FanHouse Curt Flood

If Curt Flood were an athlete in any sport other than baseball, he would have certainly won his 1972 Supreme Court antitrust case. Flood wanted the Court to rule that the "reserve clause" that baseball teams used to tie a player to the team that first signed him, and allowed the team to trade the player with no ability to contest it was in violation of federal antitrust laws that prevented such rules.

Flood lost his case because the Supreme Court decided an old stupid case that they knew was old and stupid was controlling precedent and shouldn't be overturned. Antitrust law applies to every single sport other than MLB, with the exception of limited antitrust exemptions granted by Congress. Flood v. Kuhn is considered a ridiculous case in many ways.

The first part of the Flood v. Kuhn opinion is a gushing, flowery homage to baseball, done in an attempt to demonstrate baseball's special place in American society. Supreme Court decisions, or any sort of sane and sober judicial opinion, doesn't typically read like a press release for one side of the case.

Curt Flood may not have reaped the benefits of his stand against Major League Baseball, but every player who followed certainly has every time they've negotiated a new contract.

Even though Flood was ultimately unsuccessful in striking down baseball's reserve clause, he opened the door for the challenges that soon followed and for free agency as we know it today.

You would think that Flood would be worshipped as a hero by today's players. That's true ... in some cases.

But many polled by FanHouse said they had never heard of Flood. Some, veterans and rookies alike, when told who he was, ashamedly asked us not to include their names.

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One of the signature chapters in the Curt Flood story -- the story of his historic fight against baseball's reserve clause, and the story of his life overall -- played out in Puerto Rico in December 1969, some two months after the trade from St. Louis to Philadelphia that had, seemingly innocently, started the wheels of change in motion. There, he confronted one of the most significant questions about why he was about to create such a storm for himself, his sport, the industry overall and all of American society.

Puerto Rico was the site of a meeting of fellow major-league ballplayers who Flood would try to convince of the motives, sincerity and long-term benefits of his decision to sue baseball. And it was at that meeting that Tom Haller, then a three-time All-Star catcher for the Los Angeles Dodgers and later a big-league coach and general manager, asked him (according to Flood in his 1971 autobiography, The Way It Is), whether he was doing this "simply because you're black and you feel that baseball has been discriminatory?"

There was a portrait of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. that hung in the living room of his widow, Coretta Scott King. It was painted by Curt Flood. There was a proposal introduced by Rep. John Conyers Jr., the Democrat from Detroit, to remove baseball's controversial antitrust exemption. It was numbered HR 21 after the Cardinals' jersey Curt Flood wore for a dozen of his big league seasons.

So Flood, as I've pointed out before, has been remembered by the widow of a Nobel Peace Prize winner and in legislation proposed on Capitol Hill. He doesn't need the Baseball Hall of Fame to validate his contributions to greater society or the mere game.

Something never made sense regarding Curt Flood's lonely march 40 years ago toward helping to create free agency in baseball.

Why was it so lonely? I mean, during that march, which started at the office of baseball commissioner Bowie Kuhn and continued to the United States Supreme Court, Flood was a singular hero among a slew of cowards. That's because his peers embarrassed themselves in the midst of the game's biggest moment through the late 1960s that didn't involve the Black Sox or Jackie Robinson.

The disgusting thing is, Flood's peers couldn't care less.

What would make a major-league baseball team executive testify in court on behalf of a player threatening to dismantle the system that tilted completely in the teams' favor?

A long memory, of possibly the most blatant example of how the utterly capricious whim of an owner can uproot a player regardless of how spectacular, productive and loyal he had been.

Hank Greenberg, following his Hall of Fame playing career in the 1930s and '40s, moved into management, as general manager and part-owner of both the Cleveland Indians and Chicago White Sox, along with longtime friend Bill Veeck. But, his son Steve said, "He was a player at heart.''