Curt Flood gave up his career to challenge a system that treated human beings as property. He lost in court. He won everywhere that mattered.
In October 1969, the St. Louis Cardinals traded Curt Flood to the Philadelphia Phillies. Flood was 31 years old, a seven-time Gold Glove winner, one of the best outfielders in baseball. He had spent twelve years in St. Louis. He did not want to go to Philadelphia.
Under the reserve clause that had governed baseball since the 1870s, it did not matter what he wanted. His team owned him. They could trade him, sell him, release him, or keep him for as long as they liked. Flood had no say. No other professional sport in America operated this way. Almost no other industry in America operated this way.
Most players swallowed it. Flood wrote a letter to the commissioner of baseball instead.
He wrote to Bowie Kuhn asking to be declared a free agent. He said, as directly as he could, that he did not believe a human being should be owned by another human being and that he did not feel he was a piece of property to be bought and sold irrespective of his wishes.
Kuhn denied the request. Flood sued. The case went all the way to the Supreme Court.
He lost. The court ruled five to three that baseball's antitrust exemption, which had been established by a 1922 decision that most legal scholars considered poorly reasoned even at the time, meant the reserve clause was legal regardless of what it did to the people it bound.
Flood lost his career. He never played another meaningful season in the major leagues. The case destroyed his earning years and he died in 1997 before he ever saw his full legacy understood.
Four years after the Supreme Court decision, an arbitrator named Peter Seitz ruled in favor of Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally, two pitchers who had played out their contracts without signing new ones. Seitz declared them free agents. The owners fired him immediately and then spent years fighting the ruling in court. They lost. Free agency began in 1976.
Everything that modern baseball players have, the ability to negotiate, to change teams, to earn market value for their skills, traces back to Curt Flood writing a letter that he had to have known would end his career. He did it anyway.
He is not in the Hall of Fame. He has been eligible since 1982. The writers who vote on these things have decided, year after year, that his numbers were not quite good enough, that twelve Gold Gloves and a lifetime .293 average and the complete transformation of the economics of professional sports do not add up to induction.
I find that genuinely hard to understand. But then again, the Hall of Fame is run by the same industry that fought free agency for decades.
Most fans have never heard his name. That is the part that gets me.