Nobody does sports documentaries better than HBO, and Wednesday night at 9pm Eastern they’re premiering The Curious Case of Curt Flood.
Revisiting Curt Flood’s Legacy
I’ve seen the film and it’s good, right on par with everything else HBO does. There’s one somewhat shocking bit of news, which I won’t reveal here because there’s a setup early in the movie, with the surprise toward the end.
As I’m sure you know, Flood challenged baseball’s “reserve clause” and lost, the case decided 5-3 against him in the U.S. Supreme Court. I’ve always sort of thought the justices were simply predisposed in favor of Major League Baseball’s antitrust clause. But as Richard Sandomir writes in the Times -- and as the documentary details -- the real problem might have been Flood’s lawyer, ex-Supreme Court Justice Arthur Goldberg ...
Goldberg looked like an ideal choice to deliver an oral argument before some of his former colleagues on the court. He was a successful labor lawyer and former general counsel to the United Steelworkers of America. He was a baseball fan who carried a coffee urn as a vendor at Wrigley Field in the 1920s.
Flood needed a lawyer who could deftly argue against the reserve clause, which tied players unilaterally to their teams until they traded or discarded them. Players had no rights to sell themselves to the highest bidders in this relationship, as Flood learned when he was traded by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1969 to the Philadelphia Phillies. He refused to report to the Phillies, starting him on his legal odyssey.
--snip--
Goldberg had one of the worst days of his career on that March day in 1972. He did not deliver pointed, persuasive arguments. He lost his place. He did not answer justices’ questions directly. He clumsily listed Flood’s season-by-season batting averages. He went past his allotted time. He repeated himself.
He spoke as if he did not understand baseball, citing the several "Golden Gloves competitions" Flood won for his excellent work as a center fielder. Brad Snyder, the author of "A Well-Paid Slave," about the Flood case, wrote that Justice William Brennan cringed at watching his friend’s struggles.
Flood lost the case, of course. After which he continued a descent into alcoholism that wasn’t arrested for some years. Happily (for us), The Curious Case of Curt Flood never descends into the soft-focused sentimentality or ear-grinding minor chords that too often saturate ESPN’s other networks’ sports docs.
Flood initially challenged the reserve clause after the Cardinals traded him to the Phillies after the 1969 season. Steeped in the culture of civil rights, Flood chafed upon the realization that even after all he’d accomplished, his employer could send him elsewhere without even a fare-thee-well.
Narrator: But his options were scant. Flood, like every big leaguer, had signed the Uniform Player’s Agreement, which contained Paragraph 10(a), better known as the “reserve clause.” The reserve clause bound players to their respective teams. In effect, they were owned by them, in perpetuity.
Bob Gibson: You were their property. They could do whatever they wanted with you.
Tim McCarver: l mean, you were traded just like cattle or pigs or hogs or anything.
Regarding the use of the word were ... For the great majority of big leaguers, little has changed. As you know, most players’ careers don’t last more than a few years. And today, baseball players are generally owned by their teams for as many as 12 years: six years in the minors, six years in the majors. It’s not until their seventh year as major leaguers that most players are able to choose their employers. Before that, they can still be traded like cattle or pigs or hogs.
It’s still not clear to me what Flood’s case means. It obviously changed his life, but there’s an argument to be made that the case had little impact on labor relations, generally. It wasn’t until some years later that the reserve clause was seriously challenged, with the players ultimately gaining limited free agency. Flood famously described himself as a “well-paid slave,” which offended some people who looked at a black man earning close to $100,000 per annum and couldn’t make the connection.
Maybe “well-paid indentured servant” might have been a more accurate label. And the truth is that today’s players, at least through the early portions of their careers, might best be described as exceptionally well-paid indentured servants.
Finally, I’ll close with an embarrassing personal note ... Twenty years ago, I was working for Bill James and accompanied Bill to New York for the SABR Convention. On a lovely Sunday morning, Bill and I met Allen Barra, Marvin Miller, Curt Flood, and their wives for brunch. As you might imagine, I was awed while Flood and Miller told their stories about what happened 20 years earlier. All I really remember from that time, though, was Flood’s suggestion that Major League Baseball was still out to get him; frankly, he struck me as paranoid and perhaps delusional.
The embarrassing part is that when Flood died, less than six years later, I was working for ESPN’s website and mentioned to my boss that I’d spent a couple of hours with Flood. He asked me to write something about that experience and I did, but I remembered so little that my editor essentially wrote his own piece and put my name on it. I’ll always treasure the opportunity to meet Curt Flood and Marvin Miller; I’ll always regret my youthful inability to take real advantage of that opportunity.
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