by Brad Snyder
I learned a great deal from this book. I was under the impression that Curt Flood was traded, refused to go to the new team, filed a lawsuit, and it was settled before the start of the season. Not true. Not even close to true. I also was under the impression that he won his lawsuit. This is also not true.
Curt Flood was a slap hitting, speed burning center fielder for the St. Louis Cardinals. On the 1968 Championship team he misplayed a fly ball in the World Series against Detroit. It didn't matter because the Cardinals won anyway, but that misplay was enough to make the Cardinals want to trade Curt. After the World Series the Cardinals traded Curt Flood and Tim McCarver to the Philadelphia Phillies. At the time, Flood was making close to 90,000 dollars; an amount that only a few major leaguers were paid. The Phillies were prepared to pay Flood more than 90,000 and if Flood had negotiated some, he could have probably received the magic 100,000 that he hoped to reach. The Phillies never approached that number, but if they had, there would probably be no Curt Flood story. If the Cardinals had telephoned Flood to tell him he was traded instead of sending him an impersonal telegram, there would probably be no Curt Flood story either. In fact, the whole Curt Flood story is made up of a series of 'what if's'.
Instead, Curt Flood was pissed. He had a photography studio in St. Louis and a clientele that sought his portrait painting work. It didn't matter that the painting was outsourced to someone else. What did matter is that Curt Flood had roots in St. Louis and he didn't want to leave. He also didn't want to be treated like chattel. Earlier in his career while playing winter ball in Venezuela, the Reds, who he played for at the time, traded him to the Cardinals. While the trade to the Cardinals did open up a major league opportunity for him, he was still disgusted that he had no say in where he would be employed. He swore to never let it happen again and when he was traded by the Cardinals in 1968 he did something about it. That something was to contact St. Louis lawyer Allan Zerman. Zerman explained to Curt that the chances of busting the reserve clause, the line in all player contracts that virtually kept them as slaves, was pretty much nil. The reason for that was twofold. One, Major League Baseball had an anti-trust exemption that had been upheld in the Supreme Court ruling generally known as Federal Baseball. The second was another Supreme Court case generally known as Toolson. Toolson argued that baseball was interstate commerce and was not subject to having an anti-trust exemption. The Supreme Court ruled against Toolson and instead strengthened the Federal Baseball decision via stare decisis. To overturn two previous Supreme Court decisions was pretty much unheard of.
That didn't stop Curt Flood or Allan Zerman though because they felt that Toolson was definitely wrong. However, Curt Flood didn't have the resources to fight the system. Allan Zerman didn't have the experience either. Instead, they contacted Marvin Miller, the players union representative, and asked if it was possible for the players to agree on paying for the lawyers since all players would be affected by the decision. The player reps met in Puerto Rico, agreed to it, and the lawsuit was born.
The lawsuit made it's way through the courts exactly how the attorneys for Flood assumed it would. They were allowed to bring the suit to court in the lower courts, lost, appealed, lost, and then hoped that the Supreme Court would agree to hear their case. By some manner of luck the Supreme Court did hear their case. On top of that Flood almost won. If not for the back room vote trading going on between the justices and the fact that one justice excused himself because he owned Anheuser-Busch stock, Flood might have won. A couple of the justices voted to affirm the lower court decision, but only begrudgingly. Most felt that the Toolson decision was wrong too. Curt Flood lost his case, but it did open the door for other players later. One of the concessions the owners agreed to, because they saw the eventual handwriting on the wall, was to appoint an ombudsmen for labor disputes. This ombudsmen later declared several players to be free agents, most famously Andy Messerschmidt, and free agency was born.
Curt Flood gave up a lot. Mostly his career. Excepting a spring training invite by the Washington Senators in 1971, Flood never returned to baseball. He was ostracized by the owners, some sportswriters including one of my favorites Bob Broeg, and by a few of the players, most notably Ted Williams the Washington Senators manager. I've read a fair amount about Ted Williams and my conclusion is that he was an asshole. That's not from just this book; I've read others. Flood, while a heavy drinker and carouser before the lawsuit, became a raging alcoholic and eventually secluded himself in Europe. He eventually returned to the U.S. and became sober in 1986, but the damage was done and he eventually died in 1997.
This was a fantastic book. It was extremely well written and given the fact that the author quit his high paying Washington law firm job to write the book without any deal from a publisher makes it even better. I wish that the book covered Flood's personal life a little closer because from Snyder's viewpoint he glosses over a lot of that. Despite the references to his excessive drinking, Flood comes off as a martyr, which he was to a certain extent. However one cannot be a terrible alcoholic without having some real in-depth problems. The family issues, the carousing, and the couple of brushes with the law explained in the book only cover a small amount of the personal life. I realize this book was about the court case, not necessarily a biography of Flood. The chapters about the court case were the least interesting to me, other than I learned how the Supreme Court works sometimes. All in all though, it was a fantastic read and I recommend it to anyone interested in baseball or professional sports. I believe it should be mandatory reading for anyone signing a professional sports contract. Every one of them owes Curt Flood an enormous amount of gratitude. His sacrifice, to me, is greater than the one Jackie Robinson went through. I don't mean to belittle Robinson, but Flood went through the same player problems that Robinson did in the Carolina minor leagues; not exactly a bastion of racial tolerance. In addition he gave up his career for something that he believed in. Most of us would never do that and to me that makes Curt Flood one of the most important people of the last century.
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on 14-Jul-2011 at 12:39
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