encountered more troubles by decade’s end, as financial losses and alcoholism took a toll on him. But eventually he quit drinking. He refused to feel sorry for himself and found solace in his last decade in remarriage to actress Judy Pace. Ironically, by the time of his death in 1997, this one-time star was largely forgotten by the baseball millionaires who gained the most from his challenge.
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