![]() ![]() "But slavery is a harsh word, and I don’t use it because it’s violent, it’s ugly."įlood’s case eventually made it to the Supreme Court, which voted 5-3 against him in 1972. You’re bound to a team without choice of going anywhere and you can be punished, etc.," Jackson said. Miller and Moss "were certainly willing to take a chance on it."įlood, who was making $90,000 a year, famously compared his situation to slavery, saying "a well-paid slave is a slave nonetheless." And though Jackson didn’t agree with the use of the term, he said he understood Flood’s point - particularly how it related to having no say in your own life for as long as you sought to make a livelihood in baseball. "He was part of the period when the civil rights movement - King had been killed, Malcolm had been killed and he just felt like he wanted to take it on," Lowenfish said. 3, 1970, file photo, baseball player Curt Flood, left, and Marvin Miller, Executive Director of the Baseball Players Association, wait inside ABC Television Studio before an appearance in New York Credit: AP He sent a letter to commissioner Bowie Kuhn on Christmas Eve asking to become a free agent and, when that was declined, he took Kuhn to court with the help of Miller and general counsel Dick Moss. But Flood, taking exception to the idea that teams could buy and trade a man for perpetuity, had had enough. That became a problem for Flood when, after 12 years with the Cardinals, he was traded in a package for Dick Allen and two others after the 1969 season. Even if they refused to sign a contract, owners had the right to auto-renew it. The clause kept salaries down and, after the amateur draft was instituted in 1965, meant players had no say in where they ended up. The clause, which was established in 1879 and was unsuccessfully challenged in the Supreme Court in 1922, said a player belonged to a team for his entire career and that the team could keep him or trade him as it wished up until he was released. In the minors, he struggled to find housing for himself and his family and wasn’t allowed to shower with his teammates or even celebrate in the same hotels as them after a big win.Įventually, he moved up to the big leagues - a defensive dynamo, quick with his feet and good with the bat - and ran head-first into baseball’s reserve clause. ![]() Reggie Jackson, one of the biggest names in the star-studded free-agent class ahead of that 1977 season, felt a challenge to the reserve clause was inevitable once players became more informed. But Flood’s case, which went all the way to the Supreme Court before he barely lost, is singular in a few respects.įor one, Flood wasn’t the ideal candidate to fight baseball on the issue because he was well paid and inching toward the end of his career, said historian Lee Lowenfish, author of "The Imperfect Diamond: A history of Baseball's Labor Wars." His desire to do it anyway was born out of a sense of justice honed during the civil rights movement.įor another, Flood’s case is directly tied to then-Players Association head Marvin Miller fighting, and winning, the right to use an impartial arbitrator - something that led to more grievances, more concessions from owners, higher salaries for players and ultimately the advent of modern free agency, which took effect in 1976. Labor fights are nothing new to baseball - MLB, the owners and the Players Association are embroiled in one right now, with the start of spring training sacrificed and the regular season in peril. And everybody said, ‘Do you have any thoughts of your own about the trade? Is this a thing with you?’ And I said, no, no. "All I wanted to do was talk about going to Philadelphia, the team to which I was traded. "No one knew really what a free agent was. The two were teammates on the Cardinals before being traded to the Phillies together in October 1969. "Dumbfounding," Tim McCarver said in an interview with Newsday this month regarding Flood’s fight. And it’s been 50 years since he lost the case, lost his job and lost integral parts of his life - but helped start a movement that led to modern free agency and shaped baseball and labor negotiations as we know them today. ![]()
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