![]() ![]() ![]() It was the least the Players Association could do, given the rise in players’ salaries (from an average of $29,303 in 1970 to $1,071,029 in 1995) that Flood had helped make possible. The Major League Baseball Players Association paid Flood’s final medical bills. In 1995 Flood was diagnosed with throat cancer, and in 1997, shortly after his 59th birthday, he died at the UCLA Medical Center, where he had been a patient after developing pneumonia. But these were isolated moments of recognition in the final decade of Flood’s life. In 1992 Flood received the NAACP Jackie Robinson Award for his contributions to black athletes, and in 1994, he was asked to speak to the players at the start of their 232-day strike against Major League Baseball. Hurt by alcoholism and later severe depression, Flood returned to America and spent most of the rest of his life in obscurity. It was the beginning of a series of difficulties for Flood, who was then in his early thirties and unprepared to be an expatriate. The result was a triumph for the principles Flood had fought for, although not a triumph he personally enjoyed for long. After staying out of baseball for the 1970 season, Flood signed with the Washington Senators in 1971 for $110,000, but after playing only two months, he suddenly quit the team and left America for Europe. “Not one active Major Leaguer testified on Flood's behalf in Flood v. The stranglehold a team could exercise in perpetuity over a player was at last over. In 1968 the players had negotiated the first collective bargain agreement in baseball history with Major League owners, and by 1976, three years after Flood’s defeat in the court, the players won the right to a new definition of free agency when an arbitrator ruled that, after playing a year without being under contract, pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally could be free agents. But in winning a battle, Major League Baseball lost the larger war: The pressure from players on team owners to come up with a system less plantation-like only grew in the wake of Flood’s legal defeat. The result was a victory for Major League Baseball. The Supreme Court ruled that Congress had repeatedly declined to treat baseball as a business subject to antitrust law and that it was up to Congress to change its position. But there, in a 5-3 decision (Justice Lewis Powell recused himself because he held stock in Anheuser-Busch, whose principal owner, Augie Busch, also owned the St. ![]() Kuhn went from a Federal District Court in New York in 1970, to the Second Circuit Court of Appeals, and finally to the Supreme Court in 1972. The clause would have been against the law in any ordinary business, but it had been sanctioned in Major League Baseball (then adopted in other sports) by a Supreme Court ruling dating back to 1922.įlood’s suit against Major League Baseball matched the mood of a period in which civil rights were being expanded in education and politics, and in carrying forward his case, he had as his lawyer retired Supreme Court justice and former United Nations ambassador Arthur Goldberg. “I believe I have the right to consider offers from other teams before making any decisions.”įlood’s letter was a declaration of war against baseball’s reserve clause, which bound a player to the team that signed him until the team decided to trade or release him. “After twelve years in the Major Leagues, I do not feel that I am a piece of property to be bought or sold irrespective of my wishes,” Flood wrote Kuhn. 300 six times, was furious at learning in the fall of 1969 that he had been traded to the Philadelphia Phillies. Nearly 50 years ago, on December 24, 1969, Flood wrote Bowie Kuhn, the commissioner of Major League Baseball, a letter that forever changed professional sports by altering the power team owners exercise over their players.įlood, a mainstay with the Cardinals, who in his 12 years with the team won seven Golden Gloves for his fielding and hit over. That figure is Curt Flood, a star center fielder for the St. In an era when professional athletes have become increasingly outspoken on social issues-especially those with racial implications-there’s a figure who has not gotten the credit he deserves for putting today’s players in a financial position to voice their opinions. ![]()
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